Web Design News

A couple of weeks ago I had to dive into the source code for a page on one of our own websites and nearly choked when I saw how rough the coding had been. It was something I’d done years ago and, while the page still rendered well in all the browsers. the coding was terrible.

Yesterday I ran into some more very very bad coding when a client asked me to give him a price on extending a site that had been built by another designer here in town. This designer had used a content management script that he had developed himself and, once again, the pages rendered quite well in the major browsers but the coding was aweful and the CSS was nothing like I had ever seen before. I’m not sure I have interpreted it correctly but it looked like it used a whole bunch of empty tags to position elements on the page.

So there’s some bad news instore for the client - extending this site is not going to be as cheap as he had hoped would be the case. Dreamweaver choked on the code and I doubt that I could make enough sense out of it to do anything by hand.

And there’s a lesson for any business looking for a web designer to build a site for them - make sure that you have a guarantee that everything that will be done for you can be worked on by any other web designer.

I see that Yahoo! has just been awarded a patent for a system that indexes one or more items of content by extracting one or more items of text that are then tokenized into one or more concepts.

In short, and cutting through all the techno-speak Yahoo! has found a way to index sites based on phrases that it might find on the pages contained within those sites. That’s something that Google has been doing for quite some time and they have a similar patent dating back to 2006

Ranking for phrases as well as keywords is something that we’ve been working with for quite some time and we seem to be achieving some very positive results for our clients. It’s good to see that another level of ranking pages has been added to another search engine.

It’s our practice to send each client who comes to us for hosting and search engine optimisation services a brief report at the end of every month and today as I was doing the research needed to compile those reports I found that a plan really had come together.

Usually the report to clients lists the number of visitors their site has received during the previous month, whether or not the client needs to consider moving to the next plan and whether or not the client’s website is on the first page of the results in Google for terms that are important to that client.

What terms are important for a particular client is something that is worked out with each client and once we know what the client wants we target those terms. Most of those terms include what you might call a geographic modifier that brings them down to a local level but not all want to focus on the local level.

For example ranking for the term ‘blue widget sales in Hervey Bay’ may be a term that’s very important to our clients … especially if there are a lot of businesses in Hervey Bay who have websites and who sell blue widgets.

For some clients … even though they might be here in Hervey Bay … it’s important to rank well for the term with no geographic modifier and so if they sell blue widgets then they need to rank for ‘blue widgets’ on a national level and achieving a good position on Google’s results pages for that broader term can be much harder.

It was pleasing today to write reports for two of our clients who need to rank well on a national level for several diverse terms and to inform them that we’d achieved the first step in getting them the ranking they wanted during January. Despite a lot of competition they are now right there on the first page and now the challenge is to get them up to within the top four places.

So if you need to get your business website to rank on the first page of Google then talk to the team at CopyTextOnline and Total Website Management. We really are the search engine specialists here in Hervey Bay … we have a proven record of success