Web Design News

If there is one unchangeable truth in the web design and search engine optimisation industry it’s that nothing stays the same and everything is changing.

While many web designers here in Hervey Bay still seem to think that search engine optimisation is all about submitting their clients’ sites to Google the world has moved on.

It’s also a lot more than just getting a few links pointing back to a website. Google’s personalised search is about to engulf us and that is going to change the search engine landscape in ways that a lot of people haven’t even thought about yet. 

These days search engine optimisation is a lot more than just submitting a site to Google, or getting a few links, as Lee Odden points out here.

There’s a short but important discussion going on over at Webmaster World right now about the need to use this meta tag.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>

What people like Edward Lewis and Brett Tabke certainly make sense.

Google has announced that it can use speech recognition technology to transcribe videos from YouTube … and I guess other places … into text which it can then index.

Think about it for a while, could we soon see videos ranking at the top of Google search engine results pages because of what is said in the video?

There is no doubt that video has become an important part of marketing on websites … just look at the quotes on the top of this video production business’ website … but now it might have just become even more important.

If you’re a web designer who is also seriously into search engine optimisation (and not just paying lip service to SEO) then you’ll know of the problems involved in getting Google to crawl a website that uses a lot of Flash.

Only last week I was asked to review a local photographer’s website that is uses a lot of Flash throughout the site. I found that in four years Google has never been able to get beyond the index page because the designer had not provided any work-around for the search engine spiders to to crawl the site and so the search engine rankings for the site were basically non-existant.

But now there’s some good news for Flash based sites. Adobe - the company that produced the Flash technology - has now provided a way for Google to crawl Flash sites. It’s not the complete solution but it is a step in the right direction and it’s still no excuse for failing to provide a text link to a sitemap that Google can follow.

You can read about Google crawling and indexing flash content here and here

If you’re a web designer and you’re serious about what you do and you really do want to give your clients the very best outcomes that you can possibly provide then what are you doing about search?

The search landscape is changing every single day so are you really keeping up with the changes or are you still producing sites that didn’t work last year and aren’t about to work any time in the future?

Here’s a little quote that should be imprinted on the brain of every person who thinks that they can design a content management system.

Until web designers learn proper semantic markup, like H1, H2, are structural tags first and foremost, and visual elements second, an SEO is always going to have to come in and clean up the mess. Until designers learn how to use a CMS properly and separate content from context, an SEO is always going to have fix the nightmare they have created.

It comes from this post on Graywolf’s SEO Blog and the whole post is definitely worth reading.

Late Thursday afternoon Toni and I were getting ready to shut up shop for the Easter weekend. We were sitting here planning the stuff that we had to pack in the car to take on the trip to visit our grandkids in the next state when the phone rang.

It was one half of a husband and wife team who are employing us to do a little development and search engine optimisation on their website and the work was to start this week so I presumed the call was about the work we were to do … but it wasn’t.

Instead the call was about a minor change I had suggested that they make to their website before we even touched it. The change really was very minor … just the addition of three words but it had produced what the client considered was an amazing result. This couple had been trying to get their website up to the first page of Google for a term that was very important to them for months and they had not succeeded.

So they had come to us and that minor addition of just three words had lifted them right up to position five on the first page. The client was ecstatic and that’s what we aim for … clients who can see real value in the work that we do for them. It was definitely a great start to the Easter weekend for us.

It really doesn’t matter where you’re business is situated; if your website needs some search engine optimisation to get it onto page one of Google then call or email us to see if we can achieve the results you want. We can’t guarantee that just three words is all it’s going to take to get your website onto the first page of Google but we will give you an honest appraisal of what will need to be done.

Apart from web design, web hosting and copywriting we also do quite a bit of search engine optimisation work for our own clients both here in Hervey Bay and around the world. We also do quite a bit of SEO on a sub-contract basis for other web support businesses and it seems that our work is just as effective for them as it is for our own clients.

A little over two weeks ago we did some work for one of those web support businesses where we had to target 21 different keyword phrases. Yesterday they wrote to us about the work we had done for them.

Here are some rankings for xxxx. We already have some nice results. I am quite pleased with these fast results and rankings. It usually takes longer than this to see these kind of results.

It seems that in a highly competitive area we had achieved:

•  12 listings on the first page of the search engine results pages for those terms
•  7 listings on the second page
•  1 listing on the third page
•  1 listing on the fourth page

Of course we would like to see all of them on page one of the search engine results pages but 12 out of the 21 isn’t bad for some pages of a site that have only been live for two weeks.

If you need some quality search engine optimisation work done on your site then you know where to come

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