Web Design News

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

… does it really work?

There are lots of web designers out there who proudly proclaim that they submit every new website to all the search engines as if it’s some major selling point for their services. I suppose that it sounds quite impressive to clients who have little or no Internet experience but to those who do it sends a different message.

There was a time when it did pay off to submit sites to the search engines … although there was one particular search engine years ago that actually marked down those sites that were submitted … but these days it has almost no one in the world of SEO  believe that it has any effect at all.

But it still sounds good and makes those trumpet that service look important. I wonder what they’ll do when clients do begin to understand how search engines really work?

 It seems that our latest site - nothing much other than a brochure site - was already visible in the search engines before it was completed and the client has already made more from the site that what we charged her to produce it. Of course, developing the knowledge base to achieve results like that isn’t very exciting but it certainly pays off in the long term.

I had to laugh the other day when I saw one of our local competitors announce on their website that all the sites they constructed for clients were optimised and submitted to all the major search engines. What’s really sad is that they’re not the only major web design business here in town who thinks that’s all that search engine optimisation involves.

At the end of July I was compiling a search engine report for one of our clients and was pleased to see that all the work we had put in to real search engine optimisation was paying off with top positions in Google and Yahoo for all but one of the important keyword phrases that they wanted us to target for them. I was also very surprised to see that, without any attempt to target a particular phrase, our client’s site was on page one in Google for a term that’s very important to another business here in town.

I was even more surprised to see that the business wasn’t anywhere to be seen on any of the first five pages for that term. But then I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised because the website designers they use subscribe to the idea that search engine optimisation is all about submitting sites to major search engines.

If you think that’s all that search engine optimisation entails and you design sites for paying customers then you really should get in touch with reality because, if you don’t, sooner or later you’re going to be trying to explain to an irate customer why they paid you heaps of money to be so far back in the major search engines that people never find their sites.

Meanwhile our clients go on getting a real return on their investment in search engine optimisation.

If you’re involved in a small web design business sooner or later you will also be asked for your advice and help in promoting your clients’ websites. There are a lot of people out there who will tell you that the best places to start doing that are the social media sites such as Digg, Reddit and other places where people on the Net can discuss what they see.

However, there’s a dark side to social media sites and there are some good reasons why you may not want to promote your clients’ sites in that way.

The isms of SM over on the SEO Igloo Blog has some great food for thought.

Too few web designers seem to understand the importance of thinking about search engine optimisation right from the design stage. That’s really rather sad because that’s the point where everything should be on the table and ready to be woven into the finished product.

But even when search engine optimisation is being thought of a number of basic mistakes are being made. For example, do you stop and consider who is the target audience for the website and what words they might use to search for the product that the website you’re designing is trying to sell?

It’s all well and good to go and consult Word Tracker or even the old Overture tool (if you can get it to work for you) but are the words and terms you input into those tools really the words that the target audience would use to search for the site your designing?

It’s an interesting problem and one that’s easy to overcome if you stop and think about it for a few moments. Don’t think that you have the answers just because you happen to live in the same area as the website might be targeting - you really have to look to an expert to provide you with the words you need.

I was just checking our ranking for a search term that’s of some importance to our business at a local level and came across one of our competitors who seems to equate search engine optimisation with submitting new websites to all the search engines.

Good luck to anyone who uses that business. They’re obviously so new to the game that they don’t remember the days when some search engines marked down websites that were submitted to them and marked up those sites that their spider found without any prompting.

We live and work in an interesting town here in Australia. Local search as the Americans and Europeans know it isn’t available here in Australia yet and in this town not many people search the Net for local businesses. Instead most people still rely on the old information sources.

But that’s going to change; local search will come and gradually people in this town are beginning to search online for the local information they need. As more people begin to search locally we will also see a change in the terms that people search for. More common local terms will be used - some terms that will become important are those that may only be common within this town or this district.

So are the web designers in this town including the factors that are important for local search into the sites they are building for local businesses? Are they including those local terms that could become important in their search engine optimisation?

Sadly most aren’t - in fact there are still web design businesses in this town that are producing sites with designs that were popular years ago but lack the functionality that is so important today. And search engine optimisation is something they can talk about but obviously don’t understand.

Now is the time to be building sites that will continue working effectively long into the future. Now is not the time to be building sites that were beyond their use-by date years ago.