5 Ways to Help Boost your Search Rank
2008-07-04 15:40:09
1. Get other sites to link to you. The more people who link to you the more important search engines will see your site and so the higher they will rank it.
2. Choose less competitive keywords. E.g. don’t choose ‘taxi’, choose ‘Cardiff taxi’. You will rank better if your keywords are more focused. The broader you are the more sites you’re competing with for that top spot. If you market isn’t worldwide why not focus the customers you want.
3. Make sure your keywords are in your content. Multiple instances of the keyword can help but do not over do it as this can count against you.
4. Stick around. The age of your site and the age of its domain name are considered important when your site is ranked. An old site shows longevity and so the search engines associate longevity with success and so rank it higher.
5. Keep adding new content so the search engine can see that your site is not dormant. A news page or blog on your site is a great way to do this.
Introducing AJAX to 101PoundWebsite.com
2008-04-28 14:07:05
Over the next few weeks we’re going to be introducing AJAX elements to the site. For those of you who don’t know what AJAX is, it’s basically a way of sending requests to the server without having to reload the page you’re on.
The first changes we’re going to be making are to the simple forms on the site, things like the account details update form and some of the header text edit forms on galleries.
What you will notice is that whereas before when you clicked update the page would reload and the changes would be applied, now when you click update, the text in the button changes to ‘Updating…’ and then ‘Updated’ – no page reload.
Why are we making these changes? Mainly because it’s where the web is moving. More and more sites are using AJAX to improve their user interfaces such as Facebook and Microsoft. Keeping the site running with the latest technologies means that we can provide you with an always improving user experience.
One big behind the scenes benefit is the lower workload on the servers because the they do not need to serve up complete pages whenever someone clicks update. Instead only the small amount of data which has changed is communicated.
This benefit can also be seen by you as your web connection will not be taxed with transferring large amounts of unnecessary data all the time. Also efficient servers here, means that your site will run fast too.
We hope these changes are welcome and value your feedback.
Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation
2008-04-25 10:36:51
With more and more business moving onto the web, search engine optimisation or SEO is become increasingly important to businesses and web designers. A fantastic site is worth nothing if no one ever sees. SEO is the art of making your site friendly to search engines like Google and Yahoo to achieve the best ranking for the keywords that your business is targeting.
So, what's the golden rule to achieving that number one page rank? Well no one really knows exactly how the search engines rank pages apart from the search engines them selves. What we do know though, through observation, is what things seem to make a difference and what things did make a difference but nowadays seem not to.
What counts?
The main elements that seems to make the biggest difference are your site's content, the number of links to your site and the quality of those links i.e. do they come from sites which are relevant and rank high themselves, and the readability/structure of your site by the search engines.
Site Content
The content of your site is important because search engines scan it to see which words come up most often. If your target keywords are 'houses in Cardiff' and those words are nowhere on your site...guess what... your site isn't going to rank too well for those words. Try to include your keywords throughout your site. Closer to the top is considered more important that at the bottom of a page and using them in headings or in bold help search engines identify them as important.
Links
Links have become very important in SEO. If you think about it, it makes a lot of senses to count the number of links to your site and analysing where those links come from to discover how high up the rankings a site should come. If a lot of people from high ranking sites link to your site then it probably means that your site is worth looking at, or from the other point of view, if no one links to you then it looks like no one thinks your site is worth looking at. So the lesson is... get links to your site, lots and make sure they come from quality, relevant sources. If you're a house rental company for example you want links from other house rental companies or trade magazines.
Structure
Structure is also important in SEO. I would recommend close attention to good structure in your HTML and nowadays you really should be using CSS for the design of your site. At www.101Poundwebsite.com Low Cost Web Design we consider these things very important and all sites we create are made in this way. Well structured HTML helps search engines to know what's important in a web page. Text in a heading tag is likely to represent the theme of the content below it. A H1 tag is more important than a H2 and so on.
CSS drastically reduces the clutter in the HTML. Design and content are separated so the search engines don't have to try to work their way through complicated table tags.
Other Ideas
There are other ways to get visitors to your site; two ways are paid advertising such as Google's AdWords programme and offline advertising.
Google's AdWords programme allows you to advertise your website on the right hand sponsored links section on Google's results pages. Each time someone clicks through to your website you pay an amount based on a value you have set previously. Listing are ordered by how much you are prepared to spend for the click so setting a low click price will save you money in one respect, but you may be so low down the list that no one ever clicks though. Offline advertising is sometimes forgotten but can be a very effective means to drive traffic to your site. Think about your vehicles, letter heads, premises, newsletters, uniforms etc. Put your website everywhere and people will come.
As I have said previously, there is no golden formula to achieve that number one rank but these elements mentioned seem to important. The web is full of SEO advice, I would recommend reading a few articles and certain themes will emerge.