Developers Giving SEO a Bad Name

We realise this might look like “another rant” but just this week we’ve had calls from disgruntled parties who’ve purchased SEO ‘services’ from their local Web Designer / Developer.

When we research these companies it is obvious to the trained eye that their understanding of online marketing is limited at best. 

Their lack of scruples is simply giving SEO a bad name and making their ‘victims’ far less trusting of the genuine professionals operating in the SEO industry.

Add to this the many ‘quick buck charlie’ SEO companies that have sprung up in the name of profit, and you have an industry that is causing its own demise.

It’s actually quite easy to recognise these so called ‘SEO companies’ when they advertise for business. Infact, you may have noticed this yourself with so many SEO companies now using Google AdWords to advertise and attract new business leads!

There is of course a certain irony in a company selling SEO services by using Pay Per Click in order to be seen on the first page of Google!!! However not everyone can be up there for such competitive terms as “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimisation” and to achieve such a feat would require a prolonged SEO campaign. However, it should be expected that a company selling SEO should command decent ‘organic’ positions for competitive search terms.

More often than not, companies who are not experienced SEO’s are offing SEO services to their clients when they may well have had THEIR website designed before SEO even became a factor.

This is a big mistake… To be able to offer this service you require actual industry experience & not just have read about it in a book or magazine article…

I can understand the problems that face these designers and developers, but it is simple – if they do not change with the times they will become obsolete, no different in fact to operating systems such as Windows 95/98/2000/XP/Vista etc.

It has to be said though, that the same goes for SEO consultants. Things move on and an SEO’s training should be incorporating new techniques and information for the future – all the time. It’s an industry constantly changing and evolving and those who stop bothering to move with it will quickly need to find new careers.

Take other industries – law, construction, health and transport for example – they all have to move with the times, constant change is an ever present and to those developers who are selling a substandard SEO service I have to say, “SHAME ON YOU & STOP BEING LAZY!

The fast lane is where every forward thinking business should be and quality SEO advice is key to success.

Development, Online Marketing, Web Design

Changing your SEO Company

It can be a daunting task changing SEO companies, especially if you have some form of search engine placement. But it may be what you set out to achieve isn’t quite happening for you, and you don’t feel the online side of your business is living up to it’s full potential. There can be two reasons for this – either the SEO company you originally instructed isn’t very good, or you didn’t do what your SEO consultant asked you to do. If it’s the latter it’s no good pointing the finger as it’s only going to happen again, unless of course you’re ready to open your cheque book nice and wide and employ someone to write the content for your site on your behalf!

More often than not what happens in the web development industry is that clients simply start out by looking for someone to build a website for them. Often the first port of call is a relative, friend or sometimes even a local Printer who’s offering a web design service. After wondering for a year why there are no enquiries coming from their new sites customers eventually see the error of their ways. Meanwhile, many of the SEO services offered online are from businesses that outsource their work overseas. We, like you, get scores of e-mails every week advising us to outsource our SEO, which we totally ignore. We know the failings and flaws in these services and you shouldn’t be fooled by them either. I can assure you there are no UK websites ‘sitting’ at the top of Google for competitive keywords, that have employed SEO Consultants working from some far flung corner of the world to get them there. If you believe otherwise then please get in touch and we’ll be happy to prove you wrong!!

You see the obvious language barrier isn’t the only problem, cultural differences play a large part too in determining the different ways that we, in the west, search for our products and services. Targeting the correct keywords is fundamental with SEO, and must not be underestimated.

So how do you pluck up the courage to move to a true SEO Specialist?

Unfortunately those of us “in the know” have to tear apart all the hard work put in by the previous developer. Yes, it will make you as ”sick as a parrot” - but at least we do have the medicine to cure you!

It’s painful to see but the majority of websites out there are just awful, they simply don’t work and there are so many factors involved. Ironically, what doesn’t help the cause is that people get too personal with their websites just like they do with their cars. It’s not until you own a few sites that you realise they are simply tools that exist to help get you more business.

The hardest part of moving to a true SEO Specialist is hearing their honest verdict on your existing site. However, you must forget about your current position in the search engines – after all it’s only going to get better from here on!

The truth about SEO is that if it’s done correctly it will be the best value advertising your company will ever undertake. If it’s done badly however it will be costing you business every day. Are you prepared to wait? If not, contact us now!

Online Marketing

‘SEO Training Norwich’

First Page Result on 18th February 2010 for ‘SEO Training Norwich’ Incredibly this took just 2 days to achieve!!

However, this is NOT what we would deem to be effective SEO as little or no traffic will ever result from it. Yes, it’s good to be targeting all aspects of search terminology relating to your business, but don’t be fooled by those claiming these sort of search terms/results are a great achievement.

‘SEO Training Norwich’ – So, what’s so special about this search term? Well, for one, it happens to be a local search term that Webserve Development haven’t yet targeted!

This article you are now reading, was added on the 16th February 2010 at 15.25 hours, with the intention of seeing how long it would take to rank on the first page of Google for the search term “SEO Training Norwich”. Surely it wouldn’t be that difficult as there are only 12,700 results for SEO Training Norwich and this should be easily obtainable for a local company worth their salt?

As stated in previous Webserve articles it’s not so much about achieving first page results per se but about achieving first page results for relevant, competitive search terms.

There is a lot more to consider of course. For example, is there a call for SEO training in Norwich, or for courses on SEO in the local Norwich area? Is training done in the classroom with theory tests and exams? How much would these courses cost, and how long would they last for?

One thing is for sure though, there are only ten spots available on the first page of Google and only the best will be there…

So, to recap, it took less than 2 days for a true SEO Specialist using a well established, fully optimised website. But remember, it’s those harder to achieve keywords that bare the best fruit. Food for thought!

Development, Online Marketing

SEO Consultants – SEO Specialist Jobs

So you want a career in SEO? The first step will be to convince the interviewer or client that you are fit and able to do the job. Check below to see how you measure up and compare your answers. Failing that you may just learn something – although the best information, as always, is reserved for our clients…

1. What SEO results can you boast? We’re the Number 1 SEO Specialist in Norfolk  or how about one of the best SEO Specialists in the UK, Check my Portfolio for more information.
2. What do you perceive are the important things to take into consideration when optimising a site? Understanding the business and it’s unique selling point (USP) is paramount to a successful campaign. Without the understanding or knowledge it’s highly unlikely you’ll target all the relevant keywords associated with that business.
3. Who do you respect in the industry? Web Designers who build websites with SEO in mind are not high on our list. It’s no use to anyone if a website can’t be fully indexed or is structured incorrectly or misses vital script inclusions.
4. What web analytics programs are you familiar with? Why use anything other than Google Analytics? It’s free, easy to use and informative.
5. What is page Vision-based Page Segmentation or VIPS?  VIPS will allow search engines to differentiate between links from the content block and links from other blocks such as text advertisement blocks or footer blocks. As such, algorithms could easily ‘weigh’ links from each block differently. A link from a content block could be considered as more likely to be a true recommendation than a link from a text link advertisement block. Search engines may therefore give extra weight to in-content links while devaluing links that appear to be advertisements. Sites that ‘rent’ links through link networks usually do place them in a block above, below or to the side of the content block. When VIPS is implemented, there is a risk that many rented advertisement links could be devalued.
6. What’s the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank? One is updated approximately three times a year whilst the other offers a result that gives ‘real time’ results.
7. What exactly is Sandbox? Imagine a place where you go when you have been naughty!
8. How long does it take to get out of Sandbox? First you will have to analyse and remedy the reason/s why you are in there to begin with. Once you do this and begin to develop in a sound, ethical way Google will release you, but only when they are ready! Whilst in there it’s still a good time to work on your SEO as it will take effect when your site has been released, so to speak.
9. How can you track your rankings? Regardless of which tracking system you use we would put the emphasis on the general relevant keyword traffic increase to your business, don’t get too hooked up on one search term as it’s bad for your health!
10. What are the common factors between Google/Yahoo/MSN? Apart from all being search engines we see these websites as having the potential of the ‘gold rush’ days of the wild, wild west.
11. What percentage of your Pay Per Click (PPC) budget should go to each search engine? we would concentrate on maximising the potential of Google before even worrying about other search engines.
12. Give a description of your general SEO experience. We’ve traded online since 2001, attaining both retail and web development skills. No1: SEO Specialist in Norfolk 
13. Do you currently optimise your own sites? Absolutely, yes! We manage many different online businesses. Any SEO professional worth their salt would do, wouldn’t they?
14. Do you operate any blogs?  Yes. Blogs are effective and aid other SEO techniques.
15. Where do you think the SEO industry is heading? It needs regulation as there are many ‘sharks’ giving those of us who do it properly a bad time due to unrealistic price setting and losing customer’s confidence. Good SEO Specialists are hard to find but if you do find one we suggest that you keep hold of them. Just remember Rome wasn’t built in a day but it has stood strong for many thousands of years after. 
16. What SEO tools do you regularly use? There are lots to choose from of course, some are better than others and it has taken many years of effort to gather the best resources. If you would like to know what they are then we suggest you do the same as us and try them all to find out…
17. What SEO areas are you strong in and where could you do better? Give examples of both.  Well we’re weak when it comes to leaving a poor job! Webserve have pride in their work and results matter to us. Where we’re strong is that we have a wealth of experience to fall back on, plus we understand business concepts, objectives and their warranted costs.
18. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site? Anyone in SEO knows that Link building is what gives the site it’s strength to rise in the ranks for major keywords. However this can only be as good as the optimisation techniques used to increase relevant traffic!
19. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links? Hard work and effort attracting them to the site in question, there’s no bigger link generator than good quality informative content, that people find useful.
20. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO, Blogs, RSS and Pod casting? Networking has been with us for ages and works when you target the right audience. However, used incorrectly it can be time consuming and lack results. Most social networking sites ‘likes’ use the rel=”nofollow” tag, therefore defeating the point of link building.
21. Are you familiar with search arbitrage? How does this arbitrage work? First, a publisher hosts ads on a website or blog, from the Yahoo Publisher network or Google’s AdSense program. The search engines pay for clicks on the ads hosted on the site or blog. They’re essentially giving the web publisher a commission from the click fees they collect from their advertisers.

Once a web publisher or blogger has hosted ads on their site, the next step is to drive traffic to the site using pay-per-click (PPC) ads that are displayed in the search results. If you pay less for the clicks than what you receive from the ads hosted then you’ve made an easy profit. In a nutshell, that’s the essence of search arbitrage.

22. Do you know who Matt Cutts is?  (Mr Google as far as we’re concerned! Or we’ll accept senior software engineer at Google as your answer)
23. In Google lore – what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

Why Page Theme is Usually More Important than PageRank:
In the Hilltop white paper they talk about how they can use expert documents to help compute relevancy. An expert document is a non affiliated page which links to many related resources. If page A is related to page B and page B is related to page C then a connection between A & C are assumed.

Additionally Hilltop states that it strongly considers page title and page headings in relevancy scores (in fact these elements can be considered more important than link text).

The benefit of Hilltop over raw PageRank (Google) is that it is topic sensitive – and is thus generally harder to manipulate than buying random high power off topic links. The benefits of Hilltop over topic distillation (Teoma) are that Hilltop is quicker & cheaper to calculate, and that it tends to have more broad coverage.

When Hilltop doesn’t have enough expert sites the feature can be turned off. It’s believed that Google is using Hilltop to help sort the relevancy for some of their search results currently.

On November 16th 2003, Google commenced an update (the Florida update) which had a catastrophic effect on a very large number of websites and, in the process, turned search engine optimisation on it’s head. It’s normal practice to give alphabetical names to Google’s updates in the same way that names are given to hurricanes, and thus this one became known as “Florida”.
In a nutshell, a vast number of pages, many of which had ranked at or near the top of the results for a very long time, simply disappeared off the radar altogether. Also, the quality (relevancy) of the results for a great many searches was reduced. In the place of Google’s usual relevant results, we are now finding pages listed that are off-topic, or their on-topic connections are very tenuous to say the least.

In December 2005, Google began to roll out what they called the “Big Daddy” update, and by the end of March 2006 it had been fully deployed in all of their data centres. It wasn’t a normal update, which are often algorithm changes. Big Daddy was a software/infrastructure change, largely to the way that they ‘crawl’ and index websites.

As the update spread across the data centres, people started to notice that many pages from their websites had disappeared from the regular index. Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer at Google, put it down to “sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the ‘in links’ or the ‘out links’ of that site. Examples as to what might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to ‘spammy’ online neighbourhoods, or link buying/selling.”
24. What is sticky content? It’s exactly as it sounds, i.e.content that is site wide.

The above gives you a reasonable idea of some of the questions you might encounter in a job interview situation and how an SEO Specialist such as Webserve would potentially answer them. Good luck if you’re new to the industry but please remember, as always, not to promise something you can’t deliver – it will always come back to haunt you later on!

Development, Online Marketing, Search Engine News, Web Design

First page results for SEO Specialist!

We would definitely hire them!!

It’s taken some work to catch up to the pack but we’re very close now to proving our worth regarding serious SEO rankings.

For some time now this site has ranked highly in our local region of Norfolk for search terms relating to SEO.

We’ve had to be patient and we’ve had to work hard to achieve our goal of making the first page on Google for the very competitive term – SEO Specialist. Yes, we do still expect the results to ‘bounce around’ a little until settling down in the rankings but we are extremely confident of improving our position further for this and many other competitive SEO search terms.

As you can no doubt appreciate we face stiff opposition because of the nature of our business with different budgets according to company size. It is imperative also for companies that want to provide a service in the SEO industry to have high rankings so that customers can have confidence in their SEO techniques.

Lessons can be learnt from this, as clients looking for effective SEO will hopefully understand. As SEO professionals we go through the same process as everybody else and get excited to see the fruits of our labours too. Customers should also appreciate that it sometimes takes more work if the competition is fierce, but with patience and sensible goal setting, eventually you are bound to succeed with online marketing through SEO.

The beauty of this website is that it has achieved it’s ranking without needing to insert a strong keyword term within the domain name! This just goes to prove that keyword rich domains aren’t as important as having the right website structure or hiring the best professional for the SEO campaign.

What will we do next?

This is simply another small milestone achieved and as we say the work will continue towards other targeted competitive keywords. Strengthening the site further towards key phrases such as ‘SEO Company‘ ‘SEO services’ and ‘SEO consultant‘ whilst improving further on the achievements made thus far.

The best advice we can give an individual or company undertaking SEO would be to take one step at a time, develop and improve your site -ready for the onslaught of new business coming your way when you get there!

What makes an SEO specialist special?

Well, that’s another article for another day…

Search Engine News, Web Design
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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SPECIALISTS

Seo Specialists - Website Optimisation & Search Engine Optimisation Consultancy.

Thoroughly research relevent keywords specific to your business for effective SEO. The main purpose of organic SEO is to increase relevant or targeted traffic for all those right keywords through search engines. SEO can take up lots of effort plus depending on your industry it can sometimes take up lots of money. You should have a clear idea right from the start as to what keywords you want to target. There are a number of tools available on the Internet, even Google has a free tool for choosing keywords. Seo professionals will also target key phrases as well as those more difficult terms. These have lower volumes of traffic, but if enough of them are targeted the total will add up to a sizeable amount. By their very nature they will also have low levels of completion making it easier and quicker for you to achieve higher search engine rankings and get your SEO campaign of to a good start. Relevant content FOR seo makes your website information-rich, if the site provides meaningful information people will come back to it it will increases your keyword density and it gives your website ULP (unique linking property) this will increase those all important inbound links. Updating your website with new relevant content is a good long term SEO strategy which will drive you up the search engines. Make sure you have unique titles for every page as titles are used by the search engines to both rank and display pages. Leveraging your page titles will also increase your rankings and search engine traffic. Your description Meta tag should describe your page in one or two sentences, and of course include your keywords but also selling the page to the potential searcher. Content at the top of the page is considered more important than the content below, so ensure your SEO keywords are near the top of the page. Use semantic HTML where possible. Ensure you use semantic HTML and that your keywords appear within the header tags. Your website will need to be using search engine friendly URLs. Try not to use dynamically generated URLs, as these are usually lacking in keywords. I am happy to take on SEO in London or any of the other major cities like Manchester as SEO jobs or contracts can be undertaken as i work online. Talking about SEO, We have a new client who are specialist's in Pond Construction Security Norfolk  Letterboxes
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION Our goal is simple: we want to make the Internet a successful addition to your business. That means making websites user friendly and visible to web surfers by promoting the pages in the natural search engine results with the skills and contacts in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that we have, also by using paid advertising methods such as Pay Per Click (PPC). As a Search engine optimisation specialist i can help drive more unique visitors to your website. This is far more complex than simple search engines submissions and to achieve increased volumes of traffic, your website will need to be optimised, if done correctly the site will will then be structured so that all pages are search engine friendly and get indexed. Achieving first page Search Engine listings naturally and effective PPC campaigns will bring regular visitors which your business can receive regular enquiries - The deciding factor then is what you have to offer potential customers. Through extensive research we know what works and what doesn't in SEO, with the key factor of our service being the actual website optimisation and link building. What is Search Engine Optimisation? Search Engine Optimisation is primarily about creating valuable information for the end user. Effectively Website Optimisation ensures that your companies website presents an excellent user experience, therefore growing in value to Search Engines through natural linking. Many think Search Engine Optimisation is only about manipulating placement results which isn't as effective as website Optimisation that is ensuring that your company's website delivers what potential clients want of which the search engines can interpret. Any site that follows these basic principles will find their website will add real value to their organisation, and once Website Optimisation is in place your website will be ready to compete for more competitive keywords. So Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Search Engine Optimization as the Americans call it, is the practice of modifying a website so that it is considered to be Search Engine Friendly. If a website can be properly read by the search engine spiders, there is an increased probability of achieving desirable results in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The primary task for any Search Engine Optimisation company is to understand your product and customers and the search terms these people are using to find a product or service related to the website owner. An aspect rarely mentioned is that to be good at SEO the specialist must have had lots of life experience which can only come with age One rule which we constantly preach to our clients is that in Search Engine Optimisation their content must be unique. It's no secret that google filters out websites or pages that contain duplicate content from other websites so its not a good idea to copy!! besides that every company is different so they should be shouting out about their good points and not someone else's. With SEO clients should be fully aware that when optimising websites, organic rankings don't increase overnight and it can take up to six months and even longer for highly competitive keywords. Other factors such as domain age can affect the time it takes also. Even your domain name can have an effect on search engine results. Generally though the more pages you have and the more articles you have, the more search terms related to your business you will rank highly for. One thing for sure after all the process of getting a website tuned and positioned gaining free traffic is that, it's well worth the effort and will bring you a consistent level of new found business of which your website will be responsible for, This is where your company starts to get a return on it's investment. If a jobs worth doing it's worth doing right!! I hope that after reading this you will see I know my job - and i know how to do it well!! A WORD OF WARNING Hiring as bad SEO company can also get your website banned as well as not achieving what you set out to do for the privilege of a fee.

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