It’s like this: you decorate your new shop inside with glorious interior design scheme and window dressing to die for, and then leave the shutters down 24/7.  Well, that’s a valid analogy and should be taken seriously, especially if you’re a local business.   If done correctly, it can help your business get seen and can bring in the extra cash flow you need to stay solvent.

So what do I mean by on page SEO (search engine optimisation)?

If people are going to find your  website, you need to optimise your website;

Here’s a list of Do’s and Don’ts for on page SEO

1. Don’t copy your text from someone else’s  website.  Duplicate and non unique content is frowned upon by search engines and will do you and your website’s online credibility any good at all.

2. Don’t over optimise your pages and stuff as many keywords as possible into the body  text or title tags.

3. Don’t use keyword density tools and aim for the highest possible density for your target keyword – this is old hat and will definitely result in an over optimisation penalty.

4. Do carry out thorough keyword research for all your pages.  Write your page copy naturally, with keywords in mind whilst you’re writing. Obviously, if you’re trying to rank for a keyword, it should at least be on the page once.

5. Do be careful with your title tags and header tags; don’t over align them. So if you own an online  battery store, avoid setting your title tag, your H1 header and your H2 header to ‘ Cheap Batteries Online’

6. Do avoid over doing the internal linking using keyword based anchor text.

If you’re a small local business, you can quite easily benefit from your on page SEO strategy for medium to long tail search terms.  Especially for location related terms  eg. ‘chartered accountants high wycombe’

I can recommend some background reading into the Google Panda changes  and how to survive the Penguin updates, which were released earlier this year. In a nutshell, write naturally, engage your visitors through your websites pages and don’t over optimise – shows you’re not trying to manipulate the search engines.

Here’s a classic example of a company that has forgotten to even do the basic optimisation of their websites home page (the most important page on any ones site)  and category pages. See the Zenbedroom’s home page – there isn’t even a brand name in the title tag and with a null description tag as well. The eCommerce project manager must have been half asleep on one of their overly expensive beds.

You can always acquire the services of a trusted seo company like Rankability and get them to evaluate and audit your website.  If you have a number of websites, get them to do the first one, and maybe invest in some SEO training, so you can replicate the process.

A small degree of optimisation can go a long way. Neglect your website, and you’ll be neglected by the search engines.

The site was designed with a pinterest.com style format in mind so that all the latest Athletics news could be showcased properly. The site is fully responsive so that it manipluated itself depending on the mode of viewing. Whether thats an iPhone, iPad or a Desktop PC.

If you want to checkout EightLane then have a look at www.eightlane.org or follow them on Twitter and Facebook.

The site can be found here: www.rosscojammin.co.uk .

Ross can be found on Twitter at twitter.com/rosscojammin

How to add the CSS3 text-shadow

Just add the following line of code to your existing CSS file:

h1 { text-shadow: 0.1em 0.1em #000; }

Easy!

Magento or osCommerce? We have to go with Magento simply because we feel that the software is just that tiny bit ahead at the moment, meaning better quality / functionality for our clients. Magento is great visually and is very efficient to work with. For more information about ecommerce web design go to our ecommerce page.

For more information visit WordPress.org.

Today was proof that Google has no bounds when it comes to punishing web spammers.

It punished itself.

Google Chrome was punished for paying another company to promote Chrome through a series of videos when paying ANOTHER company to blog about it and link to Google Chrome. This is yet another example of why companies have to be on the ball when it comes to paying for links and content. Having a SEO Consultant who is up to date with the ins and outs of SEO is very important.

For a full analysis take a look at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/04/google-chrome-browser-search-rankings

Brandable Domains

If you’re looking for a brandable domain name that is highly memorable and will stands your company out from the rest, then it is more than likely that you will have to sacrifice having ‘searched for’ keywords with your domain name. This may mean that you won’t get that extra strength when it comes to ranking towards the top of search engines, but choosing a good domain name over a domain name containing keywords could be the right choice for your company in the long term because it means that you can create a more powerful and trusted brand.

Keyword Domains

Looking for domain names containing highly searched keywords will provide the perfect platform for starting an SEO campaign to get your website to the top of the search engines. By limiting your domain name choices to ones that only contain your chosen keywords does mean that you may have to sacrifice a long term brand. We recommend keyword domains to online independent companies that aren’t too concerned about building a catchy, well recognised name.

Lastly, you need to check if your chosen domain is available. You can do this by going to any domain name provider and performing a quick search to check that it hasn’t already been registered. We regularly use 123-reg.co.uk to register our domains and we would recommend them to anybody looking to buy their first domain name.

The Pagerank Debate

There’s still an ongoing debate on what pagerank means, is it important, should you take any notice of it? Well, everybody has their own opinions and there are many pro’s AND con’s relating to Google’s page ranking system. Our opinion is that pagerank can be very useful but there definitely needs to be more frequent updates because new websites are at a major disadvantage and have to wait months to say goodbye to their default PR ZERO or N/A.

Some critics say that pagerank has no relation to search engine rankings, but in many ways it does. Well ranked websites are usually ranked at the top for good reasons, a) strong inbound links, b) quality content, c) good on-page seo, now how do you think Google decides on a websites pagerank? Do you not think that Pagerank is based on similar lines to the above points? Of course. There are always going to be examples of websites with high pagerank, which don’t make it to page one for their keywords and there will be a reason for this i.e., the websites on page one also have pagerank, along with better content, links and optimisation – we have a PR4 website that’s sat all the way back on page three for its keyword…

Anyway we hope that you enjoy your new pagerank and don’t be too disheartened if some of your websites lost some of their pagerank. The important thing is to carry on concentrating on building quality links, adding good related content and keeping your website’s coding clean, tidy and fast.

We’ll update you with our review soon.