We recently undertook some work for the Police Academy, here is what Nic Crocker had to say:

SEO Keywords
When it comes to SEO, whether it is local SEO or national SEO, keyword selection is one of the most competitively challenging and potentially rewarding things you can master.

Keywords are your link between your customers requirements and your website – so, thorough keyword research and testing becomes the crux of all organic SEO.

Whilst search engines no longer rely on SEO keyword density as a ranking method, they are still used to establish the relevance of your page to the keyword phrase used by the searcher. Littering you page with certain phrases will not in itself increase your ranking but having appropriate, honest and relevant keywords will add strength, as long as the overall content is informative, readable and (I’ll use the word again as it is so important) relevant. So, where do you begin?

Create a list of SEO Keywords and Phrases.
First of all you will need to create a list of relevant SEO keywords and phrases. Really brainstorm this and make it as inclusive as possible. Keep an open mind as to the sort of words and phrases your potential customers may use. Step into their shoes, try and think like your customer, remember they almost certainly will not have your expertise and may not know the industry jargon you take for granted.

Ask. Ask friends, family and customers what SEO phrases and words they would use if they were searching for your products or services, you may be surprised by the variety of results you get. This is your starting point over time and with research, you will reduce this list and discover what works and what doesn’t.

At this point it is worth setting up an excel sheet so you can manage and monitor your results. Your SEO Keyword list should become an ongoing work in progress, changing with your businesses growth and requirements.

Once you have created your list, the next phase is to test, analyse and research your words. There are a number of keyword research tools available and many very good free ones. Google  has its own suite of analytics tools, if you haven’t  already done so, then you should sign up and use these free tools. (Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/).

Google also provide a keyword tool and their traffic estimator through their Adwords portal, again well worth searching out.

Googles traffic estimator is a free tool that allows you  to see more about the strategic value in the keywords you are selecting for your site. The research done using this tool can help to eliminate guesswork, and give your strategies more depth and penetration.

Using your master keyword list, enter each one uniquely to see potential search volumes. You may be surprised at the results – and opportunity – you find.

For example, you may enter “SEO Plymouth” as your term, the keyword tool shows you that twice as many searches occur on the term “Search Engine Optimisation Plymouth.” This means you would be better targeting you page content phrases at “Search Engine Optimisation Plymouth” as double the amount of people are using that phrase. (That’s not to stop you writing an article about SEO Plymouth to capture the rest )

This tool also shows that people may not be using the search phrases you thought they would be when searching for your products or services. If you eliminate the guesswork you can only increase your conversion rate.

Free Analysis by an SEO Professional.
If you would like further information about choosing the right keywords for your business, or a free appraisal of your web site’s SEO credentials, including a keyword analysis, a Google rank check and an free basic analysis of one of your competitors web sites, complete the form above or call 01822 859495.

Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Keeping it Fresh.
Google has recently changed its search algorithm in an attempt to reward searchers with the freshest relevant content possible and this could have a dramatic effect on Search Engine Optimisation.

The Internet moves at an incredibly fast pace with information being updated and added all the time. Depending on the topic, the most recent information could be from the last week, day or even minute. This pace of change both keeps search engine optimisers on their toes and creates amazing opportunities for those SEO companies who are on the ball enough to take advantage.

Googles algorithm, depending on the search terms, needs to be able to distinguish whether a search result from say a month ago, about the latest SEO advances is recent, or if a football result from last Saturday is too old. If you have searched for “latest SEO developments” you may hopefully have found this article. Google made the announcement of the changes to their algorithm at the end of 2011. Whilst a month or two old now, this news is still up to date, fresh and relevant. Had you searched for “Plymouth Argyle latest result”, anything older than their previous result (4-0 win against Accrington Stanley at time of writing) would be considered out of date, or not fresh and consequently should get a lower ranking.

In short the object is to keep search results relevant and fresh.
So, how does Google keep this information up to date and relevant?
Well this is all part of Googles algorithm upgrade. Last year Google completed what they call their Caffeine web indexing system. (Sounds like a lot of late nights to me). This system allows them to crawl and index the web for fresh content. Since that algorithm upgrade, they have been making additional tweaks to further improve the relevance and freshness and Google say this impacts up to 35% of searches.

OK yes but, I hear you cry, “My chocolate Muffin recipe is always relevant and fresh, just like my muffins”. So where do your Muffins fit into this?

Google now break their search types down into several broad categories and their algorithm will now calculate where your site fits in:

Recent events – breaking news etc, so here you may find the latest, breaking news, current events, blog publications, live scores, anything that is happening right now, or very recently.

Regular Occurring Events – In this category you may find things like football results, election news, x factor news.

Frequent Updates – In this category you may find things like product updates, reviews, etc.

Finally – there are the results that are always relevant, like your Muffin recipe. When someone does a search for a muffin recipe, a three year old recipe is just a relevant as a one week old recipe, so both have the potential to be listed.

Well that all very nice to know, but what does this mean to my business?
Some would say that if you are a business that sells a product or service that doesn’t change all that frequently, then this change shouldn’t affect your search engine optimisation strategy all that much as Google will pop you into the relevant catagory and you will appear as always for your preferred search phrase. As long as Google understands freshness importance level for your business sector is low, then your rankings in that area should not be affected. To some extent this is true.

However if you take that approach to SEO, I believe you are missing an opportunity. I think whatever your business type, keeping your web site fresh and up to date with the latest news from your industry will effect your rankings and if you can appear at the top of the rankings because of fresh breaking news then why ignore it? If there is any industry breaking news, or even just company news or live events, it may be considered fresh and relevant and thus boost your rank. A place at the top, even if it is just for a short period of time on breaking news, is excellent exposure for your business and builds a reputation of your company being at the cutting edge.

Whether “freshness” is obviously important or not, you need to monitor your analytics carefully to assess the impact and be ready to react. Relevant content produced on a consistent basis and updated regularly remains the most important factor in optimising your website for search engines. That statement is now even truer.

So, what can you do to benefit from these changes? – I would suggest starting a blog or a news page, and keeping it fresh with up to date relevant news and stories from your sector.

Why not contact us here at A38 to see what we can do to help. We offer complete SEO packages, social media management, article writing and blog publishing (all client articles written by an experienced broad sheet trained professional journalist).

Call Ian for an informal chat about SEO and Web design on 01822 859495 or 07885 225 233 or complete the form above

A little while ago I decided to localise some of my SEO practices and focus on the keyword phrase “web design Plymouth”. I spent a few hours a week for a couple of weeks using all the SEO strategies I know on the phrase “web design plymouth” with quite good results. My site went from nowhere for that phrase to top 20. On the whole I was pleased with the result because the effort had not been huge.

As expected, after a week or two, my site started to drop, which wasn’t a huge surprise, I was expecting other on the ball web design companies in Plymouth to overtake me, however what was a surprise was just how far and how fast my site did fall. Within a month, I was out of the top 100. This got me thinking.

Why has my ranking dropped in Google?
Does this sound familiar to you? You have a great web design, you have spent time and money optimising your web design, applying all the SEO strategies you can think of to get your web design as high up the Google rankings as you can. Your hard work has paid off and your web design has gained a respectable and profitable position within Google. Then, all of a sudden, without warning, your web design starts dropping and dropping fast.

Why Why Why Googlilah?
If you’re behaving yourself, following the guidelines, not trying to cheat and Spam your way to the top, you may well ask why? Well there is probably no one single reason, it is probably a number of different factors, but here I have outlined a few possibilities:

Competition.
Your web design may have been out gunned by the competition. The nature of Google is that it is constantly seeking new and relevant answers to the queries that it is presented with. If the web designs that you are competing with are adding new and relevant content, better links or just have a better SEO strategy than you, you will be overtaken and will drop down the rankings.

The good news is, this works two ways, if you have a great SEO strategy, then your web site will continue to climb the rankings. You can find out more about SEO here.

Google Reshuffle
Google generally does two types of crawl to analyse the net and make up its rankings. There is the shallow crawl, which happens every couple of days. Robot programs crawl the net looking for new web sites, broken links etc This information is correlated and used to place new pages and remove old broken pages.

About every six weeks, Google does a deep crawl. This crawl is much more sophisticated and complex and takes several days to complete. During this process Google will update its systems, clear and renew its cache and re-evaluate the importance, popularity and relevance of all the web sites making up its rankings.

After a shallow crawl, you may notice your web design has gone up or down a few places, after a deep crawl your web design may have shot up or down the rankings by tens or even hundreds of places, depending on how effective your SEO strategy is.

Of course you should look at this as a good thing. The constant re-shuffling of the rankings gives you an opportunity to get your web site seen. If Google remained the same all the time, it would basically be a first come first server directory and your web design would never have a chance of getting to the top, however relevant the content.

Take Care who you Link your web design to (and from)
Whilst Google considers a web design that has many other web designs linking to it as important, some believe having too many links, or links from low quality content web designs can have a detrimental effect.

Spam Linking, as it is known is the process of mass linking to and from non relevant web sites and directories. If you consider Googles aim is to serve up content relevant to their users enquiry and then ranking that relevance by importance, you will see why they chose linking as a type of recommendation. Back at the turn of the millennium, simply getting lots of links was enough to drive you site to the top of Google. However, Google have got a lot more sophisticated, and check the links to your site and check the links to and from that site. they use complex algorithms to assess relevance.

Many SEO Companies believe simply getting lots of link swaps and directory listings from non relevant web designs, is now likely to be considered attempted link spamming and could well result in your web design being demoted or even removed altogether. Personally I doubt it would have a detrimental effect as it would be just too easy to spam link your competition by mass registering their web site with non relevant web sites. What is far more likely is Google simply adds no value what so ever to certain sites and higher value to other sites. So three high quality links will do more good for your web site ranking than ten thousand low quality spam links.

In short, link to sites that contain Rich valuable and relevant content.

Static content instead of adding more
My web design is online, that’s it isn’t it? Sadly not, Google like up to date content and one of the ways it gauges that is by the frequency that your web design is updated, or more importantly, new content is added.

Adding additional content in the form of new pages and articles is by far the most preferable way of updating your web design. Just changing the content on a certain page may in fact have a negative impact on your web design. You may change the wording of a particular existing page, maybe the content is completely unrelated and suddenly it is no longer relevant to the keywords and title Google has stored. The likely result is you drop down the rankings.

Of course if you change the content for very similar but improved material, that is relevant to the existing page, then probably very little will change, you may even see an improvement.

In short, add rich, valuable relevant content to your web design, preferably in the form of new pages.

Duplication
Duplicate content is the most likely reason for a site to have a sudden drop in Google. Google is known for rewarding sites that have quality content, and as such will punish those who try and cheat with use of repeated copy. If your site needs to have duplicate content on for whatever reason, it is advisable to have robots.txt to block Google from reading any pages that have the same content on.

A38.com are a Plymouth based web design and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) specialist. We offer a variety of Web Design and SEO packages to suit all sized organiisations, from start up company to multi-national. For more information or an informal plain English chat, call 01822 859495 today and ask to speak to Ian.

Imagine the scene, it’s a beautiful sunny crisp February morning, you’re enjoying a quiet stroll in the countryside, your breath is forming a small cloud each time you exhale, and you feel a general sense of well-being as you start to notice the faintest smell, a delicious desirable familiar scent and you wonder, what does that remind me of?

You walk a bit further, the smell growing ever stronger and you ask yourself, what is that wonderful odour? You carry on, and as you get closer you hear it, a familiar sound, and you put two and two together, the sound, the smell, the unmistakeable sizzling and crackling, of bacon rashers, frying in a pan and you feel your stomach start to rumble. Someone walks around the corner just ahead of you, biting into a steaming hot delicious crispy bacon butty and your mouth waters and you think, I’ve just got to have one of those right now.

All very appetising, but what has this got to do with Web Design and SEO?
The point is a winning web site is a web site that will attract visitors from a distance, (SEO and promotion), and compel them to take action. Just like the delicious smell of bacon cooking draws you in from a distance, a well planned SEO strategy will draw in targeted prospects to your web site and well designed irresistible content will compel them to take action.

How can I get my website to smell like sizzling bacon?
A38.com offers a range of irresisitible web design and SEO packages. For an informal chat with our head bacon fryer about how we can make your web site compel like a sizzling bacon butty, call 01822 85 94 95 right now or fill out our form above and we’ll get the stove on!

Re-directing using .htaccess.

So you’ve decided to create a new web site, you have used a contant management system (CMS) such as Word Press, you have completed your web design, you’re satisfied with the results, and have launched your new web design onto your Linux web host.

Great, all done? Well not quite. Something you may not have considered is your existing search engine rankings for the previous incarnation of your web site.

If you have exactly the same file names for your pages, this is not an issue, but the chances are, especially if you are using a CMS, the file names will have changed. In this case, if someone clicks on your existing Google listing they will at best get a copy of your old out of date web page and at worst, get a 401 page error. Further more, Google Spiders may remove your listing from your their database all together.

So, what is the solution?

The smoothest way to redirect your visitors is to use an .htaccess redirect. This has no delay since before a page is served to the browser the server checks first for an .htaccess file, if it sees this the old page never loads, instead visitors are sent directly to the new page. It also tells search engine spiders of a permanent redirect.

If you’re using a Linux Server, an answer is to edit the .htaccess file.

Using FTP, download your existing .htaccess file from the root directory of your server and edit it with notepad.

Note, generally speaking your ftp software will not show your .htaccess file as it is a hidden file, you will need to change the settings to show hidden files. The free FTP program FireZilla is excellent for this purpose.

Once you have your .htaccess file open in Notepad, you can add the following line of code for each of your old pages.

Redirect 301 /oldpagename.htm http://www.domain.com/newpagename

Domain being your domain name or web address. For example, my about us page changed from aboutus.htm to a wordpress page about-us so I used the code:

Redirect 301 /aboutus.htm http://www.a38.com/about-us

Once you have done this for each of your old pages, save the file and transfer it back to your root directory on your server. Job done. Try visiting one of your old page urls and it should transfer you seamlessly to your new page.

To Move an entire site

This will catch any traffic on your old site and redirect it to your index page on your new server. If you want to redirect each page to its new spot, this isn’t the one for you.

Redirect 301 / http://www.newsite.com/

Please note, this is for Linux Servers only, I will follow this article up with a version for Windows servers soon.

For those of you who want the ins and outs straight from the horses mouth, check the Apache Tutorial on .htaccess files for more detailed info.

I hope you found this article helpful, please feel free to comment or ask questions.

A38.com is a web design, search engine optimisation (SEO) and web promotion business based in Plymouth, Devon. We predominantly cover Plymouth, Plympton, Plymstock, Tavistock, Yelverton, Saltash, Ivybridge, Totnes, Torquay, Torbay, Exeter, Newton Abbot, Devon and Cornwall.

We are of course happy to help anyone wherever you are in the UK and we have many happy clients all over Britain. We believe search engine optimisation (SEO) and web promotion should begin within the local area that a business covers. Google, Bing and Yahoo are all moving toward regional and local searches as this is predominantly what their users want.

A38.com are a market leader in local search engine optimisation SEO and website promotion. For more information on our SEO Search Engine Optimisation and web promotion services call us now on 01822-85 94 95.