• Review of your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Management of online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisement (denoted by the heading “Sponsored Links”) as well. Advertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search. Many of these free sources, as well as information on paid search, can be found on Google Webmaster Central.

Before beginning your search for an SEO, it’s a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. We recommend starting here:

• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web.

If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.

Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• What’s your experience in my country/city?
• What’s your experience developing international sites?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been in business?
• How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site’s presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:

• Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
  

  “Dear google.com,
  I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”

  Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

• No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
• Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you. If an SEO has FTP access to your server, they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.
• You should never have to link to an SEO.Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don’t affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines — at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
• Choose wisely.While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn’t comment on specific companies, we’ve encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.
• Be sure to understand where the money goes.While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they “control” other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn’t work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you’re considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.
• What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

One common scam is the creation of “shadow” domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client’s behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor’s domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

• What are some other things to look out for?

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It’s far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

• owns shadow domains
• puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
• offers to sell keywords in the address bar
• doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
• guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
• operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
• gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
• has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

Take a look at their new website page: www.facebook.com/pages/Central-Electrical-NW-Ltd/168618296497336

If you would like SK Webdesign to develop an on-line marketing campaign via Facebook or Twitter, then contact us today to arrange a free, no obligation quote.

Website Design Tameside Manchester

How do you get a powerful web 2.0 enabled business website? How do you get a look that you will love with the latest, leading technology behind it? But most importantly, where do you start?

That’s what we are going to answer in this article.

Having a nicely designed website for your business should be a top priority. But more importantly, you should have it loaded with fresh content and fully optimized to easily drive traffic. Why? Because a website should serve at least one of the following purposes:

Provide information about your business. Market (or sell) your products and services online. Create leads (or inquiries) to generate business. Be a source of information (i.e. blog) for your specific area of expertise.

Here is a breakdown of how you should approach creating a web 2.0 small business website:

Plan Your Website,Choose Some Keywords,Add Your Content,Leverage Social Media and Build Your Website

Plan Your Website

The first thing you can’t do is get a website because everyone else has one. It has to have a purpose and you have to find out what that purpose is. What’s the objective of your site? Is it to (1) sell a product, (2) market a service, (3) capture a sales inquiry, (4) have someone subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed, or (5) get followers to your twitter feed and Facebook page. Chances are you said yes to most of these. Once you know your objective, you can go about creating your website to achieve what you want. Without this first and most important component, you can’t get your website visitor to do what you want them to and they will be just left wondering “Ok, but I don’t understand how you can help me” as they leave your website. So now that you understand this and you have your objective, the next step is to determine what keywords are important for your website.

Choose Some Keywords

Before you go off spending countless hours writing content for your website, it is important to find out what people are searching for on the internet that relates to your business. For example, SK Webdesign provides web design and software development services. The type of visitors we want on our website are the people that are on Google typing “website design”, “website design company” or “software development service. Why are keywords important? Because they enable your content to be ranked by Google and increasing your exposure on search engines will drive organic traffic to your website. That should be your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for your business. Organic search results are the results you find in Google that are right under the search bar below the paid advertisements. You want great placement without having to pay Google. To rank well in organic search results should be your main SEO strategy. Remember, SEO is forever while ad placement is temporary (and costs money). So before you begin creating your content, make sure to pick your keywords carefully. Use free tools like the one provided by Google to help you in determining what keywords are right for your business.

Add Your Content

Your website can look awesome. But that doesn’t matter if the content doesn’t provide the website visitor what they came looking for. If you fail to provide meaningful content, your website visitor will simply leave looking for someone else and all that time, effort, and money you spent getting them there would be a waste. When a visitor arrives at your website you have just a few precious seconds to capture their attention and deliver your message as if they where standing right in front of you. You know your business well and how you want your clients and potential customers to see it. Get down on a personal level and abandon that overly technical or complicated message. Keep it simple and straight to the point. Use those couple of seconds you have to capture your website visitor. Remember, good content is what drives search engines. As we discussed in the previous section, you have to include the right keywords in your content. The last thing you want is someone being directed to your site only to leave and never come back.

Leverage Social Media

When you create a web page or blog post, share it. Post it on your Facebook page or Twitter feed. Social media is an easy, free way to get your business out there to a large number of people waiting to hear about it. Setup a blog and let your website visitors read and comment on it. You need to engage your audience. Some of your website visitors will notice you’re on a social network they use and will follow or friend you. Don’t be afraid, thats a good thing because you got their attention.

Build Your Website

So now you have a good idea what your website needs to do and what you are going to put on it. Now, how do you get your website online? Without getting too much into technical talk, you’ll need what we in the web community call a Content Management System, or CMS. With a CMS you can manage your website content, design, and features. At SK Webdesign the CMS of choice today for our small business clients is an open source platform called WordPress. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging tools available. But what many people don’t know is that it is a powerful CMS that can be used for more than just a blog. With WordPress you can build a small business website that years ago would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. WordPress was designed as a platform for bloggers, but you don’t have to use it as a blogging tool. With a few modifications, it can be used to power your website. The fact that WordPress was designed as a blogging platform gives it some great advantages. It is optimized for easily publishing and you can add or update content without having to hire a website design company. And getting good search engine rankings requires fresh, unique content. You need a system that does not get in your way when you want to update your website with a new page, article, image, or video.

Expanding on topics earlier in this article, WordPress provides a strong foundation for:

SEO – WordPress provides good search engine optimization (SEO) right out of the box. There are a few tweaks you need to make, but there are many SEO benefits that WordPress provides for free. Content – it is easy to update content on your website without knowing HTML. I am sure you don’t want to have to learn HTML and how to use a tool like Dreamweaver. Do you want to have to ask your webmaster every time you want to make a small change to your website? Well that is a thing of the past. Once WordPress is set up, you can easily create new pages or edit existing pages using a simple rich text editor. Social Media – all your pages and posts can be easily configured to share content on most, if not all, social networking websites. Furthermore, each category you setup comes with its own RSS feed for easy distribution. Plugins – There is a large community of developers creating themes and plug-ins. This means you can browse and use great design themes from a large collection, or extend your website with contact forms, a slick image gallery, a shopping cart, or hundreds of other cool features without having to hire a web developer.

Don’t suffer the same frustrations other small business owners experience with their website. With WordPress you don’t have to worry about that problem anymore. Building a website that is designed to meet your goals powered by a full featured content management system like WordPress will set your website up for years to come.

If you want to get a WordPress website created for your small business, contact us about  our  Website Design Package created specifically for small business. You will get a smashing design, setup, training, web 2.0 features, and a website built for your business. All for a price you can afford.

1. The first important factors:

1) Title tag: describes the text that displays on the top line of Web browser, and is the 1st important.
2) Description: describes what page is about, and is the 2nd important.
3) Image Alt tag: is descriptive name of an image, and is the 3rd important.

2. The second important factors: H1 and content.

Heading 1 or H1 uses the exactly relevant keywords.
Fresh quality content gets higher ranking. 200 words a web page is the best. It includes the words and phrases are searched by people.  Big sites with many pages are better. Don’t make the duplicate content on the site!

3. The third important factors: Keywords

Keywords are advised to put everywhere on every web page, and also closer to the top of content. 5 to 8 keywords are normal in Meta tag. Don’t put too many keywords on the site. The keywords stuffing will get black-listed.

4. Links

Links are from the reliable related web sites, and using right text anchor. The more links you put, the better. However, don’t put too many same links in one forum or one blog. Links from a variety of sources are greatly encouraged. Otherwise, search Spider will not index it. Paid links belong to violations!

5. Site structure

URL friendly named; meaningful and easier to read; the files and the folders are named readable. Make sure the links are working and not broken.

6. Sitemap

Sitemap in xml format is better for search engines. Always submit sitemap on a regular basis to main search engines.

7. Robots.txt: is a text file that controls which pages are not indexed.

Use less Flash on the page, put below the text if you want to use it.

8. Loading speed

If the loading speed is faster, the page ranking is higher. If your website fails to respond quickly when the search engine spider visits, the page will not be indexed.

The above elements will bring your website higher rankings. However, it is possible that the site ranks top 1 today, will rank top 50 tomorrow. No strategy or SEO expert can guarantee top rankings because search algorithms and marketing change all the time. The paid program of top ranking is an exception.

This will allow users to more easily and frequently migrate to the latest version of Joomla, and take advantage of all the security benefits associated with running the newest code. We think Joomla users around the world will really embrace this new process.

One Click Version Updating

Update a site to the latest stable Joomla release with just a click. The new built-in updater also handles updates for Joomla and Joomla extensions.

This is a major enhancement improving upon the previous system of manually updating individual files on the server.

Six-Month Release Cycle

Multilanguage Improvements

Multilanguage improvements allow you to associate menu items in different languages for faster navigation.

Language packs can now also be built to automatically select the best font for that language for the administrative back end.

Additional Features

• The ability to create a search menu option with pre-defined search options. This allows developers to create a menu item that pre-fills out the search fields so end-users can have a built-in search for a specific phrase.
• Better example code for different plug-in types. The enables developers to more easily build custom extensions.
• The ability to automatically validate form data against a list of options during the save operation. This makes it easier to protect against hackers manipulating forms and trying to save invalid data.
• Enables the submit article form to automatically set the article category. This makes it easier for site administrators to restrict users to a specific category meaning content isn’t accidentally added to the incorrect page on a website.
• Batch processing (copy & move) of articles is now available in the same way as it is for categories and menu items.

A new release of the Magento platform, Magento Enterprise 1.11, Magento Professional 1.11 and Community 1.6, addresses two important priorities for merchants – site management and increasing revenue. We are providing merchants with a number of tools that help them better manage their online business with data management tools and greater ability to effectively administer all aspects of an order. As always, we strive to develop features that improve the consumer experience and help increase conversion rates for merchants. This new release also includes features that make it easier for consumers to shop and manage their orders.

Here’s a look at the new functionality we’re including in this release:

Return merchandise authorization (RMA)1 – administrative capabilities that support customer and merchant administration of returns, support for partial order and individual item returns, customer notifications, support for multiple shipping methods and much more. Learn more about this feature.

Persistent Shopping3 – customers are able to start shopping and maintain items of interest in their shopping cart, wish lists and recently compared items between browsing sessions and from device to device using a long-term cookie established for browser/device combinations. Together with customer segmentation capabilities, merchants are able to increase customer satisfaction and tailor offerings and promotions for higher order value. Learn more about this feature.

Shipping integration with label printing – support for all major carriers; labels can be created and printed for new and existing shipments and multiple labels can be printed for select shipments and orders.
Configurable order tracking widget1 – customers can track status of existing orders and returns without the need to log in to their account.

Scheduled Import/Export1 – import and export product catalog data either locally or from remote FTP servers. Merchants can configure for error handling, status reporting and backup. Price and promotion permission2 – merchants can create and control multiple admin roles for reading and editing prices and promotions.

Refactoring multiple databases1 – allows developers to extend module development to different databases by accessing abstract RDBMS with a set of routines; developers can reduce code and logic duplication, maintain backward compatibility, improve maintainability of code and make it easier to make changes and add new features.

Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) – allows merchants to provide their customers with special promotional/sales pricing while adhering to pricing rules set by manufacturers. Merchants choose how and when to display special pricing – in shopping cart only, prior to order confirmation or on gesture at the catalog level.

Interface improvements for Paypal’s Order Payment Action within Magento.
The improvements include:

• Additional parameters during express checkout
• Updates to Magento order creation
• Updates to Magento invoice creation

Special Brazilian Support
Magento has incorporated several improvements for the Brazilian market that are available for Magento Enterprise, Magento Professional and Magento Community, including older versions of Magento Community (versions 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5). The Magento Platform now includes PayPal website standards with support for Brazilian currency and support of government tax id requirements.