Keywords for kids

Let me make it clear from the start when I say keywords, I am referring to text that appears in the

1. Page Titles (Meta Tag)
2. H1 tags
3. Body text (in particular text toward the page top)
4. Meta Tag Keywords
5. Meta Tag Descriptions

At Design Credo we have a number of hats available to wear, graphic design, photography, website design and of increasingly greater prominence SEO or search engine optimisation particularly for companies in Exeter, Devon and the South West. So, when we write for our own websites we need to mention these creative skills.

In essence we are trying to pre-judge what our potential clients might type on when using a search engine, particularly Google, when looking to access the services that we provide. Google still has the strongest market share but this doesn’t mean that we are oblivious to the likes of Bing and Yahoo though.

Some informative examples:

1. SEO Exeter Vs Exeter SEO ? If I Google ‘Exeter SEO’, Design Credo appears on the first page of a Google UK search whereas if I Google ‘SEO Exeter’ we are on page two. This is probably because my page title starts ‘Exeter SEO’ rather than ‘SEO Exeter’. Is this a problem? Well yes it is really because I suspect most people wold put SEO first and Exeter second when they do a search. Clearly there is a bit of homework to do.
2. Andrew Butler Photographer. My name is Andrew Butler I take photographs I am in the South West. So however does Andrew Butler and indeed does Andy Butler (by the way don’t ever call me Andy). In addition Andy Butler also gets his hands dirty with graphic design, I’m not certain whether this is the same Andy as photographer Andy Butler though. Suffice it to say that ‘Andrew Butler Photographer Designer’ puts me top of the list as indeed does ‘Andrew Butler Designer’.

   Clearly in an area of competition for the top slot there are winner and losers and the truth is that people will generally be searching for a set of skills rather than a person’s name or a trading name. As one of my customers correctly said the other day;

   “so what you are saying is that I’m not really famous enough yet, when I’m really famous my name will do but until then I still have to tell people what I do?”

3. Cheap Search Engine Optimisation Vs Search Engine Optimiser. Looking at these two search strings in the Google Ad-words Keywords tool, I was struck by the usage graphs for the two strings being almost a direct mirror of each other, with people now looking much more for Cheap Search Engine Optimisation. I guess it could be seen as an indicator of peoples’ changing needs.

To reiterate, we are trying to prejudge what people will search for and you may need to do some research. As an example I never really use the term agency, as in ‘design agency’ but I am aware that others do. Many people are aware of the term ‘SEO’ but don’t really know what it is short for. Is someone going to search for a ‘photographer’ or someone to do ‘photography’?

Location, Location, Location

Putting it simply, if your market is regionally defined this needs to be included in your keywords. There is no point in me battling it out with all of the website designers in the country if I only want to travel as far as Devon, so Devon and Exeter needs a mention. Keywords are filters too, they help you differentiate yourself and your services.

The bottom line website content needs thought, it is a different style of writing, you can’t assume Google knows what you are talking about, search engines need things spelling out to echo what your potential customers are spelling out on a search.

Search Engine Marketing is a must if you are to going to get people to view any website. Nowadays everyone seems to be an SEO specialist, at least they do in Exeter and Devon, I imagine it is the same throughout he UK.

I am more aware of the abilities of WordPress than other blogging platforms so this is what I will use as my reference point. I have to say that I am totally enamoured with WordPress, I think it is great, but first a bit of general knowledge.

WordPress comes in two distinct flavours

1. .com Most people start with a free WordPress blog which you can start straight away and I would recommend you to go and sign up. If you blog a for a while and chose to migrate to self-hosted this can be easily done.
2. .org If you have access to hosting then self-hosted blogs open up a world of possibilities. You will need hosting with a database which is necessary to store all of the posts, images, comments and information about the site. My hosting supplier now throws one in with even the starter hosting package. You don’t really need to understand about databases (MySQL) but it can be quite interesting looking around, seeing how all of the data and information is organised.

WordPress can be thought of as a modular entity.

1. Core
   The site itself, everything that is needed to make it work. This includes a user friendly interface that will allow you to update the site without knowing about web deign.
2. Themes
   There are a huge number of available themes that make the basic WP blog look different (1 column, 2 column, colours styling etc.)
3. Plugins
   These add to the functionality of the blog, they make it do more things, (display images in galleries, add contact forms, etc. )

Search Engine Friendly Blogs

It helps if your blog has a focus and a appeals to a niche. Write with a clear view of your target audience, in particular what your readers are looking to find and what words they would use to search. Incorporate these words in your text. These keywords are fundamentally important.

WordPress plugins add to the functionality of the blog. In particular there are a range of SEO aids such as;

• XML sitemap generator
  This will enable the blog to develop an XML site-map that helps Google and other search engines locate the pages in your site. (you can get a plugin to create a people friendly site-map such as the one on this site).
• HeadSpace
  This lets you create a good page title and meta description. These two items are very important. Gone are the days when ‘Home’ was a good page title, it needs suitable keywords. The Meta description is what will generally appear in the Google snippet, the bit of information that appears when your page has been found on Google. This should be descriptive and keyword rich.
• Share This buttons
  Make it easy for people to share your site. Not strictly SEO stuff but it all helps.
• Twitter feed and Tweetmeme buttons
  As with Share links Twitter is a great way to network.Don’t underestimate the power of other social media such as Twitter and Facebook, cross-link your accounts try to keep a similar focus with to your blog, otherwise you will fail to appeal to your niche. There are a huge number of sites that will do the job for you, have a look at the Google search results for designcredo. There are loads of re-tweets and niche re-tweet sites in this list. Good news!
• WordPress Stats
  Statistics are your source for data that lets you find out how many people use your site and how they find you. You occasionally will find unexpected results.

I will finish with one further plugin PuSHPress (a PubSubHubbub Plugin For WordPress by Joseph Scott)

This plugin adds PubSubHubbub ( PuSH ) support to your WordPress powered site. The main difference between this plugin and others is that it includes the hub features of PuSH, built right in. This means the updates will be sent directly from WordPress to your PuSH subscribers.

I have recently mentioned PuSh with WordPress and my experience is that WordPress is quite PuSHy as it stands. I am currently developing a WordPress blog for a customer (several as it goes) but the one that is nearing completion has found it’s way on to Google already. This is a tad annoying because the location that it was Googled at is not it’s final resting place so in this instance the PuSHy little blog has caused me a bit of work. For now I will leave PuSH as a topic to return to.

The bottom line is that blogs should no longer be seen as SEO problems, my experience is quite the opposite. Within a couple of hours notification of the first draft of this blog had been returned to me via Google Alerts (SEO, Exeter) but in the same alert I was informed that the post had already made an appearance on another site. Don’t forget, this is organic search engine marketing my investment is time not money.

Yes, yes, time is money I know…

At Design Credo we design websites. We are equally as happy to set up a blog for you. This includes researching theme styles, editing them to suit and branding your site. We will install and configure the plugins and most importantly guide you through the interface. Give us a call (07790 322176) or contact us here.

Beyoncé Preparing The Vég

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO brings Beyoncé to Exeter? Yep if you’ve been following so far, “Beyoncé to help in light household duties” now seems to rank in the top three of a Googlé search.

Update – “Beyoncé Exeter” now position 2
Update – Now position 1

Further to this I am eagerly expecting people to fulfil my desires for a Leica M9 and a Colnago Mexico due to similarly high rankings for search strings.

So what’s this all about?

It started as a bit of a joke, I noticed that cigar smoking football players seemed to rank highly as search strings for The Design Credo WordPress blog (this is not a group that I have previously had an interest in). So checking it out, this was in fact true (by accident) as explained in my earlier post.

What Will Improve My Google Ranking?

Firstly it is absolutely essential to understand that whilst people may be very moved my visuals and aesthetic design, search engines, as yet, are not. They trawl or ‘crawl’ through the html code that is the basis of web pages and sites looking for relevant text. Some of this text is hidden, unless you view the source code of a page, but most of this is there to be seen by the viewer.

So, what will improve my search engine ranking?

Page Title

Depending on what browser you are using you will see a title at the top of the page. Currently this has a useful effect in search engine position and should employ value laden keywords and strings.

Page Heading

HTML is a structured system used to describe web-pages, there is a hierarchy to it. As such it is assumed that the main page heading, or ‘h1′tag, holds particular information summarising the text below. Not surprisingly Google places great importance on this first h1 tag. Every page should have one at the top of the body text.

Body Text

Again it is fairly intuitive that the text based content of a page will hold relevant keywords that the reader is expecting to see following the search. This isn’t rocket science. Google in particular applies greater weight to the text towards the top of the page.

SEO – The Bits You Don’t See

At Design Credo we try to structure our sites so that the important ‘value laden’ text appears towards the top of the code. As such SEO is embedded in our code design. We also ensure that pages have suitable ‘meta tags’ including appropriate keywords and descriptions and that these are different throughout the site.

Flash not flash

Flash, whilst offering a very rich experience rates poorly for SEO as well as accessibility, as such we tend not to recommend it. Nowadays there are many alternative methods to add interactivity to sites whilst keeping them fast and accessible.

SEO – The bottom line

There is little point in having a website if people (or only the wrong people) find it. Words make the difference, words in the appropriate place, selections of keywords and appropriate groupings of keywords. For the record I am not expecting Beyoncé to pop round, this is just a silly example to make a point, someone may need their Aston looking after though (joke).

Next time I will look at how to generate suitable keywords for your Organic Search Engine Optimisation whether in Topsham, Exeter or the UK.

We are the people who try.

When I was first there I was a student. At college we used very early Apple Macs in the labs and the adventurous were word processing their work. There were no mobile phones, no internet, and no email. The Photographer’s Gallery (where I am now) was near Leicester Square, whereas it is now just off Oxford Street.

Walking round London some things change a lot but others seem not to at all. Earlier I had a double expresso in The Bar Italia in Soho. The Gaggia machine was ‘old school’, hand pulled, refreshingly quiet whilst still making exceptional coffee. On the large screen TV, Murray was getting through to the semi-finals in the Australian Open much to the enjoyment of the Italian and Eastern European staff. Take the screen out and the setting would have been difficult to date, maybe the clothes would give the game away.

Some things change, some things stay the same, some things should change, but stay the same.

We Are The People Who Try

I am just coming out of a intense week or so of website building. The customer wanted something a bit different, saw the way the Apple presents previews of images and said I want that. I now know how to make that happen on a website. As Fahti the swimmer says, “we are the people who try”. I can’t think of a period of my life when I have done so much learning, independent learning, the ultimate aim of the education system. The information is out there, accessible (subject to cautious analysing and filtration of course). There is a huge generosity of spirit too, with people wanting to share ideas and knowledge. This is a good thing (I think) but very different to twenty years ago.

The other day I spoke to someone who only recently learnt how to cut and paste on her computer. This may seem strange but she has always used Macs where there is a long history of drag and drop. She has always just pulled what she wanted from one document and dragged it straight on to another. Macs have always had a very visual appeal, there is a strong visual metaphor and I suspect that for this reason they appeal to very different people. I am always surprised when I hear people complain about how difficult macs are to get to grips with, for me at least they seem very intuitive. However when I attended a night class that used the Windows platform I felt like a complete and utter numpty. Whatever though the Mac Vs PC seems to get to peoples’ core.

In my house now I regularly have a number of computers, currently a Mac G3(BW) desktop, a G3 Pismo PowerBook, a G4(DA), a G4 MacMini (my FTP server) and a Unibody MacBook Pro. This tally sometimes swells when two other current MacBooks come to visit as well as my son’s Toshiba PC. Apart from the G3 they all work, the only reason the G3 doesn’t is because I sold the processor. Oh there is one more, maybe the most important, I have an old Dell laptop, with a German keyboard.

So they all work, the ten year old Pismo is used by the children, it’s rather slow now but hey? But what of the Dell, what’s that all about?

Well, I use it to test websites (to destruction). You see, it is old and slow, but uses the much loathed IE6 browser. IE6 is still used by around 10% of users but unfortunately it is no longer compliant with current web standards. This means that in order to get a website to work on this browser designers will have to design in a number of hacks and workarounds. This invariably means that a compromise has to be made either to the visual appeal or the functionality and yes I realise that these two should be inherently linked. So, when it is testing time, yes it is lovely to see how good the site looks on the Mac but unfortunately much as I love them the truth is that Safari accounts for 3.4% of the (browser) market, and as such the hopeless old IE6 with all of its failings will be the window that three times more people will use.

The good news is that 46% of people will use Firefox which is a pretty good browser. Increasingly design companies are dropping support for non-complient browsers. You can get a WordPress plugin to display a large gaudy banner if the viewer is using IE6. Somewhat devilishly this plugin can be set to crash IE6 although I haven’t felt the need to be so annoying on this site.

Some grow old gracefully and get a bit slower with age whereas others get really a little too grumpy for words.

A couple of days after this post the BBC reported that “Google has begun to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6, the browser identified as the weak link in a cyber attack on the search engine.” (more)

Serendipity Ifracombe

Serendipity Ilfracombe

Holiday accommodation is a deeply competitive market, particularly here in the South-West. Resorts have their ups and downs, Ilfracombe would appear to be on the up. However there are an awful number of competitors in this market.

People are far from rational in their everyday behaviour. Some have neat tidy minds but for many of us it is a bit of a sprawl. Memory is optional and to be honest getting the shopping done will probably knock that important phone number out of the ‘things to remember’ file. Anyhow we no longer remember phone numbers do we? I can remember the phone number of the house I lived in when I was a teenager (Waddington 688) but I don’t know the land-line that I pay for now, I don’t really use it. People may remember a name, a place, they may know what to look for and although they may not know the full ins and outs of Boolean searches. The way that many people use search engines borders on the bizarre, often people have found a way that works and have never ventured towards improvement.

So, Serendipity, Ilfracombe. If you Google those two words as I just have you see my customer’s site at the top of the page. This is a start. The website has been up for a relatively short period of time (a couple of months), it is early days yet. Of course, unlike Starbucks people won’t necessarily know that Serendipity exists, this isn’t enough. However some might, or they may tell others about the accommodation and its name. It is easy to remember this one bit of info and to access the website from this simple search

“Tariff, Holiday, Ilfracombe” results in a position two result with “Booking, Holiday, Ilfracombe” giving a still respectable position 11. “Well, Priced, Holiday, Accommodation, Ilfracombe” gives a P2. Interestingly (for me at least) “well, priced, holiday, devon” gives a similarly high ranking (P2) as indeed does “well, priced, holiday, south-west”.

We are now getting into the realm of useful results. We can see that the Google results will work for those with a brand awareness and those who have never even heard of the resort.

Although a small starter site it was designed with search engines in mind. Headings, titles and text all serve a purpose. It is still early days but, we seem off to a good start.

You can download a PDF brochure for Serendipity here.

Last Friday I sat trying to explain Twitter to a customer who’s website we are currently developing and to be fair it is a hard thing to explain. The irony is that it was she who had first suggested Twitter for her website and I only joined the community to learn more.

Yesterday I Googled my name (I Google therefore I am?), my Twitter details came up third in the rankings. I am a convert.

Further searches brought my Linkedin status, references to my Twitter activity and this blog in the top six. I have only recently re-visted Linkedin and this self-hosted blog has been up for less than a month. Not bad, not bad at all.

About six months ago I couldn’t find myself through a reverse search on Google at all, I just didn’t appear either through my own name or as Design Credo. Of course there was a simple reason to this, my Design Credo website was set up quite some time ago and things change. Around the time we developed the site I took a break from design and moved into education, the site wasn’t attended to although it has remained hosted throughout. When we set the site up we didn’t really attend to making the site search engine friendly and anyway conditions were very different then.

So, any ideas what started here in 1998?

Any Ideas?

This was the starting point for Google

Last year according to Marketingmagazine.co.uk Google broke through the $100bn threshold;

The study found that the internet search giant has reached a brand value of $100,039m, a 16% year-on-year increase. It is trailed by Microsoft and Coca-Cola, which took the second and third spots respectively.

This is a hugely rapid development and what of Twitter? Well, this is the first ever Tweet (8:50 PM Mar 21st, 2006). Last year Twitter claimed a worth of $1 billion.

Twitter’s $100 million round is over 1025 times the amount of money they raised in its very first round of funding. In July of 2007, Twitter raised $97,500

It is worth noting that the same article also mentions;

Twitter has yet to make a single cent in profit. We’ll let you be the judge of what that means. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Smell The Coffee

All terribly interesting but what’s this got to do with me? Well, quite a lot really and it’s not too bad. There are huge audiences to be targeted through online methods but there is no point to standing at the edge of the pool and dipping your toes.The concepts need to be understood and embraced.

The first issue that I regularly come across when designing websites is that they ask very fundamental questions. “What do I do?”, “what am I trying to sell or market?” (personally I prefer the term communicate). If the customers aren’t absolutely certain what they are selling initial progress will be slow. Further to that it helps to know who we are aiming to engage with in this online endeavour.

Many customers may have websites that seem to make perfect sense but for some reason don’t perform. One of the first basic errors is that they assume the reader has a base level of understanding. This may be reasonable for people but not much use when it comes to search engines. Search engines really need things to be spelled out, in proper, value laden, keyword-rich text.

A proven track record has helped us establish ourselves as a leading practice in Thambridge and investment in IT keeps (us) at the forefront of modern business practices and helping us to offer cost efficient advice.

This is perfectly reasonable but could anyone say what this customer actually does? This text appears near the top of the page and as such ranks fairly highly in Google Value. The company are in good company though.

Google places a high value on;

So if you were a multi-national company would you put the web address of the home-page as the Page Title on their website? Starbucks do, Google even discuss this in their online SEO seminars. Other useful Starbucks page titles include “Our Stores – Default” and “Contact Us”. It has to be said that when I viewed the Starbucks site the “Visit our International sites” link wasn’t functioning either.

Ok so Starbucks have a huge brand, and people will probably search by brand and can afford to improve their rankings by buying results. When I searched “exeter coffee shop” Starbucks does appear but it gains similar results to the locally based Boston Tea Party. BTP have very little searchable text on the home page and for some reason Costa Coffee don’t even seem to exist in Exeter although I am sure I have drunk a mediocre Cappuccino there.

So the good news is that there is scope to do better than others. Further to this it isn’t rocket science. The rules do change but at the moment a bit of thought and research at the point when a website is being developed will reap benefits in search engine rankings reasonably quickly.

Next time I will give examples but for now video below puts flesh on the bones if you are interested, it’s a bit ‘steady’ though. Alternatively have a quick look at this article.