It is important to design a business website to reach out to the maximum number of visitors and sell to as many as possible. With this in mind, find below four handy tips you can use as a checklist when either building your website or tweaking it.

1. Make sure you have very clear directions on the navigation of your website. Your menu should be as uncluttered and concise as possible. Do not lose visitors at the first hurdle.

2. Do not overload your website with images. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are not needed. Make sure the images you do have are optimized for the minimum file size and that they are correctly described with within the ‘alt’ tag. The ‘alt’ tag is an HTML tag that provides alternative text when non-textual elements, typically images, cannot be displayed.

3. Keep your text paragraphs to a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, split it into shorter, separate paragraphs. Web users tend to want shorter descriptions and news than those reading a newspaper or magazine.

4. Please ensure that your website complies with the web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but is unreadable in Firefox you will lose out on many prospective customers.

To find out more about how we can help your website grow, contact us or view our SEO Packages.

Working at Google

1. A new employee at the Googleplex is called a Noogler. This name doesn’t go away until you’ve been working longer than 1% of the company.

2. Google employees are allowed to spend 1 day of the week working on any idea or project that interests them. A massive 50% of Google’s products come from this special project time.

Google search

Try and get some of these figures round your head!

3. There are 87.8 billion worldwide searches every month.

4. Every day, 620 million people visit Google.com

5. This amounts to 7.2 billion page views every day on Google.

6. Google even supports fictional languages including Klingon, Elmer Fudd and Leetspeak!

Money, money, money

7. In 2000, Google made a loss of almost 15 million dollars. Last year, it made a profit of 6.5 billion dollars.

8. A staggering 97% of Google’s revenue is made from advertising alone.

Not just search

If there’s an internet business model, Google probably has a hand in it. From blogging services to social networks, analytics and global mapping, video sites to mobile phones, internet browsers and even energy, Google has much more than just search.

9. 270,000 words a minute are written on Blogger blogs all over the world.

10. 57% of the top 10,000 websites in the world use Google Analytics.

It’s simply astonishing to see the growth of Google and numbers in a blog post simply don’t do it justice. What are your favourite facts about Google?

It seems people are perfectly willing to part with their hard earned cash and purchase an SEO Package without even researching what SEO is all about, let alone what the key ranking factors of Google’s algorithm are.

The truth is that unlike many SEO Package companies, our aim is to NOT run away with your money in exchange for backlinks. We actually want to help you the most we can. This is why we communicate with you non stop, offering tips on how you can reap the highest benefits from our SEO Package in the shortest amount of time, and changes which simply have to be made to your website.

The most common changes that need to be made in websites are; image alt tags, page titles, internal linking.

If you feel that your website isn’t looking too great for the search engines, get in contact with us today via our contact form, and we’ll happily take a look at your website and offer you an SEO Package which we think is going to help you.

]]> http://www.seopackages.com/seo-tips/make-sure-you-have-your-keywords-in-your-page-title.html/feed 0 http://www.seopackages.com/seo-opinion/does-valid-code-affect-rankings.html http://www.seopackages.com/seo-opinion/does-valid-code-affect-rankings.html#comments Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:24:58 +0000 Jack http://www.seopackages.com/?p=500 When the minutest detail can affect rankings in highly competitive markets, can the cleanliness and validity of your code affect your search rankings?

It’s an interesting argument and the general consensus is that the vast majority of sites do not use valid code (by W3C standards) yet rank well. But to an extent, there are certain things that make code valid and are considered highly valuable to SEO.

For example, an image should always have an “alt” attribute. Even if you don’t want one, you should define it as null, such as the following code:

<img src="example.com/image.jpg" alt="" />

The image alt attribute is considered highly important to SEO, and yet contributes to valid code so in this case, one complements the other.

Page speed and browser compatibility are affected by the validity of your code and these contribute to how useful a site is for a visitor, which is of course, the raison d’etre for search engine rankings. The more useful a site is to a user’s query, the more likely it is to rank top.

Theorists suggest that factors like bounce rate and the time a user spends on a website contributes to how a Google will rank you. If a site uses invalid code and therefore doesn’t work for users, this may affect your rankings and, of course, your conversion rates.

Do you think having valid code affects search engine rankings? Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

Now, throughout us working within multiple niches for a varied amount of clients, we always assess what types of link building work and one’s that do not. To reflect this, we have made some changes to the amount of links you will recieve as part of your package, of which all numbers have pretty much increased. To reflect this so have our prices; they are still of fantastic value though, which I am really excited about.

In our starter package for instance, which now costs £99 per month (up from £60), we will create 80 directory submissions, 10 Edu links, 50 social bookmarks and have your website re-tweeted on Twitter a total of 20 times. On top of this, you will still receive check-ins from us, regular reports on progress and on page optimisation recommendations to help us get the rankings you deserve quicker. Of course, your SEO consultant will be available on the end of the phone too.

To check out our new pricing for SEO packages, just go here. Thanks!

At some point in the last 2 weeks (roughly the 16^th June) it is believed that Google may have rolled out its so-called Panda 2.2 update.

Many site-owners and developers are still suffering the results of the last update to the algorithm just a few weeks previous to this. A survey conducted by SEO roundtable showed that 73% of web developers had not recovered in the slightest from Panda 2.1. This same group of people (who supposedly had not used any “black-hat” techniques to improve rankings) hoped that the update would correct and help reinstate their rankings.

Like always Google had offered minimal information about what their update would include, but stated that its primary objective would be to improve “scraper detection”; this involving identifying original content apart from copied or duplicated content.

Many of the websites that have “unfairly” suffered in their rankings claim to have done so as a direct result of “scraper pages” and websites. The last update failed to identify the real original content and pushed them below the plagiarised pages.

Google have not officially announced its update yet, however many site developers are claiming drastic traffic changes, some even reporting recoveries.

The general advice from Google remains relatively unchanged to what it ever was:

• Check the originality and plausibility of your content and linking content,
• Keep domains free of any “black-hat” techniques (Google will find out eventually),
• Ensure the sites you are linking with contain reliable, quality, original copy, and are trustworthy in their own right.

The Panda 2.2 may well be hyped up and over anticipated; if it has already been released there has been little activity to write home about. It is important to note that Google conduct up to 500 algorithm updates every year. As always, the best practice is to avoid short cuts and dedicate time and effort into good and honest Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

For more information, help on website optimisation or further updates please don’t hesitate to visit our London SEO agency and we’ll be more than happy to assist.

We understand that a lot of technology is also moving in to portable devices (namely smartphones) and apps (or mobile applications) are a key way for people to access basic web interfaces for their favourite services including streaming, gaming, music playing, seo tools and online marketing.

The market leader for apps is Apple, and their ‘app store’ has an unholy amount of apps within it; some of these apps are admittedly useless, however some are great for people who desire certain things.

iPhone App #1: Website SEO Analyser

Website SEO Analyzer is a FREE app which diagnoses a website for key SEO aspects and then pinpoints where your site falls short for perfect optimisation. The app provides details on it’s age, location and number of indexed pages. Meta tags, descriptions etc are all catered for.

Website SEO Analyzer has a rating of four out of five stars on the apple app store.

iPhone App #2: Link Juice

Link Juice promotes itself as a first of a kind SEO app. The Search Engine Application combines data from reliable API sources including SEOmoz, SEORush and Majestic and provides data on backlinks etc. of your website or any website you type in.

Link Juice has a rating of four out of five stars on the apple app store.

So there we go, two top iPhone apps for SEO. Enjoy!

You can see how many search impressions you’ve received over a certain period of time (something other reports can’t offer), their rankings and how many people clicked through on certain keywords. To do this, ensure your website is verified with Google Webmaster Tools first of all, then navigate to Your Site on the Web > Top Search Queries. You can select certain periods of time, just as in Google Analytics, and see how keywords have performed.

The great thing about this new tool is you can see what keywords might be bringing in traffic you never knew about or keywords that could be getting more exposure if you optimise certain pages better.

Of course, it won’t show you rankings for specific keywords unless they just happen to be included in this table due to it getting a lot of impressions already. To check your rankings for keywords that are important to your website, you may still require third party tools including our fantastic SEO reports. This also includes the ability to check how your competitors are ranking, which, of course, Google doesn’t offer.

What do you think of the new Webmaster Tools? How are you using them?

Now it’s official and according to Google Webmaster Blog, site speed is now a ranking factor.

Google has always been obsessed with speed and take even the smallest details into consideration on their own products. Now they’re suggesting something regular users of the internet have always known; people don’t like hanging around for a website to load. If a site doesn’t load, then it isn’t relevant to their query because they can’t even get an answer to their query.

Of course, few sites will be affected by this new announcement and Google suggest that less than 1% of all search queries are affected by this factor. If you’re in a competitive market and noticed your rankings change, this might be why.

We’re guessing that for competitive markets, speed will certainly be more important to your SEO strategy than if you have a small, niche website but when you focus on SEO, you should try and optimise for every factor so in the coming days we’ll offer tips on how to speed up your website and WordPress optimisation tips.

Google always gets  in on the act creating fake products such as today’s animal translation app or last year’s Artificial Intelligence website that decided pandas, glitter and Comic Sans were the best thing ever. Today they went one step further by changing their name to Topeka, a tongue in cheek reference to the Japanese town that changed it’s name from Topeka to Google (for real).

One thing that I, in particular, noticed on this day of hoaxes and hilarity is the sheer amount of websites I visited, explored, bookmarked, signed up to and were linked to from other places. When every website has an April Fools of its own or links to other April Fools, it’s difficult not to get sucked in and experience more than you might usually. Even the national media gets in on festivities, similarly linking out to popular and clever Fools.

Just like Christmas and other seasons, you should be thinking about your own April Fools strategy. Firebox, a gadget website, for example, devised several fake products and advertised them via their social media and newsletter which was picked up by Mashable and other sites. Imagine how many links it received, how many people explored more pages of the site, signed up to the newsletter or even made a purchase all because they created an April Fools campaign.

Unlike other seasons, the jovial, funny and clever nature of well-devised April Fools jokes are natural link-bait. They are discussed and spread across the web and is absolutely perfect for collecting natural links. It doesn’t even matter what website you have: e-commerce websites, create a fake product (such as I Want One of Those); blogs, create fake news (such as ShoeMoney); picture hosting sites, switch your logo upside down (such as Twitpic) – if you’re creative, you can come up with anything.

So, think about April Fools next year. As with all seasonal campaigns, you could set a reminder for March and then decide what strategy to deploy and how you can try and create fantastic linkbait with an April Fool on your website.