First Aid

I really do agree with you anywebsite: If the SEO Guy doesnt tell you what hes doing then hes got something to hide! In this day and age there has been a number of 'SEO Specialists' who have been running in all directions panicking since the last Google Update!! And there has been a number of SEO Specialists who have always kept their clients updated at all times and have over a period of time have built up the loyalty and trust. Guess which SEO Consultants still have their clients? So I do believe good ethics do pay off!

Every now and again Google will apply a different matrix to its Algorithms - which govern how Google analyses websites. The latest Alorithm change was back in March called 'Penguin' - The factors search engines consider when analyzing the content on your site. It was quite a serious change and affected many websites which were not applying 'Black hat' tactics but still came under the radar - I have read about a few 'clean' websites that would be on page 1 position 1 for a number of years and since the last update they fell to page 10 or less!!! Think of the financial impact this would have on their income!!

Every since the Last Penguin updates last March a number of business's have been severely impacted by the algorithm changes. One of my sites was badly effected and at one stage I was ready to just drop the site altogether. With it being 500 pages it would have been a challenge to redesign and change content. However over a period of 2 months I worked on the title tags and Meta Descriptions as Google Master tools did indicate there was some Duplicate content - in the last few weeks it does look like its starting to re-vitalise and the hits are slowly coming back in. I am just wondering is this because of my changes or is the last algorithm tsunami now settled and tweaked by Google? What is your performance like now compared to last march?

So True! But believe in the thick of the recession people will look and analyse their business and will put on the 'have a go' hat!!! In view of the recent penguin update a lot of customers have been unhappy with the SEO services they have received and only now start to question the ROI where previously if their website was bringing in the money they didnt see it as much of a problem what they where paying their SEO guys!!

Quirky site but if you need to get it out to the masses you need to get a sitemap.xml in the directory. See you have no robots.txt file? I would revist your title tag and Meta Descriptions - these are too long and will effect your indexing by Google!!! Apart from that a nice little site!

Ha!! Reminds me of an old story I read............... Once upon a time in the days of the Dot com boom there was a company that started off as a scrawl on the back of a fag packet. The scrawl was later developed into a five year plan. Venture capitalists loved the plan and gave the two young founders £5 Million to develop the company in the first year. The inexperienced pair immediately spent half this cash on a deposit for a trendy office in Soho. They spent the rest on a daily supply of organic fruit for their staff. The founders claimed organic fruit helped their staff think creatively. The founders also splashed out on a lavish launch party at an upmarket City wine bar. They also caught the imagination of the Media and got glowing write ups in the business press. But less than six months after the company launched it became clear it wasn't meeting sales targets. The founder's couldn't understand why people didn't want to buy "Stuff" on line. The original backers were getting nervous and the company was running out of cash. The founders took a radical decision: they stopped the deliveries of organic fruit!

Many Thanks, Will check that out with a few friends

Hi Andy, Just a few observations that will help your website! Analysing your website it has very few backlinks which indicate you have not applied any SEO Campaign (which can be done by you) I see there is only 6 backlinks to your site. You need to build these up by using facebook for example or search Google for a number of Blogs and write a few posts. Can be time consuming but after a while you will build up your links. This in turn will increase your Domain Authority! Domain Authority is measured from 1 to 100 and is built on a number of factors including 'Backlinks' etc. Your domain authority is 8! - To be serious about getting traffic coming into your site you should be aiming for a Domain Authority of about 50! Hard to get there but you dont eat the elephant in one go - you have to chop it up into little pieces first! You cant really monitor your traffic without analysing it and you have no Google Analytics installed!! Google it and read up on it and then install it - if your serious about traffic you need to see whats coming into your site and who is visiting as well as what KEYWORDS have been used to find your site. The canonical issue raises its ugly head! You're not redirecting the non-www version of your website to the www version (or vice versa). By not doing so, you're creating essentially two versions of your website that can confuse the search engines when it comes time to rank your site and any good link juice you get it will be shared by the two versions - basically seriously effecting your Domain authority. I would work on the above and see how you get on - once done I will be happy to revisit and give a few more tips for you!

Just finished a Lunchtime Coffee and had an interesting talk with a colleague.............just want to share my thoughts. I remember a few years ago watching my Local amateur Football team play every Sunday and they would bring along a professional photographer to take the photography. He would take a number of pictures and hand out a few business cards to everyone watching with a link to his website where you could view the thumbnails and download a high resolution image – for a hefty price. Then appeared every Sunday a young college student with the same size camera, although she claimed she was not a professional photographer, she applied the same process of taking the pictures and handing out cards with a link to her website. The difference being is that she hosted the images on her cloud server and made them freely available. Her business was done by association with people and she had regular bookings from people who initially visited the website to view the images. The Professional Photographer soon got the huff and walked off never to be seen again! I think we are all in an age of ‘I can do it myself’ and even looking around the web there are some awesome websites that have been put together by people whose skills have never touched on web design fundamentals but they have taken the time to learn as much as needed to do the job. With the recent Algorithm changes over the last few years it has made a lot of ‘website owners’ sit up and ask their SEO guru’s ‘what the hell is happening here!’ with the questioning and actually listening comes the learning and self belief................’I can do it myself’. Everything has its day and I read daily that business’s that tend to take on board their own SEO Campaigns see a better result as they learn and fine tune the ‘mechanics’ but more importantly they know how much time and how much money they are spending on the campaign. The SEO Specialists must have felt as good as Kodak did in the sixties – and today are in a similar position of feeling the pains of the Digital Memory Cards.

I would check out BDI Media - Google them! Well worth speaking to them - friendly and knowledgeable

Do you have the dates for the festival?

We are looking at setting up a cloud server to share a number of files while we are out the office and on the road. We are looking at using Microsoft Mail exchange to and would like to know if anyone on here has had experience of doing it themselves and the implications you have come across. I know per email a third party company would charge us anything from £5.99 -£10.99 for the Microsoft exchange mail facility. Any feedback on mail or cloud server would be greatly appreciated.

CONTENT IS KING!!!! Looking at the site is is lacking 'stickiness' !! Bounce rate has nothing to do with structure or coding behind the scenes it is a 'human' response! A website with a low bounce rate keeps the visitor on the website because they are interested in what they see or something has grabbed their attention and they want to know more! I think you would need to do a bit more research into your business and be more specific and direct - be more informative and look at your subject from a different angle. If you feel that getting the flow is not your stron point try and engage an Englsih student or someone who has experience with writing articles...........give them the information and you will be suprised what difference it will make. I would look at your layout as there is no structure or uniformity with it - get rid of the images and use high quality images - most cameras today can do a pretty good job. Get other people to read through your content and have a 'critical' eye........... And once more keep updating and changing the content to keep it fresh!