Link Building. Is it worth it?
Posted: under News.
The number of inbound links that any site has has lng been touted as a highly important metric in promoting any website’s page rankings. As a consequence SEO firms (and we have been no different) have been diligently finding directories to which to add our clients’ sites in the quest for the Holy Grail of page 1 Google. This is an extremely time consuming activity and when all is said an done, does this manual addition to relevant directories actually make any difference?
The perceived wisdom is that 100 inbound links are the minimum required to have any beneficial effect. Our experience is that it takes an hour to submit to around a dozen directories – so do the math – a day and a half to submit to the minimum 100! Even with the most relevant of directories it could take 6 months for it to appear in the directory.
Now, of course, there are those directories which will give you immediate posting for a fee. At around $5 a throw, that becomes prohibitively expensive and there is absolutely no evidence that paying for the link is more effective than those which do not charge.
Let’s be controversial here. Does every site with great P/R in Google actully appear in Google Page 1? Well, no. And the converse is also true. Websites with great on page optimisation which can be found on Page 1, Google, don’t all have brilliant P/R either.
Smaller, niche sites may well be found reasonably easily on the search engines after some judicious searc engine optimisation but won’t necessarily have great P/R. In the end it is being found by prospective customers that is important, or is it?
This might seem obvious, but our experience is that very few websites are built with any marketing objective in mind. Even e-commerce sites where the ultimate objective is to sell goods online rarely have any marketing objectives. As for brochure websites which are the main stay of the web – how many are ever considered as part of the overall marketing mix or promote the company’s branding. All too few. Our first question to prospective clients is always – “what do you want the website to achieve?”. Invariably the answer is “more sales”. Fair enough answer, but as we probe further it is clear that few people treat their websites like their printed equivalent.
We then discuss their markets, their business strategy and then how to convert that into a web marketing strategy which will start to make their website more appealing to prospective customers and consequently attract more traffic, which we will hope to convert to enquiries and so on.
This cannot be done in a couple of days of keyword bashing and needs to be developed over weeks and months. It is, however, a whole lot better use of time than submitting to directories which may or may not ever display the site.
Think on!
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Oct 12 2009
SEO and W3 Compliance
Posted: under News.
There has been much debate over the years about how much influence that having a site validate to w3 standards has on Google page rankings. Matt Cutts has come out and states that it has absolutley no effect at all on P/R. Does that mean the end to all the hard work? I don’t think so.
The main reason that folks want sites to validate is that it makes it easier for sites to be cross browser compatible, which regardless of what the philistines say, is actually quite important. However, I no longer subscribe to the “must validate” at all costs philosophy. Not all validation errors are fatal to browser rendering. Take the use of the ampersand in coding. If not written as “&” then it will cause a W3 validation error. Now although this would clearly be better from a coding point of view,if not then it is no big deal.
It is true, though, that some errors will stop the bots spidering past the error even if it doesn’t prevent the site rendering and if the following piece happens to contain the all important key phrase or phhrases, then page ranking is bound to suffer as a consequence.
There are some who argue about the need for compliance to the above standards, but surely if the web is to develop then we should be ensure that there are standards that browser developers can work to and make life easier all round.
Ever ask the question, if Microsoft had not released IE6 (and IE7 for that matter) and IE8 had been closer down the line, then FireFox would not now be the second larget browser in town?
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Sep 23 2009
Slow Broadband Speeds
Posted: under News.
So you think that you have slow Broadband speeds? A South African Company was so frustrated that the challenged their telcom that a carrier pigeon could do better. The pigeon took just over an hour to reach its destination and some 40 mins or so to upload the data from the USB it was carrying. In the same time only 4% of the data had been uploaded by the telcom company. Don’t know about you but the prospect of our information winging towards us by pigeon has a certain symmetry about it in these days of everyone wanting us to hgo back in time to save energy.
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8248056.stm for full article.
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Sep 11 2009
Web Template Launch
Posted: under News.
In recognion of the need for small businesses to have a simple, cost effective internet presence, we have developed a range of web templates. The entry point is a brochure type template. All the client needs to do is supply the logo and content and the web site can be online the same day.
For more advanced users who wish to display their products or general photographs we offer a portfolio template. We will upload the photographs, logo and content and have you up and running the same day.
At the top end of the range is our premium template. This has a strong content management system which allows users to manage their content whether it be purely content or photo rich.
All templates are fully customisable to the client’s requirements in layout and colour, are cross browser compatible and comply with latest W3 protocols on valid html/xhtml.
Included in the price is one year’s hosting and if required a .co.uk domain.
So if you are a small business owner, sole trader or club web development officer, these templates are developed with you in mind.
Contact us now for more information.
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Jun 30 2009
FCKeditor Compatibility with Safari
Posted: under News.
For the many folks out there in design land who use Safari, they may be unaware that their content management system (CMS) may not be working as intended. You will know this if the text boxes in the CMS show html code instead of a WYSIWYG format.
This is now a simple affair to correct.
Prior to version 1.3, Safari lacked the ability to interface with FCKeditor. With newer versions this is now possible. With FCKeditor 2.5, the two are now compatible. Just go to FCKeditor for the lastest version, unpack it and upload to your server.
You will, of course need to ensure that the fckeditor.cfg file matches your CMS’s setup and that the folder name matches that in your site – otherwise it won’t be recognised by the code on each page.
I have to say that I don’t find the documention in FCKeditor very helpful and the samples even less so, which is why I have used Tinymce, a Javascript based editor for most other CMS applications that I have built. So saying, FCKeditor is easier to use where there is a need to have more than one text box on the page with different height, width combinations.
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May 15 2009
May the Force be with you.
Posted: under News.
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Apr 17 2009
What’s in a name?
Posted: under News.
There has been much debate on WebProWorld SEO forum about keywords as domain names.
We believe that branding is more important than targetting a specific key word in your domain. The biggest brands on the net do not have key words as their domain – Twitter being a major case in point. Brand new, huge traffic and a brand rather than a key word or phrase.
Even Matt Cutts of Google is ambivalent about this strategy.
“If you’ve got an existing solution that works for you, it’s not really worth going back to change your urls. It may worth considering when you’re doing a new site.”
Watch this video:
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Apr 16 2009