Website Design & SEO Tips

How can twitter maintain its social network position when it increasingly can’t cope with the traffic? To see my analysis and judgement as to whether twitter will survive see my post

We are delighted to announce the release of Anglia Skills Academy  new website.  They offer a range of courses for the offshore and construction industry together with first aid and manual handling training.

ASAL also have a blog on their website.

This website was designed using Desire Solutions CMS.

Just a quick reminder to all small businesses that would like to become larger businesses.  Firstly get a Google Map Listing, secondly GET A WEBSITE, thirdly publicise it!

If you do not have a website, please please at least get a Google Local Map listing, if you do not know how to read my SEO Blog.  As long as you do not work in the graphic design, web design or SEO industries you will be fine as searches for “your type of business town” should bring local map entries up at the top of the search results.

If you do decide to get a website make sure you follow all the advice I give here and on my SEO website BUT whether you create the site yourself or whether you ask us or anyone else to do it remember CONTENT is KING!  You may well like all the pics etc but without some good interesting relevant words the search engines will not like you.  Sometimes you have to just bite the bullet and write honestly about what you do and what services you provide.  You need at least 300 words on each page – in this post so far my word count is only up to 205!!  Write out at least 600 words for each page and let your web designer cut them down if they feel it is necessary.  Any good website designer will know how to best phrase your content.  If you give us only 150 words for each page you are heading for failure no matter how lovely your website looks.

Thirdly as I said publicise!  No search engine is going to give a jot about your website if you do not market it.  You must have business contacts who have websites too, well ask them to write up a few paragraphs on their website as to how you helped them or whatever and make sure they include a link to your website but make so so sure that they use good link text [read my SEO website above and the attached blog for more information].  Plus of course use social media to drive people to your website, again look on the SEO blog mentioned above.

Wierdly though, we have a website we designed about a year ago that has only ONE incoming link, no adverts, but has a pagerank of 3/10 for most of its important pages.  So Google is fickle, but you can’t rely on that and our wonderful programming skills, you have to do stuff to help yourselves – but if you can’t or don’t have the time, call or email us and we will do it for you, for a fee of course!

When I wrote the last post I really thought we had had the last of the snow but NO, it came again… the water stand-pipes froze… no water again.  To have a piping hot shower would be such bliss.

Just my luck that the one winter I decide to get out of the rat-race and do something different we end up with the worst winter for 40 years.  My daughter Emma joked we should at least get a book out of this and she may well be right.   Amazing as this has been it has fundamentally put the perspective solidly back into life.  When you have to fetch and carry your drinking water by hand, walking over two sodden fields, you certainly treasure every drop you have, especially when the stand-pipe could freeze at any time in this weather. And hot water that runs out of taps rather than having to be heated up in my stockpot is a luxury I can at the moment only dream of!

Business has however been great, we have a number of websites we are working on and, more so than at any time, we are very happy with the designs and functionality we have come up with.  They are all being designed with our content management system Desire Solutions CMS and as the person who normally ends up putting the content in, I have to say it is a dream to use compared to WordPress etc.

We should have all 3 websites completed this week hopefully and then we have a few more quotes that should come in.  So I am hoping that by the time it comes to my Birthday on Friday we have a lot to celebrate.

Now I must sleep, although we have been very good and rather than working to stupid times in the morning have been disciplined and been asleep at a reasonable time and up at 7 each morning.  One of the most difficult things when you both do not have conventional work is to maintain the routine of sanity but getting up and hearing the birds tweet is definately working for me.

Do try this free online image optimiser. You can choose many of the parameters and add borders etc.

Image Resizer