[Calibre Designs]

Hi guys and girls.

SEO has been a real science to me. Really tried to take on past experiences and posts on board but applying it is a different story. I truly believe that we have some first class experts on this forum which we are grateful for.

Enough groveling...


Calibre Designs will undergo phase 2. Everything is that we can do is being done at the moment but we need some guidance over the seo of the site.

Product design sector will be taken away to have it's own site later on.

The services page will expand to go more into detail about each service ie 1 page per service. The main services page will be the index page for that if that makes sense.

Nothing to do with seo but we are strengthening the message via the banner. Web copy needs developing.


Your help is deeply appreciated. Any help is better than none.

Thank you very very much!

[TomLeDree]

Once you have your keyword report it will be important to properly optimise the different pages of your site for those keywords. This 'On Page SEO' will be crucial in achieving high rankings.

Once that is done the next step will be link building. This is the majority of the work involved with SEO. To be successful relevant links need to be built continuously over time. You can either do this yourself or hire someone to do this for you.

If you don't have the time to do all this yourself, I would be happy to outline a marketing plan and implement it for you.

[SEO Guy]

If you want a company to build links for you, make sure they have tons of links themselves. You can check this out in yahoo's site explorer

As for seo, a company can only be measured by their own ranking for competitive words/phrases and a large list of genuine testimonials. What other way is there to measure a providers capability?

If a company has less the 30,000 links, does not list highly for at least one competitive phrase or have at least 20 genuine testimonials, you are taking a punt on them, rather than being sure they understand seo

[nass]

As a web design company the best thing you can do to help yourself is make sure that all your sites have a backlink in the footer of every page to your homepage with "Web Design by Calibre Designs". If you want to help yourself offer customers free forums in exchange - if their forum takes off it means more backlinks.


Other than that most web design companies aim to rank on "web design" + "county" and "web design" + "nearest big towns". My experience with the latter is that they#'re best obtained with specific landing pages and the former on the home page. Also I wouldn't advise pushing generic template joomla type sites too much, but push bespoke sites and applications. There's more money in these.

[Tin]

Hi Kay

Sorry, I can't answer specifically as your original post was too general, however I can give you some pointers to think about whilst doing your own SEO.

1: Take a look at your page titles, although they are unique to each page they aren't doing you much good because they're too short and do not serve to focus the page content well. Personally, I like to stick to the 65 chars limit and try to get both a tight page summary across plus my WIFM if I can. Sometimes this can be difficult within 65 chars but can usually be done with a little thought.

2: Similarly, your page descriptions should be unique to each page, more importantly, they need to be 'descriptive' and relevant to the page. Yours aren't I'm afraid but this is easily corrected with a little preparation. Again, I personally like to stick to no more than 22 words, reinforce my WIFM, expand the page topic and make some word connections to the words used in the page title too. Do remember, if you put page specific keywords in your description then Google will display your description within your code snippet result as long as these words are in the search string, if they don't then Google will 'pull them' as a description from areas like an alt attribute on a logo or from the first instance that the words appear within the page content itself. You can't always control what Google uses in the snippet but with a fair bit of planning you can go a long way towards this.

I can't stress enough how important it is to get your code snippet as good as possible, it's where your first sales pitch begins "and ends" so try to think through what sort of message you want your potential visitor to see which may encourage them to click on your link (your second sales pitch begins on your site) rather than clicking on a competitors code snippet.

3: You also need to examine the way your playing with the content on your pages, it's good and I'd guess engages well with your visitor but it doesn't really tell search engines what each page is about because there's little keyword focus (I've just remembered that someone's looking into your keywords for you so if that's why the content is shy then ignore my point).

4: Links - Yes, they are an important element. You'll need less 'quality links' to see the job done than if you simply garner thousands of poor quality links from weak sources. Don't go with sitewides, personally I don't run with reciprocal link requests either but I may think about them if they're bang on topic and would be useful to my visitors if they were included in a relevant page.

General: The thing I always try to impress on clients is that if they focus on the on-page seo and try to get it as spot-on as they can then they 'own the work', it's embedded in each page, nobody can take it away. External links on the other hand are owned by third parties, you as an individual have little control over these links or indeed the future direction of the website that contains your links so I would suggest that some common sense prevails when you are seeking links and don't base all your ranking reliance just upon third party links.

Link basics here (not in order of importance) are:-

a: is the page that your link would appear on in Google's index?
b: are the links on the page 'clean links'?
c: is there a determined theme to the page that would carry your link?
d: is this theme 'connected' to yours in some way?

Other thoughts escape me at the mo I'm afraid.

Hope that helps and if you'd like some free advice in more detail just let me know.

Ray

[SEO Guy]

Some very good advice from Ray all based around the fundamentals of SEO.

If you view every 'main' page of a website (not forms, contact us, about us etc) as a homepage and structure them accordingly you will be on the right track. The starting point should always be keyword research and then move through the aspects listed above.

People can struggle with meta information, however if you basically think of a webpage as a book and the meta tags as the index for that book, you wont go far wrong. The trouble is people get greedy and target too many keywords, this never works well, you should limit each page to a maximum of 3 targeted keywords. You can sometimes pick up other keywords these are derived from the page content, these should be viewed as a bonus.

So by structuring your

URL's
Meta Tags
Headers
Image attributes
Content

Around your selected keywords, without overkill you will do fine.

The main point to note - Depending on the area you are targeting, the competition out there, the age of your website and your own aspirations targeting the most popular terms in your field is not necessarily the best tactics. Sometimes less popular keywords or phrases less associated with your site may be a better option.

An example of this

I worked on a bike website and after my keyword researching I came to the conclusion the term 'cheap bikes' was the best niche to attack. Of course this horrified the site owner who did not want their products to be associated with the term cheap anything. However after I explained my reasoning in detail, they went with it. 6 months later they are listed on page 1 for the term and selling upwards of 20 bikes per day.

[SEO Guy]

As a web design company the best thing you can do to help yourself is make sure that all your sites have a backlink in the footer of every page to your homepage with "Web Design by Calibre Designs". If you want to help yourself offer customers free forums in exchange - if their forum takes off it means more backlinks.

Nass you are right it is the best thing any design company can do however you are advising someone to do something that is totally unethical. A designer has no right to slap their link on any clients site unless

It is agreed upon by the client, some designers put it in the contract or offer a small discount for a sidewde link

Both parties agree to reciprocate, however how many designers want their clients sidewide links?

I have had this discussion many times with various designers, I personally think it comes down to deception, site owners generally have no idea about the value that link could hold.

I have also heard it mentioned that the link is like a label on a piece of clothing, if this is the case why have it hyperlinked or if it has to be why not assigned with the 'no-follow' attribute.

I have my own site linked on a few websites, on each occasion I ask the site owners permission and inform them the link is for my benefit not theirs. I have no right to just slap it on, you could end up with a site full of sitewides all accrediting work done by

Designers
SEO
Ecommerce
Copywriters
Logo

etc etc

I found your post a little disapointing as generally you offer some great advice.

[office space]

spot on, SEO Guy.

[nass]

Originally Posted by SEO Guy

however you are advising someone to do something that is totally unethical

Eh? I beg to differ, reread my post. Nothing unethical there; heck I even suggest offering a free forum. Many successful small web design houses have a link to their homepage somewhere on clients work; web design usually involves signoff of an agreed look before the production.

So, if you perform a great service, even given away a freebie like a forum and the client signs off the design, with the link in it, I think it's just smart business sense. If the site is good enough heck they'll be perfectly happy to have a link.

Now you know and I know the value of links, both from an SEP POV and just 'spreading the word' that there's a good local design company. If the client doesn't know the value of a link then I don't think Calibre Designs should undermine its marketing by omitting it.

[SEO Guy]

Nass morally it aint right and it aint good business practice as we both know.

Saying that who would know or care?

Just because you get away with something it doesnt make it right, added to that Google has devalued sitewides due to some ass kicking tactics, favouring contextual links

So I guess in the future we will see a few sentences in the footer dedicated to the designer....lol