Blog News and comments from the team on Jack Marlow, Truss, and our clients

2010 is winding up and, like many of our business partners, clients and friends we're absolutely run off our feet!

2010 has been an absolute cracker of a year for us; new staff, exciting projects and some major upgrades and improvements to the Jack Marlow CMS.

Here's to a relaxing break and a prosperous and enjoyable 2011.

Holiday Trading Hours

The Jack Marlow office will be closed from noon on 24 December and will re-open at 9am on Monday 10 January.

This is my latest Blog Entry

Would you use the words “This is a billboard” on a billboard? Or start a brochure with “welcome to our brochure”? Probably not – pretty much everyone knows that a billboard is a billboard and a brochure is a brochure and pretty much everyone knows that a website is a website.

Following on from my 1 Minute SEO blogs on headings and link text you’ll remember that the words you use in headings are important as are the words you use in links.

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

When Google “spiders” (reads through a website and follows all of the links it can find) your and other websites it may associate the words used in a link with the destination page. When you link through to internal pages on your website make sure that you link using the keywords that are relevant to that destination page.

You can also use this to help build up associations with terms you may not use frequently, but which your prospective customers might use to refer to your products or services.

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

The first page your visitors see is your homepage and you only have a limited amount of time to capture their attention.

Additionally, Google and other Search Engines will see your homepage as being the most important page on your website: it’s the page which people will link through to and will probably have the highest “Page Rank” (a ranking of how important the page is).

Text on your homepage can be crucial for telling both your customers and the search engines about who you are and the benefits of dealing with your company.

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

When Google reads through your website it will try and work out what your website is about – this is so that Google can match your website up with search queries that your potential visitors might be making.

Make your important words stand out

Google, and your visitors, will pay more attention to text which stands out: headings, bold or italic text will call out to your visitors. Think about what your potential visitors are looking for and make sure that those questions are being answered in a way which is easy to find and see.

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

While “Flash” (A kind of software which produces animations) and image based menu and navigation systems can make your website look good, they can seriously impede your website's ability to be read well by Google, and consequently your position in search engines may suffer.

Google and other Search Engines read the text on your website and may associate the words used in links with the content on those other pages: A flash navigation system won’t be able to be read by Google and google won’t be able to read the words on any image buttons you’re using.

Over the next few days Google is rolling out a new search feature called "Instant Preview".

What is Instant Preview?

Using Instant Preview, anyone searching Google has the option to see a popup preview of what each website looks like as they move their mouse over the search result, without leaving the page. This means that a potential visitor will be able to get an idea of how your website looks before they even click through to your site!

A Web Browser is a program you use to browse the internet. There are a number of different Web Browsers available for free and while the basic functionality is the same (with an address bar and the ability to view websites) some of the advanced functionality is different and each browser has a different interpretation of websites.

The intricacies of “browser bugs” aren’t important to anyone that’s not a web developer and even in our office here we have different opinions about which is the “best” web-browser. The important thing is to make sure that your visitors all have a great experience, regardless of which browser they prefer to use.

You can pay a lot for SEO – but what can you learn, right now, in one minute? An ongoing series.

“Meta information” is information you can use to describe your website beyond the content on your site itself. Your Content Management system should allow you to add in Meta Information for your website, and for the individual pages on your website.

The three “Meta Tags” that pertain to SEO are called “Meta Title”, “Meta Description” and “Meta Keywords”.

What is the ‘Meta Title’?

The SEO Title appears in the title bar of your web browser, and appears as your site title when your site appears in a google search.

I keep hearing people say that they want to be "Number One" on Google or that someone-or-other is going to get them to Number One.

But - number one for what? There are no search results on the Google homepage: before you see a list of search results you need to enter some search terms. There's no point being number one for searches that are completely unrelated to what you do, or are so esoteric that nobody will ever search for them.

If someone is promising you "Number One" on Google without talking about search terms?

Run.

If they do tell you they can guarantee you the number one spot for a particular search term?