Web-Studio Blog

The Meta description of your website is an important area to spend that little bit of extra time on. It is used to entice people who find your site on the search engines to click on your link. Do not have the same description for every page.
This description will appear on the search engines under your page title (which is very important to get right!) so make it appealing and relevant.
More information on how Google advises you use your description:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264&hl=en#writegooddescriptions

Labels: descriptions, web design, website promotion

The first thing we look at when a client wants to improve their search engine position is the way a search engine views your website. We use a Lynx Viewer simulator which are freely available online. The Lynx viewer shows us the text on the website which could be indexed by the search engines. It also lists the links that the search engines could see and what anchor text is used within those links (the anchor text is the text used a link to another webpage). As you have probably guessed by now it is a word game. You need to ensure that each page on your website contains good quality text which is relevant to what you are trying to promote.

Test your own website and see if the text that appears contains the keyword phrases that people type in the search engines to find you.
http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php
If you are not sure what people will be typing into the search engines to find you then use our keyword suggestion tool in the webmaster tools section.

Labels: lynx viewer, website promotion

Articles are one of the best ways of improving your search engine position. By adding your article to carefully selected article directories you can benefit from many backlinks into your website. The content of your article will be relevant to your website and the anchor text (text within the link which returns directly to your website) will be the keyword or keyword phrase you have targeted and is also relevant to both the article you have written and the website or website page it links to.
I must mention that if you are sending out an article with poor content then you do not really deserve to gain backlinks. Artcle syndication is about improving your website position and bringing in traffic from your articles, so make sure they are of unique content, relevant and interesting to read.
There is a problem though. Google has a duplicate content filter which will only act on a link back to your website on a few of them, if that. The way around this is called article spinning. It is a matter of rewriting the the paragraphs and headings in your article to be able to create many articles spawned from the origionla. Each article being unique in its own right and still interesting and relevant. This involves grammar changes, rewrting the sentences but keeping the meaning of each paragraph the same. Keeping the meaning of each paragraph the same then means that you can swap paragraphs between your articles to create multiple unique articles.
The benefits of article spinning is that you will gain many more relevant backlinks to your website, which will stay in the search engines longer.

Labels: link building, links

Gaining links from other websites which are relevant to you, is a fundamental neccessity when trying to improve the search engine position of your website. The process of building incoming links is an ongoing procedure which takes hard work, diligence and knowledge of your field. It is just not worthwhile blasting every possible site with link requests. The sites you want to exchange links with must have a relevancy to what you do. It is not an automatic process using link exchange programs, it needs manual work to investigate which web pages would be relevant to yours. In fact, links from non relevant sites can do you more harm than good.

There are some great places to get good links, such as directories, social bookmarking sites and article directories. For those businesses that really want to build a good solid search engine position you have to go out there and look for them. In some cases you will need to pay for a link, you have to accept that. But time set aside every week or month, to investigate good content sites that you can ask for a link from is time well spent. When asking, ensure you communicate with a person, maybe by telephone or maybe by an email to an individual. Give them a reason to link to you. If your site is not up to par and there is nothing they see relevant on your site then why should they link to you.

Links can be gained by submitting articles and press releases. But these have to be of a good quality and of interest to the reader. Keep your website interesting and 'bait' people to link to your page, by either having unique quality content or something interesting that will keep them coming back. Blogging is a good form of link building, but again you need time to blog and your blogs must be of interest. Don't blog for bloggings sake, blog because you have something of interest to tell.

Don't forget the links which the search engines cannot see. Links in emails are also important, so use mailing lists to keep clients informed, again remembering to make the content interesting and relevant.

In summary:
Link building never stops.
Make sure that the site is relevant
Make sure that your site is worth linking to
It is a manual process, don't use link exchange programs
Ask someone by name to swap links.
Don't give up

29/4/08: Quick update
I have just seen this video on youtube, its very good. Chuck raps about link building.

Labels: link building, links, website promotion

Normally we do this by hand, but Google now have an online facility (in Beta) to help you create your own google map to embed on your website. It is a great way for clients to find you and add a bit of extra functionality to your website. You will have to sign up for a google API to put the google map on your site but this is fairly painless.
Embed Google maps onto your website »

Labels: maps, website addons

This is supposed to be only available to America, but I have successfully created an account and have been using an online version of my favourite imaging software. Photoshop is my image editing software of choice so I was delighted to see an online version available.

The system is in Beta version at the moment but it has a very easy to use interface and looks set to become a regular in my Favourites. They provide you with 2GB of FREE storage space and have facilities to allow you to share images with friends and colleagues. The have some good tools on there to edit your images which provide very good results. Couldn't see how to resize an image but I will keep playing. You can crop, play with colour settings and have some basic effects applied. Have a play at http://www.photoshop.com/express

Labels: Image Editing, Images

We have just finished the upgrade of the new NNT website. New Net Technologies are a leading software manufacturer and solutions provider. A global company offering a range of business solutions such as:

• IT Service Delivery Management


• Network and Server Management


• Change, Configuration and Inventory Management


• Security Management


• Professional Services

The website is built with the focus on gaining quality leads for their product range and to provide the professional image the company deserves.
View the ITIL Management Services website from New Net Technologies.

Labels: websites