Tag Archives: Web Designers Birmingham

How to know when you need a break from social media

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We all love social media (even if we say that we hate it sometimes!) and it has become an integral part of most of our lives. It offers a way of communication that has never existed before and can connect people all over the world to bring together whole online communities at the click of a button. Facebook itself would be the third largest country in the world in terms of how many people have profiles set up and with over 30% of the world’s population now connected to the internet, this number is only going to grow.

SEO BirminghamWhilst all this is great and makes sure that each morning we know exactly what all our friends did last night and are able to see the latest image of a crab wearing a top-hat, we think from time-to-time that we all need a slight break. Below are some of the tell tale signs that you need a break from social media:

1. When you find something amusing you exclaim LOL or ROFL instead of laughing

If you are finding trouble with laughing and you find yourself compelled to shout LOL, ROFL or LMAO (to signify the different intensities of hilarity that your feeling)  then it may be time to try and take a break from your online conversations and try to reintegrate with physical chat.

2. You find that you ‘Like’ most of the things that the people you know are doing but cant bring yourself to dislike them

Are you going around the city centre and telling strangers how much you like what they are doing? Are you telling your friend that you like that they are ‘bored and need something to do’? Do you find that you are doing this multiple times a day and receiving an equal amount of strange looks? If so, you are probably finding it very strange that you cant find a way not to like what anyone is doing and spending minutes of frustration trying to work out why on earth you can not like what they are doing. In this case, the advice we would give is to maybe have a day off from social media.

3. You only speak in sentences of 140 characters or less

Do you find it hard to string together complex sentences that consist of more than 140 characters? Also, do you find it slightly strange that you are able to calculate the exact amount of letters in your sentence as you speak whilst taking into account spaces between the words? Don’t worry if this is happening to you, you are not alone. We have witnessed several people that talk in this manor. Recently, one of our clients finished a sentence by saying ‘hash see you tomorrow’. Needless to say we admitted them straight into our social media rehab clinic.

Don’t fear if you are facing the symptoms outlined above because there is help out there for you. Get in touch with us and we will give you a full diagnosis that can get you back on your feet (or computer chair) in no time. In the meantime, maybe have a little hour break from the laptop each day… #yourgoingcrazy

The SEO Benefits of Writing a Blog

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SEO BirminghamWikipedia explains the word “blog” as a “website or type of website updated with new content from time to time”. The word blog is formed from two words; web and log and includes regular entries of commentary about events, news and even video.

Blogging is growing each day and as of February 2011, there were over 156 million public blogs in existence.

Whatever your business, writing a blog (or having a guest blog) is extremely important and can be often done without the help of professional web designers. Whether it records a view on a subject, a diary or advertising, this gives you and your business a chance to promote to an audience. Guest blogging means you write for someone else’s blog or they write for yours which again gives you the opportunity to promote yourself to a different audience. By working in this way, you get those ever important backlinks to your website enhancing your SEO. Remember, when writing a blog, don’t forget to use keywords to really maximise on your SEO and drive traffic to your site.

Love you, love your blog!

Search engines love blogs and are a key part towards search engine optimisation. People searching on the Internet are looking for new information all the time. Keeping your blog updated is essential, perhaps every 3 days, so that search engines keep on recognising you and driving increased traffic to your site.

Advertising for free!

Advertising can cost a fortune and from one month to the next, how many people keep copies of publications/emails they receive containing advertising? Your blog is your advert. If you have special features at various times of the year or special offers, writing a blog, posting and then using your usual social media methods makes it go viral and no huge advertising costs to pay! Plus, you can keep your blogs on your website for people to search through!

So….if you keep just one resolution of 2012, start your blog and keep it running!

Three Quick Tips for Moving up the Google Search Listings

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SEO BirminghamThere are many different tips and tricks that so called ‘experts’ give out all the time on the web promising that they will get you to the top of Google in a few days. In reality, you have to be either extremely lucky, a huge organisation, or be targeting a very niche search term that barely anyone searches for. What we suggest is that you follow these three tips and it will get you on your way to rising through the listings. We’re not saying that you’re going to jump straight to page one (however it is possible) but you will at a minimum see a just up of a page or so.

Tip 1: Take time to decide what your target market will search for in Google to eventually get to your website. If your company was called something that isn’t really related to what you do, for example ‘Vision’, it is wise to understand that the majority of people won’t search the term ‘Vision’ on Google to end up at your website. Let’s say that ‘Vision’ were a web design company based in central Birmingham. Users would find the company’s website by searching for terms such as ‘web designers Birmingham’ or ‘web design Birmingham’ so it would be wise to target such terms in your SEO plans.

Tip 2: Place your keywords within your HTML title tags and H1 headers, for example, the website home page could be titled ‘Vision – Web Designers Birmingham | Web Design Birmingham’. It is also important to remember that Google only shows the first 60 characters of your website title so don’t make it too long. With the H1 tags you could have the title on your homepage as ‘Vision Web Designers in Birmingham’ and this will immediately allow Google to recognise that the ‘web designers Birmingham’ keyphrase is related to the company ‘Vision’.

Tip 3: Submit a sitemap for your website into Google’s webmaster tools and submit your website URL so that it the search engine knows that it must crawl through your site.

Last of all…. be patient! Don’t expect results straight away as Google often takes some time to re-index all of the webpages so all you can do is keep creating fresh content with your keywords in (be sure not to put in too many instances of your keyword as this is called keyword stuffing) and in time your website will rise through the listings.

Give it a try…

Domain Name Hijackers Causing Problems

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SEO BirminghamOver the past couple of weeks there has been several reports of domain names being stolen, primarily from web design related websites, and then being held to ransom for its return by the hackers. Chris Coyier from css-tricks.com was one of the victims of the online attacks as they had managed to hack into his gmail account and also gain ftp access through this as well. The hackers then refused to return the domain name to Chris, claiming that they owned it!

David Walsh, an online blogger, was emailed by his hackers whom demanded £2000 for its safe return. Walsh said, ”from a personal standpoint, this incident took a large toll on me. My blog has helped me get jobs, travel to Europe to speak at events, and meet lots of great developers. The thought of losing the domain I’ve worked so hard to promote is terrifying. I’ve spent dozens and dozens of hours contacting the various parties involved to get the domain back, still without result. It’s shocking my accounts could be so easily compromised – it’s been a scary, scary wake-up call.”

It is an important to remember the importance of creating secure passwords and making sure that passwords across each of your different accounts in order to make it as hard as possible for hackers to gain complete access to your website and related accounts. Also, by regularly checking directories such as WHOIS, you will be able to keep a constant check on the status of your domain and be alert to any immediate changes that may have been made.

Situations such as domain name theft can be extremely stressful and can be very detrimental to your search engine optimisation (SEO) and your customer satisfaction levels. Be sure to contact your domain support if your find anything suspicious happening on your site to avoid these kind of attacks affecting you and your customers.

Effective SEO With Video Content

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SEO BirminghamWhen it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO) it is important to understand the different types of content that can have an effect on how your website ranks in the search engine results page (SERP). Video content has been proven to be more than 50% more effective at reaching higher in the SERP and as well as this it has the advantage of being able to display a thumbnail image next to it which instantly catches the users eye. There are a number of ways in which you can improve your SEO through utilising video content as we will show below:

Product Videos: If you can create individual videos that showcase each of your different products within your range then you will be able to maximise your SEO activities. Through the use of rich content like videos it will also be more attractive  for the user as they will be able to interact with the site. Google especially likes this type of content and bearing in mind that YouTube itself is the second largest search engine in the world it doesn’t even need to be said what the potential is there. One important thing to remember, however, is that your web designers need to ensure that the video doesn’t cause your webpages to load slowly as this is the number one reason online for users to prematurely leave a website.

Clean Video URLs: Another important tip is that you have to keep your URLs to the webpages that contain video ‘clean’, i.e, make sure that they are canononical (wowinternet.co.uk/seo-birmingham-web-designers-birmingham) and also to include the file format of the video at the end (seo-birmingham.avi).

Video Sitemaps: Video sitemaps can be an essential part of your video SEO and they, like normal sitemaps, allow Google to accurately crawl through the content in order to find exactly what the user is looking for.

Keep Content Updated: If there is one piece of advice you should take away as being most important for your SEO it is to keep your content updated. Google loves fresh, updated, and accurate content more than anything so make sure that none of your videos are outdated!

These are just a few tips to get you on your way to improving your SEO through video content, but be sure to check back here for more tips and tricks!

Block all search results from websites in Google

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Whilst browsing through Google’s search engine the other day it was brought to our attention that there is a feature that they have implemented within their search engine results page (SERP) that gives the user the option to block a specific website from appearing within the listings. This occurs when you click through to a link in the SERP and then press the back button which will bring you back to the search results, however this time you will be presented the option of ‘blocking all’ results from the listings and future listings that you will see.

Web Designers Birmingham As you can see in the above image, we searched for ‘web designers Birmingham‘ and found our website in the SERP, we then clicked through and then went back and we were given this option to ‘Block all’. Now, from a user point of view this could be a good idea as you can get rid of any websites that come into the results that are just spam or just plain unhelpful (obviously you wouldn’t be blocking our site!) and this will allow you to have more of a customised user experience. On the other hand, from a website owner’s point of view, this isn’t so good because all that time spent on perfecting your search engine optimisation (SEO) has just gone down the pan if your target market are blocking your website. Also, quite a shocking thing that we found was that even the paid-per-click (PPC) ads on the top of the SERP have this feature attached to them. I don’t know how happy you would be if you are spending a large sum of money to be guaranteed into the search results at the top of the page and then you find out that it can be removed from the results with a click of the users mouse! If you have just found this out now and are having a moment of panic, don’t worry, there is hope yet!

What we have found with our rigorous testing of this feature (i.e, we accidentally found this out when we were browsing) is that once you have clicked through to the website from the SERP, if you stay on the webpage for at least 30 seconds and then go back then the user is not provided with the option to block the website. This could be seen as Google determining that anything under 30 seconds is a page bounce, therefore, first impressions are essential. Ensure that the loading time to your website is at a complete minimum because this is one of the highest causes for users to leave a webpage prematurely, also, make sure that the landing page that the user is presented with isn’t too overcrowded and is aesthetically appealing because nobody wants to stay on an ugly website (we all have our shallow sides). Factors like this can make a big difference.

Hopefully we haven’t sent you into a wild panic and you feel more informed than enraged. Simply follow the simple advice we have given and it will be a good starting point to ensure you don’t face the dreaded ‘Google block’.

Google+ Pages: Has your business got one?

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A couple of days ago Google announced that it was finally allowing businesses to create a Google+ page which immediately opened the floodgates for business trying to get in on the action. Like us, you may have been slightly disappointed with what you found.

The thing that struck us first was really the lack of verification needed to set up the page and considering the emphasis that Google has been putting on the validity of data within their products its quite surprising. One way they have done this is within Google Places they have recently made it possible for users to comment on the locations of listed businesses, provide phone numbers and even URLs to the company’s website which is a really engaging way for the online community to ensure that all the information on Google’s searches are correct. For example, when users search for ‘web designers Birmingham’ and get a list of local web design businesses, they are able to personally update any contact information that they know which can be very helpful. However, it seems that Google+ pages may seem slightly open to spammers and we could well see a lot of false accounts making news soon enough!

Another mild annoyance is that within Google’s terms and conditions it forbids Google+ page owners to run competitions, coupons or any direct promotions on the page itself which is a substantial limitation in itself and could play a fairly large role in its competition with Facebook pages.

These points aside, there are obvious huge benefits to having a Google+ page, one of those being primarily that everything Google touches at the moment turns to gold! Google+ is still up for debate as to whether it can become a success in the long run or whether it will take the same path as Google Wave, however, increasing your brand’s social media presence is a must and simply ignoring Google+ as a valuable marketing tool could leave you with regrets in the long-term.

Our advice would be to get a Google+ page as soon as possible to simply have a presence and then try to integrate your existing social networks into this so that you don’t get left in your competitors dust! Why not check our page out while your at it :)


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Google makes changes to search algorithm

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Web Designers BirminghamSearch engine giant Google has recently announced fresh changes to their search algorithm which builds on the ‘Caffeine indexing system’ they put in place last year and signals a sign of intent to overshadow the likes of Microsoft’s Bing. The new changes focus more on provided the most up-to-date results and delivering the most relevant information.

Google estimate that this will affect around 35% of all searches on the web so companies will have to ensure that all of the information being fed from their websites is as regular as possible if they are to remain within the top listings of results and web designers themselves with have to keep a keen eye on this too.

“Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.” Google’s blog.

These means that the emphasis is on keeping your content flowing, for example, a firm providing a consistent flow of up-to-date and topical information is far more likely to have greater off-page SEO than a firm with out-of-date information that is rarely posted and this is definitely something to bear in mind. If we were to search ‘SEO Birmingham’ on Google now, the search results will automatically provide you with the most recent articles and webpages related to this topic.

Google say that ‘different searches have different freshness needs. This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers.’

This move could be also seen as a response to Microsoft’s update to the Bing search engine to provide more effective use of social media linking and interaction with websites. “This lets users find not only what they’re looking for, but view related information from their family, friends, co workers and contacts, whether it’s about liking the same band, eating at a restaurant or booking a trip,” says Sean Suchter, head of Bing’s social search team at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus.