Sunday, 16 May 2010

The meta tags and SEO

Posted by SEO South Yorkshire
Here’s short post on SEO meta tags. For the majority of search engines the meta tags have zero relevance to ranking a page in the search engine algorithm. It hasn’t always been like that in the past the main ranking factor was the meta tags, like any thing that can be humanly changed we had the years of the meta tag stuffing where keywords would be placed in the description and keyword tag area often not relevant to what’s on the page. This would lead to higher ranking but made for a crap user experience with pages returned that were not relevant to what the person was searching for. Today it’s all about relevancy and user intention.

So should you use the SEO Meta Tags

Yes you should, let me explain why. The keyword meta tag is all obsolete for the search engines. There is a but, Some social bookmarking sites read the keyword tag and use it to auto generate tags for bookmarking and sharing. This will save any user bookmarking the page time and effort. Thus making the process of bookmarking more striate forward.
The description tag , although this tag is not used for the ranking of pages this text is displayed under the page title in the search engine results page. This gives you opportunity to write attractive and enticing copy to increase your click through rates


Remember to choose the keywords as if your were tagging the document .

Note from Google on the Keywords meta tag

Recently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn’t use) the “keywords” meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob’s site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her “keywords” meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words “AliceCo” to his “keywords” meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?
At least for Google’s web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.

Complete article  http://webmojo.co.uk/blog/seo-meta-tags/

Saturday, 15 May 2010

How to Price for SEO

SEO is very important to the online business with on average the number of leads the search engines produce being anything from 60% – 100% of the visitors to a website. So as an SEO how do you work out your SEO pricing. I find this part of the job one of the hardest. Search engine optimisation and pricing, it is a minefield. Price too low and the client thinks your unskilled at your art, price too high and your run the risk of pricing yourself out of the job. So where’s the middle ground.
SEO is a two stage process the first being the on page optimisation where the structure and content is optimised to take full advantage of how the search engines rank a page / site. The second stage is off site optimisation this involves building links to the site from relevant sources across the internet. Pricing should always reflect the amount of time that is going to be spent on the optimisation process. A rule of thumb is an newly trained SEO’s time is worth £25 per hour and an SEO at the top of their game can be worth up to £175 an hour. So you should be pricing for your SEO service accordingly.
Word of warning, if you are a new to the world of SEO, know your own level. You don’t have to tell your customer, but if you price according to the the results you expect, then you shouldn’t go far wrong. There is nothing more irritating then an SEO who is over confident and under skilled, they give the whole industry a bad name.

Method one: Price on performance SEO

This sounds simple, you get the customer on first page and they pay you. This method is problematic especially with the introduction of personalised search. You may find yourself educating your clients on the search engines so they can validate the data you send over in your monthly report. I’ve talked to business owners who have used this type of service and it seems to turn into a pay us if you want to relationship. With the client only paying when they think the seo company has done enough. This may seem the fairest but its often the SEO company that is left out of pocket.
This opens the system up to abuse by not having a set metric. I normally see this sort of SEO pricing at the lower end of the market with uncompetitive phrases and localised search. Price wise you are looking at £50 – £150 a month on phrases with moderately low level of competing sites.

Full article on SEO pricing

Thursday, 13 May 2010

simple layouts for web designers just starting out

There are many good web designers out there and some who are just starting out. If your one of those beginners, you can have some problems coming up with web design ideas. having a basic design formulated in your head is half the battle and actually building it is the other half.

There are several simple models that you can use to base your site on. Here are a couple of different models to help you with your ideas.

The first type of configuration is a three column with header and footer. It comprises of a header section three columns and a footer with the main page content taking up the centre column.

The second type of configuration is the header menu content footer layout set out top to bottom header at the top with the menu directly below set out horizontally then content and finally the footer section.

Saturday, 8 May 2010

latest projects moneymakingmummy and more

Here is a list of our latest projects
Moneymakingmummy.co.uk we are working closely with getting paid to work at home expert Syreeta Dent on this project providing SEO support

Babykingdom.co.uk 
We are working on this project selling baby equipment  

and lastly we are working on payasyougogo.co.uk a site about everthing pay as you go from mobile phone to credit cards