Search Engine Optimisation Blog - SEO

Our specialist website optimisation team at Creare are able to provide your business with a solution to the question. People often wonder how do I get my website highly ranked on Google? The answer is careful keyword positioning throughout the site, which we can put in place. We will also monitor your websites performance in the search engine rankings and over a number of months slowly promote your website aiming for page 1. It is quite unusual for someone who is on a search engine to progress past the third page of results. The generic user of the search engine will get to page 3 and will then try differentiating keywords. This means it is so important to get your business noticed within the first three pages of any search engine. Creare is able to help you. Give us a call today on: - 0800 01 999 06 and we can help to get your website to page 1, number 1!

Since beginning my employment with Creare I have personally seen and been involved with business customers who have seen their own search engine rankings improve dramatically. This improvement is solely down to the great work we put in to every customers optimisation.

Great search engine optimisation can take time and effort, but put your trust in Creare and you will be rewarded!
Written by Gareth Joyce on behalf of Creare.

Do you want to work for one of the fastest growing SEO companies within the UK?  If the answer is yes then please send your CV to either info@creare.co.uk or colin@creare.co.uk and we will consider your application.

We are currently recruiting for a wide range of positions within our search engine optimisation department, so whether your an expert, or wanting to start out in the field then get in touch.  What we can say is that with over 400 customers (and growing fast) it certainly wont be dull…………

So join us in our quest, to not only be the best web design company in the UK, but also to be the best search engine optimisation company in the UK. 

I look forward to hearing from you.

Colin

Company Director

Well now that Google Chrome (BETA) has been available for a while what do you think?  I must admit when I first used it I was a bit disappointed, maybe with it being a Google product my expectations were just to high but it is starting to grow on me now.

Here are what I consider the main advantages and disadvantages with Google Chrome:

Advantages:

1. Speed.  It definitely does seem to load things up faster than Firefox and Internet Explorer.

2. Simple, Easy to use interface. 

3. Is chrash proof?  Well so they claim!!!

4. it’s free and a relatively small download

Disadvantages:

1. Lack of a send-this-page option.

Overall Chrome has definately grown on me and I will continue to use this as my prefered browser for the foreseeable future.  You will be glad to know that Google Chrome will have no impact on SEO results.

Over the last 5 years Yahoo has been on the downfall and left in the shadow of market leaders Google. Every Search Engine Optimisation enquiry we receive is to appear in Google, rarely Yahoo. In this article we will look over Yahoo raise and fall and why now it only own 19% of the market they innovated.

Yahoo is widely considered the original big time search engine and reasoning behind what is now the search engine phenomenon. They originally launched in 1994 on a sub domain of the founders (Jerry Yang and David Filo) University website, was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. In least than one year Yahoo (was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo) had a million hits under their belts and the founders realised the potential behind their site. They later released on its new domain www.yahoo.com and surfed the Internet boom during the late 90’s early 00’s. During that time Yahoo released a range of Internet services including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Games, GEO Sites and Yahoo Groups.

They remain pretty much unrivaled apart from some minor competition from sites like Lycos and Excite. However, it wasn’t until Google’s quick growth that Yahoo faced serious competition. In 2007 it was reported that Yahoo now only own 19% of the market share, compared to Google’s massive 53%. It is still the second biggest search engine with MSN falling behind with a 12% share. However with such fierce competition from Google does Yahoo still stand a chance?

As of today there have been numerous of failed acquisition attempt by Microsoft, ranging from 2005 till present the most recent being the start of this year, all of which have been unsuccessful. Now the future of Yahoo is hanging in the balance with suggestions of a merger with Google. In my opinion the days of Yahoo being a market leader are over and the chance of a possible merger with Google or MSN is the only solution left for the previous giants.

Search Engine Optimisation can offer a huge increase in potential customers visiting your site. It offers three key advantags to set you ahead from your competition.

• It is a highly cost effective way of marketing your site
• It offers targetted traffic straight to your products/services
• Ensures long term high positioning

If you currently have a website and your conversion rates are low, Search Engine Optimisation could be the best way to get your site noticed by customers or clients. There is no point in having a well designed website if nobody knows it exists.

Creare Communications are Search Engine Optimisation specialists with years of experience and a highly successful portfolio to offer. Feel free to contact us today to find out the best solution for your company.

In this article I aim to express 5 reasons why organic (the left side of Google) search engine optimisation is worth the time and effort.

• It’s what Google was made for, and its what people generally use Google for. Good positioning in the organic listing of Google is much more likely to increase traffic to your site over pay per click (right side of Google) campaign.
• You have no budgets; your site won’t disappear from the listings after being clicked 20 times.
• The coding used in your site will be clean, modern and W3C compliant.
• The addition of a good navigation, with your keyword phrases throughout the pages and topical sites pointing links back to your website equals long term success.
• You would have nothing to show for months of pay per click marketing if you were to stop, with organic search engine optimisation your site would have built a page rank and would be starting to appear in organic listings.

Overall, I feel people are generally put off by the timescale of organic search engine optimisation over the instant results of pay per click. However, pay per click offers no long-term benefits and will not generate as much traffic to your site as organic SEO. For these reasons I recommend each client to opt for organic SEO over PPC.

Bounce rates also known, as exit rates can be a crucial part of analysing how well your site is performing in the online arena. Bounce rates indicate what pages are either letting your site down or leading it to successful conversions. However, it seems to be a touch and go subject, with many people unsure what they exactly mean.

What is a bounce rate?

Put simply, it is the rate of which people leave your site without visiting any other pages. The lower your bounce rate the better your site is performing.

Analysing bounce rates

So what is a good bounce rate, Avinash Kaushik a Google Analytics specialist quoted “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

Help is at hand

If you find your site has a high bounce rate, there are many ways to improve it. First is finding out what the possible causes may be, usually its from either poor design or bad usability. Other than these it could be due to poor content on the site, or that you are being found on Google for unrelated terms to your company. Resulting in users leaving the site on entry. Second, is correcting these potential problems, at Creare Communication we offer a range of search engine optimisation services to improve your sites bounce rate and higher conversion rates.

Wait how do I find out my bounce rates?

There are many applications that you can use to track your websites analytics. At Creare Communications we implement Google Analytics into each of our sites, which offer monthly detailed reports including bounce rates, conversion rates, average time people spend on your site and much more.
To find out more about these services click here.

In today’s competitive market it is very tempting for either an individual or a search engine optimisation company to use whatever techniques they can to get their site to the top of Google, for the search phrases they want. Below lists certain ‘black hat’ methods that some sites have used in the past to get better Google listings. Never use any of these techniques as any success you have from doing so, will be short lived as Google can easily identify these techniques and your site may even end up getting banned.

Never use……..

1) Hidden text or hidden links
2) Cloaking or site redirect that lead the visitor to a different page than the one listed in the search engines.
3) Duplicate content as this could be viewed by Google as SPAM. Do not create a large number of pages with very similar/ the same content.
4) Meta Keywords cramming. This is where your keywords are reapeated over and over again within your meta keywords.

What Google is basically looking for is that a site represents the keywords that it is being listed for.
If you are still having problems then just call Creare who will be able to advise you on ethical search engine optimisation.

When deciding to get professional Search Engine Optimisation to help increase traffic to your website, you may become confused by the mention of internal and external SEO. In this article we discuss the differences between the two and why they are both equally important to the whole optimisation process.
Both internal and external SEO are sometime referenced as off and on page SEO.

Internal (on page) optimisation

Internal SEO is the initial optimisation stage, this is when the site is prepped for search engines, it can vary from stripping and cleaning the useless code to changing tags and making sure the site is relevant to the main key phrases you are wanting to appear for. Without this your website will never achieve its highest potential in search engines.

External (off page) Optimisation

This is the on going part of the search engine optimisation. This can take months to years of committed work. This can include anything from article marketing to successful link building campaigns.
Google judge’s sites more so on this than any offer search engines such as Yahoo who favor sites with good internal SEO.

So Cuil? Will this one be the Google Killer? Cuil has been developed by a highly competent set of individuals, with some previously working for Google, IBM and AltaVista.

It claims to has a search index that is 3 times the size of google and 10 times the size of microsoft, The question is…. what are the search results like? Being a search engine optimiser it can be difficult to take a step back and analyis this because I would look at the performance of search in a different manor to a general user.

But anyway, what do i think? Our customers do not rank brilliantly in Cuil or not as well as Yahoo or Google, which is obviously an intial off put, but i like the idea of an image and search being more dependant of content.

The trouble with a search engine being completely content based is that spammers will find ways to manipulate searches, Yahoo uses a similar method relying on content over links etc.

The images that were shown next to the results seemed to be irrelevant, i think a company logo would be more relevant, but at the moment it seemed to generate random images.

The final thing that i found strange was that it was more benificial to be in forth position than second or third due to the way the results were displayed.

Will it be the Google killer, not just yet.

Creare Search Engine Optimisation Experts