The Creare Group are the largest Web Design & SEO Company in the United Kingdom, employing close to a 100 hundred staff including SEO Consultants, Content Writers, Link-Builders, Video Producers, Web Designers & Sales Managers.

In this week’s SEO Video Blog, we’ve produced a short video which meets some of the employees in the SEO Department at Creare, who speak about their experiences working for the company so far, their day-to-day roles and how their their job has evolved and progressed since joining us.

We currently have a number of job vacancies available at Creare including SEO Consultants, Content Writers and Team Leader roles. If you’re interested in applying for a job at Creare, please send your CV in the first instance to jobs@creare.co.uk.

Webmaster tools is an essential tool when optimising or administrating a website for a client. The Google tool provides a range of comprehensive information.

Google have introduced new ways of verifying your website in webmaster tools, these include DNS, Meta tags, HTML files and Analytic accounts.

Tutorial

Thanks for watching this weeks SEO video blog, please leave any questions or comments on the supporting blog post.

If you have recently had a new website developer and are worried about losing your existing search engine listings or Page Rank once you set the site live, don’t worry.

Using server side 301 re-directs will ensure that Google transfers page rank and replaces any existing search engine result positions with your new URL’s.

The process we use is involves a .htaccess file and a simple command line.

Redirect 301 /old-page.html http://www.domain.co.uk/new-page.html = <img>

We have recently produced an new eCommerce website for a client Mama Baby Bliss , we replaced the old site with a sparkly new Magento shop and re-directed any old pages to the new replacement pages.

You can see when looking at the site that some of the sites pages that were 301 redirected have had their page rank passed on, where as the other new URL’s are yet to receive any PR, until the next PR roll out by Google.

In conclusion, you shouldn’t be worried about setting a newly developed website live. As long as the development company understands SEO you should have no down time with the sites listings.

Of course if your interested in purchasing a new eCommerce shop like Mama Baby Bliss, please call freephone on 0800 01 999 06. Thanks for watching.

We have previously done a video on the .htaccess file for apache servers, and how is can help to normalize your URLs and in particular help re-direct any inbound links to the correct page.

We have since expanded on the htaccess file that we use with our sites and have added other commands that we believe help your website to perform in the search engines and improve usability.

The code includes, Rewrite conditions, Error documents, Cache Expiry and Compression.

The rewrite condition is designed to ensure your website has 1 URL per page indexed by the search bots, You can use the following code:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.co.uk$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [R,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php

RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

The first part of the Rewrite condition re-directs the domain to include the www.

The second piece re-directs away from the /index.php or specific file name back to the root.

2.) Error Doc - Tells the server where to re-direct the user to if a dead link is found or a URL is not longer active.

ErrorDocument 404 /404.php

3.) Expires On - Tells a browser how long to hold the information of a web page in its cache, this improves the load time for rrevisiting users, this includes html, javascript and images.

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresDefault “access plus 7200 seconds”

4.) Compression (Gzip or Deflate) - You can use either Gzip or Deflate dependent on server capability, this example uses mod_deflate and firstly checks if the functionality is enabled then dependent of the browser, the files are compressed and minified to improve the load time of the site.

<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

</ifmodule>

Thanks for watching.

Welcome to this weeks SEO Video tutorial, over the past two weeks we have covered the initial setup of Google places and the optimisation of the listing to improve the impressions for your business.

This week we will explain the analysis of your Google Places listings and the information displayed, we will then show how you can adjust your business’ information to improve the relation of the queries that your business appears for.

To see the analytics, click your business’ name. You are then shown the ‘dashboard’.

The first piece of information shows the date range, you can adjust this accordingly. By default it is set to 30 days or a month.

Next you have the ‘Activity’. This separated into Impressions and actions.

Impressions denote the amount of times your listing has appeared from a user query.

Actions then illustrates the amount of clicks from a user, so you can easily work of the CTR (Click through rate) by dividing impressions / actions.

Actions is also broken down further into ‘clicks for more info’ and ‘clicks to your website’.

(Show image) You can see the two options on an impression. The company name clicks through to the ‘website’ or the ‘more’ button displays the business’ Google places profile page.

Lastly the ‘top search queries’ show what keyword queries your listing is appearing for.

Looking at the ‘top search queries’ will allow you to decide whether what your current listing appears for is related to your business and your main services.

If you want to alter the ‘top search queries’ that your listing appears for, you can edit your business information on the right hand side. You should look to change the description, categories or areas of businesses to suit your business’ main services.

Thanks for watching if you have any additional information that can help optimise Google Places, please leave a comment on the supporting blog post.