Looking to improve your knowledge of SEO or Google Analytics?

Recently we’ve been mulling over the most effective ways to help local businesses promote themselves online and realised we’ve missed one vital area – training courses.

We felt that with finances so tight for businesses at present, paying a digital agency such as ourselves an ongoing fee to manage their websites and/or online marketing may stretch budgets too far. Instead, a one-off charge is far more manageable and invests valuable knowledge in either the business owner or a member of staff who may act as Webmaster.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be talking to website owners to distill their training “wants and needs” into a focused training course.

Our hope is to pass on our combined knowledge of:
•    Website Analytics
•    Search Engine Optimisation
•    Pay Per Click
•    Google AdWords

This will be via either one-day training courses based in Fulbeck, Lincolnshire with gourmet lunch provided or alternatively, at the clients business premises (where the client takes us out for lunch of course! ;O)

The latter would be the more expensive option as it would effectively be one-to-one consultation, with the Fulbeck course aimed at small groups of about 6 people, helping to reduce the cost per person.

One area we feel is vital for any web training course to be successful is the support after the course ends. So all our training courses will come with a minimum of seven days email and phone support, ensuring any problems or questions that arise  after the course can easily be resolved with the trainer.

We’d really love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have about the correct course content, how long the courses should run and preferred locations?

If all goes well, we’ll put on the first web training course completely FREE so even if you are only vaguely interested, drop us an email and we’ll put your name in a hat (or similar storage device?) to see who gets to come!

Last year, Google introduced ‘ Google Video Search ‘ and earlier this year we saw these video’s appearing in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages ).

If you perform a search for ‘Michael Jordon’ in Google, you will be presented with results similar to the following screen capture

People can include video on their websites for all kinds of reasons; information, selling a product, tutorials, advertisements etc.

Videos on your website can act as link bait, viral and social media marketing. If users find your video useful, they may link to it. If you use keywords in the title of your video, you could find yourself with targetted links pointing back to your website. This in turn will help with your overall search engine rankings for the keyphrases you wish to show up for in the SERPs.

When adding video’s on your website remember to also submit them to ‘Google Video’ as well as YouTube.

There may be a number of reasons why you would want to redesign your website, however, the general aim is for improvement. Improvement for your users, improvement for search engines or maybe improvement for your own peace of mind. So, the question is, how do you go about it?

People have posted their concerns in online SEO forums about what would happen if they redesigned their sites. Mainly, would it affect their search engine rankings in a negative way?

Well, the answer to this is, not if it is done correctly, infact, quite the opposite.

There have been a couple of occasions when LandingNet have been involved in website redesigns, and in all of these occasions, search engine rankings have improved.

Generally the reason for redesign was either due to rebranding or because the site was old and needed a facelift. Redesigning a website can prove to be an advantage because it gives you the opportunity to implement improved usability as well as search engine optimisation.

The main issues that can cause you to loose rankings in the search engines are:

Changing the names of your URLs

If you have a page on your site that is currently ranking called ranked.php, and change that URL to ranking.php, then ranked.php becomes obsolete. This means that eventually this page will no longer rank in the search engines for search phrases that were bringing traffic to your site.

Not redirecting currently indexed pages

If ranked.php was changed to ranking.php then it is important to 301 (permanent) redirect ranked.php to ranking.php, this then will tell the search engines that ranked.php has permanently been moved to ranking.php, therefore, as long as the page is optimised for the same search terms, search engines will rank the new page in place of the old one. Infact, if you have the opportunity to optimise the newer page better than the older one, then the rankings will infact improve.

Not optimising your pages

If you have a well optimised webpage and change the content on that page and do not optimise it, then this page will cause you to loose rankings, which means traffic driven to your site via this page will cease.

An important thing to remember when redirecting old URLs to new URLs is not to redirect all the old URLs to your homepage. If you have created a new page on “baskets” to replace an old page and you have renamed this page, then you need to 301 redirect the old page to the new page rather than the index page. The same would apply to all old pages, which have been replaced and renamed. Of course, the simpler answer is not to rename the page in the first place and just let the new content naturally replace the old page.

Redesigning your website is your opportunity to build your site in a way that will benefit your site visitors as well as your business. It is your opportunity to clean up navigation around your site and to implement new trends of search that search engines are currently using to enable you to increase your web presence.