The Oakland Group expands with an e-commerce shop, Trend Online. Selling everything from Trend Management to Control Supervisors this high tech e-commerce  shop allows easy online purchase.

More information www.trendonline.co.uk 

Web 2.0 has had many success stories as the integration between web content and user interaction becomes evermore seamless. However, the most popular of this new series of web technologies is blogging – a means whereby users can post articles and opinions on any topic of their choosing on their own web space. The result of this is an online community where posters and readers can post comments, and more importantly, hyperlinks. As a SEO strategy, this can be a very effective method of communicating not only the existence, but the significance of your website in the industry, especially if corresponding blog posts speak favourably of your site. The major benefit is that blogs can reach very wide audiences if implemented and promoted correctly.

Imagine a situation where everytime you had an idea to share, 5,000 people who trust your opinions see it in your blog. The majority of those 5,000 people also write blogs in your field or related fields. Some of those bloggers may frequently mention your site on their blogs, and they themselves could have thousands of subscribers. Within a short space of time your blog could have the attention of hundreds or even thousands of users. Where people go search engines follow, so if many users link to your blog, it will also boost the search engine ranking for other parts of your site.

It is important however that your blog postings avoid ‘commodity status’, which includes short comments on somebody else’s work, and simply posting for the sake of generating optimised keywords. Posts must maintain quality, originality, depth and have its content driven by the user’s expertise in order to acquire popularity amongst web communities. I have studied in-depth, the work of usability expert Jakob Nielsen, and I have found an interesting article of his; Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, which encapsulates this matter perfectly. He asserts that leadership (or prevalence of the poster’s expertise) in blog postings, blog-post variability and regularity are of high priority in gaining trust and recognition. I believe he wants to encourage you to personalise your posts, by giving your own opinions and judgements on your subjects to provoke interest and even raise debate.

He also points out however, that if the content isn’t the main concern for your site, and you simply want to communicate simple answers to your user’s questions then “you should comply with the bulk of content usability guidelines: be as brief as you can; use bulleted lists and highlighted keywords; chunk the material; and use descriptive headings, subheads, and hyperlinks.” These guidelines all fall nicely into the standard Search Engine Optimisation requirements. I believe it is therefore essential that blog postings for SEO manage to achieve a balance where expertise and content usability can work together simultaneously to bring the right users to your site.

One of the chief objectives of Web 2.0 and web logging is to make the Internet a more community-based entity, and by using the blogging practice in the most effective way for your website, you can take advantage of this. This doesn’t just mean writing articles on your chosen topic and leaving it there, but it means interacting with the wider community. Quoting and linking to other popular bloggers, leaving useful comments on other related blogs, writing articles for other blogs and actively soliciting & replying to comments can really push users towards your blog.

With RSS feeds also enhancing the likeliness of your articles being noticed and linked to, it will only improve your website’s probability of being picked up by Search Engines, making blog posting a valuable resource for optimisation.

Reference:

Wall, A M (2007). Search Engine Optimisation Book. California: Aaron Matthew Wall. 87-91.

Jakob Nielsen (2007) Write Articles, Not Blog Postings [online] available from <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html> [15 January. 2007]

You may be asking yourself, as we have been here at Creare communications, ‘why does my site rank brilliantly one week then not the next?’

Continually updating your site content may be recommended to a lot of web masters, this may be so if done a certain way. For example, from the experience of the search engine optimisers at Creare, we have found that Google disagrees with the constant changing of optimised key phrases.

The best way to constantly update your site is through a content managed news systems or a RSS feed, these can still cause problems, as if you have script re-calling the articles and the titles are or aren’t key word rich to your chosen optimisation, this can also effect you Google standings.

The name “Google Dance” has often been used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. Google’s index update occurred on average once per month.

Google’s search engine pulls results from more than 10,000 dedicated servers, now it’s not possible to update the index on these servers at the same time, so one by one they will be updated.

Now does this explain the reason why an unchanged site can drop severely in Google’s rankings or even disappear all together?

Could the search specific to your site be determined by which Google server your search is being processed by this week or month? Maybe, and it would explain these strange behaviors shown by standings.

This week my site has been cached by a Google server that has yet to be updated with the backward links obtained and the newly gained importance of the site, meaning that my site have gone from being top 40 to the bottom end of 200?

If this is true, then only time will allow us at Creare to determine the time scale that this happens over and whether the site in question returns to its rightful place once all the servers have been updated.

Search Engine Optimisation and Marketing from Creare Communications.

You may be asking yourself, why do i position well in yahoo and msn, but not in Google?

Well your probably getting penalized for something that you have implemented into the search engine marketing of your site. Different search engine use different algorithms and each search engine weighs different parts of a site differently.

• Google are the primary UK & US search engine, Google focuses on the sites age and link based authority and popularity, they are the industry leaders and seem to have the best system for determining the Good sites from the poor sites, spammers and aggressive optimisers.
• Yahoo! focuses more on the page content side of thing, but while still relying on a large decent link base.
• MSN is easier to manipulate, by using low-quality links, aggressive anchor text and high population of keywords, getting a higher position becomes more possible.

Tweaking a pages internal optimization is very time consuming and the effect is mostly un-noticeable once a decent standard has been set, your better off trying to research quality links that have value and are from a industry site related to you.

Google now offers a page rank measuring tool built into their free downloadable tool bar, available for all popular browsers.

The Google Page Rank tool, provides a logarithmic scale to mimic the link popularity of pages and websites themselves. By looking at a page rank you can automatically see how important Google rates the web site or web page. Creare Communications currently has a page rank of 3/10, but with constant link building this will rise and is almost certainly a 4 now. (just awaiting Google to re-score the web sites – this usually happens 4 times a year, but this is not set into stone.)

Google would like you to believe that their Page Rank system is the core of their search engine optimisation system, this is simply not true and there are many other factors which improve the returned results which Google supplies.

Many webmasters and developers exchange links with as many sites as possible, but this isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. As you can image there are good links and bad links, which are available to exchange with on the web. Google has the intelligence to sort the good from the bad, this increases the risk of swapping and adding links to every site possible.

“When you link to the wrong circles, you run the risk of being associated with them”
Aaron Mathew Wall, (http://www.theseobook.com)

Google’s page rank is only a single component of the Google search engine algorithm. A better optimised site with a lower page rank will feature above a competitor with a higher page rank in the results of a keyword search in Google.

Search Engine Optimisation tips and Implementation from Creare Communications

You couldn’t expect to get on the first page of google with a general single word search term, for example if you typed in ‘buy’ you would recieve over 100 million returned results. Thats over 100 million people trying to use the word ‘buy’ to send traffic to their sites.

Now ‘buy’ is probably relevant to millions of sites out there and who are trying to sell something, but is too general for any internet user and they would never find what they are looking for.

Key phrases in Search Engine Optimisation  should be specific to your site and be obvious to what a user might type in to find what you sell or your site, for example if you sold ‘wool carpets’, you would want your key phrases to include such terms. (buy quality woolen carpets).

A common question we get is can you only optimise the Home page of a website.  I can understand why people think this as the Home page is the most important page of the site but the answer is YES you can and should optimise the other pages of a website.

When you are optimising the other pages of a website you should remember:

- You should use text based navigation.

- If you use graphics then remember to use the ALT tag.

- Use a site map to allow google to spider your whole site.

- Deep link to related articles and content from within the articles and content of your page copy.

- Use CSS.

At Creare Communitions apply this to all our optimised sites.

In the natural or organic search engine optimisation listing within Google, you sometimes see Google displaying several links to pages within a site underneath the main link. It is difficult publish this in a listing within the search engine, as google has an automated algorithm which controls the functionality.

Usually it is aimed towards the larger of web sites and usually appears in relation to searches that involve a company name (your company) or specific pages from a web site other than the homepage. Rumor has it backward links containing the company name and therefore attracting a lot of visitors via Google is a main reason that Google applies these to your listing. Most probably Google will have a threshold for the amount of keyword rich links you need before supplying your site with a ’sitelink’.

The sitelinks can be taken from any area within your site and Google does not restrict this to your main navigation, The speculation behind the theory of ’sitelinks’ within the search engine optimisation listings is that it is directly related to the highest search phrase volume on a site.

The algorithm that Google uses to position sites for key phrases has changed (as it always is).

The most recent change is to devalue a link from a website that is a paid link.

We at Creare Communications keep abreast of all changes to the Google Algorithm and can rest assured we have taken the appropriate action regarding this.

Many people often wonder why all credible Search Engine Optimisation companies charge on going fees, I mean what else is there to do once the sites position has been achieved for its keyphrases?

The answer of course is that it takes a lot of effort to get a site listed for a competitive key phrase and just as much effort keeping it there.  Not many non optimisers are aware that Google continually changes its algorithms and that it is continually revaluating a sites relevancy and trustworthiness to appear for the phrase it has been optimised for.  In short a lot of work has to be done to keep a site listed for its key phrases. The thing most people don’t understand is that that most work that is done to keep a site listed in Google can not be seen within the site.  Without the skills of an optimisation company no site will keep it’s position for long if it just has a one off effort for optimisation and is why ongoing optimisation fees pay dividends in the long run.