Winning Inch provide professional SEO services to Cirencester based companies.

Large and small companies need to expand into new markets in order to support a growth plan.  This poses a problem for most organisations who want to maintain a local presence as well achieve growth further afield.

Using the Internet is probably the simplest, most effective and affordable, way of segmenting your market with messaging that target both local and new markets.

SEO / Internet marketing is a really effective tool with a good return on investment.  Call Winning Inch your local SEO Cirencester company on 01285 711699.

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SEO tips – Avoid hidden text

Using similar colours for backgrounds and text can lead to problems of hidden text. You should avoid the risk altogether by using colours high contrast. Black and white is the format that we have become most familiar with from books, newspapers etc. That is not to say that it is the only options but care should be taken to ensure that you content can be read by everyone.

From a search engine point of view. Hidden text used to be a way of stuffing a page with keywords / links that could not be seen by the viewer but could be read search engines. As a result search engines are highly tuned to specifically omit content where it finds or suspects that hidden text is present.

So if you want to use white with off white or grey on grey for design purposes make sure it is an image to avoid being penalised.

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Twitter seems to be struggling under the weight of it’s own success. Leaving millions of Twitterers frustrated.

Twitter’s over capacity not only prevents access to the site directly but the Twitter feeds as well. Leaving blank spaces in website’s that should contain recent tweets and links to relevant information.

We do not have any answers so this post is just sharing the frustration that everyone else is feeling! So a plea to Twitter “scale up to meet demand”… Thank you

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Google page rank demise

many people have witnessed the shake up over page positions in search results. Top search result positions used to belong to the website who had the highest page rank. It is this reason that link strategies played such an important role in SEO. Well looks like those days are gone and good riddens to it.

Apart from building shady business finding clever ways to buy and sell links, relentless “link to me” requests and of course blog / forum and other social networking spamming. The page rank system prevented new businesses and entrepreneurs from gaining any value from the Internet. It can take years to build a solid page rank naturally which does not really support the needs of new and small businesses.

The “welcomed” shift to content relevancy to search keywords is like a breath of fresh air. Relevancy is focused on your website’s content and meeting the needs of people searching for the content you offer.

It is too early to tell of this is a permanent change in direction or part of the Google caffeine roll out short term. But it does support trends in social networking. Most sites like Twitter, facebook etc use either “nofollow” or redirect links to avoid passing on “link juice” that would build page rank. The reason they do this is stop link spamming diluting true content with rubbish.

Social networks are vitally important. But rather than simply being a popularity contest the emphasis should be on driving traffic to your website.

So have we seen the demise of Google page rank. I hope so as it levels the playing for those just starting out as well as established website’s. Isn’t that the reason the Internet became so popular?

Filed under: News, SEO, website design by Kev
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Website maintenance and update services from Winning Inch.

Winning Inch is pleased to announce new Website maintenance and update services.  From January 2010 you can use Winning Inch as your virtual website team.

The service will provide for ad hoc updates to text / images to existing website pages for just £50.00 per hour.   For contract client’s (40 hours or more per month) this rate reduces to £12.00.

Updates can be sent via e-mail, cd-rom or usb sticks or transferred directly via our own “instant chat” facility.  This dedicated service means that you are directly linked to your virtual team at  Winning Inch anywhere you have an Internet connection.  Just connect, tell us what you want and will make it happen in under 24 hours.

Read more for full pricing…

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Google China threatened to pull out of the region earlier this week.  The reason was hacking into human rights activists Google  e-mail accounts.

It now appears that a security weakness in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was at the root of the problem.  Apparently a fix is now planned but until then you can overcome the weakness by setting your “security zone” to high.

The computer attacks exploiting this weakness was targeted at Google and 20 other companies.  For Google it sparked off threats of pulling out of China all together who are already compromised by being forced to censor search results.

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SEO positioning Improve your website by 40%

1. Keyword use in document title. Open each of the top 10 and note the page title. This appears right at the very top of the browser window on the left hand side. Make a note of how the keyword has been used and how many other words are used.  Then modify your page title to ensure your keyword is present with a similar amount of text.  This must be unique so do not copy.
2. Global link popularity. Copy the URL of the top 10 competitors into the Google search box. But put “link:” into the search box before the URL i.e. link:bbc.com and repeat the process for all 10 competitors, plus of course your website, making a note of the number of links per website.
3. Link text of inbound links. This is covered in more detail later.
4. Keyword use in body text. This is relatively straightforward. Open the competitor’s home page and hold the control key and press “f”. This will bring up the browser search bar, enter the keyword and count the number of times it appears. Also calculate a rough proportion / percent of other text it will probably be in the region of 10-30% keyword density.

Having now done the homework on the most important part you should  now:

1. Ensure that your document title contains your keyword in a unique sentence of about the same length and density as the average for the top 10.
2. Take the average of all 10 will tell you the minimum number of links you will need for your home page. Be very careful when link building. This, by far, is best done via social networking sites like MySpace, YouTube, Blogger, Twitter, Digg etc. Do not pay for links and do not join a backlink exchange. These will do more harm than good. You can also use directory services these are often free but make sure they do not use “no follow” on their links to you.
3. Where you have links make sure that the link text includes your keyword. If you are familiar with this (HTML) your text link should look like this<a href=”http://www.services-web-design.co.uk” title=”website optimisation” target=”_blank>Website optimisation by Services Web Design</a>  which when viewed by a browser looks like this Website optimisation by Services Web Design Oh and if you appreciate this article please copy and add this link to your website or blog (thanks).
4. Keyword in body text use the same pattern, again make the content totally unique, including roughly the same amount of text in proportion to the number of times you repeat your keyword.

These 4 steps alone will help to improve your website position for the keyword by up to 40% but will have a larger impact on your website’s performance.
.: back to SEO Positioning :.  .: Forward to Essential – 25% weighting :.

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SEO positioning Improve your website by 15%

15% website optimisation section

1. Keyword use in same domain links. See  20% section point 1.
2. Keyword use in meta description. Meta tags refer to messages for search engines. Not many use them but for completeness it may be worth seeing of any of your top 10 use them. If they do it is probably a good idea for you to as well. Meta tags sit in the head of your website page. Copy the tags from a competitor and the content between each < > with your own content using keywords were appropriate.
3. Number of trailing slashes in URL. Trailing slashes defines a sub directory. Yourwebsite.co.uk is the top level and should have no other “/” or “.” In the main url. If you have then your website is part of another website and you should get your own url and hosting. The location of your home page should be yourwebsite.co.uk/index.html. Search engines gives more importance to web pages at this level. A sub directory would look like this yourwebsite.co.uk/subdirectory/webpage.html. Because there are 2 “trailing slashes” the pages at this level are view as less important. If you have content, that is important, you need to move these pages to the top level.
4. HTML validation of web page to W3C standards. The Worldwide Web Consortium is the body that defines how web pages are viewed. There is a standard set of guidelines that is used by web designers and web browser vendors. This means that regardless of technology everyone can view your website in exactly the same way as everyone else. This important as we have people using both old and new technology and the visually impaired need to be able to adjust text size so that the content can be read. Any non conformant website is automatically penalised versus a compliant website. To check your website, for free, go to W3C and enter your website address. The report is instant.
5. Readability level of web page. Readability score is based on the Flesch guidelines for readability. You can check your content either in a word processor or test it by going here
6. Keyword use in meta keywords. As per 2 above. If it exists in your competitors probably goof to have it too.
7. Keyword use in the first sentence of the body text. This is good practice and better to be at the beginning of the first sentence.
8. Factors that could prevent your top ranking. You can do everything above and still fail at this point. These are the DON’Ts like. Do not copy content everything must be original and that goes for your page titles and content. Don’t spam the search engine by repeating your keyword over and over again. That is why it is important to view your competitor’s keyword to content ratio. However, as a guideline do not exceed a keyword to text ratio of 30%. Do not get involved with link exchange websites or pay xx number of links. This will get you black listed and you will not appear on that search engine for a long time. Follow this link for the full webmaster guidelines.

Filed under: SEO by Kev
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SEO positioning Improve your website by 25%

1. There is nothing you can do about the age of your website if it is younger. But whilst “tenure” does count so too does an active website. Look at the competitor’s website what does it offer? Newsfeed, blog feed, Twitter feed, rotating banner, call back or contact form, live help or an area where the data changes frequently. Search engines likes change and an active website is far more interesting than a tired same old same old website. So ensure that you incorporate activity into your website.
2. Heading 1 tag. This relates to headline text it refers to an HTML tag of &lt;h1&gt; this is the largest font size and is used to indicate the most important information. Another free tip. When viewing a web page the underlying code is there too. To see it go to your browser “view” menu and select either “source” or “page source”. OK it is not so pretty and very confusing to look at. But every web page is made in pretty much the same way. So look at it again and, or use Control + f, to find “&lt;h1&gt;” just after this is the actual headline text. So look to see how the keyword is used and as before recreate it using your own words but use about the same amount of text including your keyword.

So now we should have improved your website position by 55-65%. It is at this point that a reality check is needed. The results of what you do now can take 3-6 months before you notice a change. It can be quicker and will work for all search engines. But they are in control and with billions of web pages to index they may take time to fully re-index yours. You can help them by submitting your website, by hand, do not use an automated system this will have a contrary effect. And submit a site map. I will come back to this later.
The above section and the 40% section are the big ones so the work you have now put in will have a very positive impact on your website position. But do not stop now as there are still some “gotchas” ahead.

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SEO positioning Improve your website by 20%

1. Keyword use in domain name. This is useful as it places your keyword into every link you have. So if you have a domain that reflects your trading name i.e. bloggandson.com (see article “Is your website working for you?”) then it will not be working for you. Whereas www.cirencester_builder.co.uk will help you because it defines what you and where you do it.
2. Keyword use in page URL. This works in the same way as 25% point 3 above and relates your web page names. Using the scenario from above (and content from an earlier post) we start with a base URL of www.cirencester-builders.co.uk. Your home page will always be same i.e. index.html so the full address to your home page is (to a machine) www.cirencester-builders.co.uk/index.html. But let’s say that you are a building company and you build conservatories. It would be a great idea to call that page “conservatories.html” because you have then nested keywords i.e. www.cirencester-builders.co.uk/conservatories.html. Take out the address details and you have a keyword of “Cirencester builders conservatories”. Far more useful that www.bloggandson.com/page2.html.
3. Links from social networks. Social networks is more important than this position in optimisation indicates. It is number 9 because you create it. But used successfully it can have a bigger impact. For example. Twitter gives you 140 characters, pretty much the same as an SMS message, so we use this as an alert. My twit may be “How to optimise your website in real life http://winninginch.co.uk/blog/index.html” This will hopefully get a few visitors to my blog page. If they like what is written they may link to it from their website. If they do my social networking link (ranked 9th) has now become a backlink ranked 2. So check your competition to see what they are using.
4. Page load time. Ever come across a website that take ages to load? Did you wait for it or just go somewhere else. I know that I would not wait as life is too short. Search engines are programmed to think the same way. If you have a lot of images make sure their file size is small. Web images are between 72 and 96 dots per inch (dpi) which matched screen resolution. Anything larger is just wasting bandwidth as the image will not look any better but it take longer to load. Especially for those who are stuck with a 56k modem connection. Yes there are still those who do not have broadband!
5. Keyword use in H2-H6 headline texts. This is pretty much the same as 25% point 2 above. Don’t over do it and in many cases unless you find it frequently in your top 10 (see how to in 6 above) do not use them at all.
6. Keyword use in IMG ALT attributes. When you add an image or Flash to your website you add an “alternative” description. This is designed to help those who may be visually impaired using a text to speech web reader instead. The reader will describe the image using the “alt” text. Using a keyword here is useful but the best way to see if it makes sense is to close your eyes and have someone read the alternative text to you.
7. Top level domain of web site. This relates to the latter part of the domain “.com”. Search engines take note of the extension and will often give preference of one over another (depending on where you are). Google UK will give preference to sites.co.uk for UK based searches and actually does it’s best by looking at your IP address. So for those who opt to limit searches to UK only will not need to do so quite so much in the future. Personally I stopped doing that about a year ago. If you have a .com and based in the UK get a .co.uk.
8. Keyword used in bold text. See 5 above.
9. Number of visitors. This one amuses me as it is a bit of ironic. If your website was in the top 10 you would have more visitors. Go figure. But specifically this relates to Alexa rank. Alexa measures your popularity by the number of visits you have. The best way to compare this is to go to Alexa and download their browser tool. This will give you a ranking for every website you visit as well as your top 10. The higher the number the lower your visits. So Google has an Alexa ranking of between 4 and 1 which is probably the highest in the world today. As a general rule for us mere mortals if you are in the top 100,000 you are doing exceptionally well. Anything above 1,000,000 is average for most. Following this guide will help you to increase traffic which will improve your Alexa ranking too.

Congratulations you have reached somewhere around 70-85% improvement for your website. From here on in these are nice to do’s. But important if you have not been able achieve one or more of the above.

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