Web Design Company, Hampshire UK

Hi all,

I cant believe how fast the last 6 months have flown by. I have simply not had the time to keep the blog up to date but I thought I would pop by and let you know of the bits and bobs I have achieved over the last few months.

In the past, we (boxChilli – Web Design Hampshire) used pass our search engine marketing work out to third parties. This went ok for some time until about 6 months down the line, when we were notified that very little progress had been made with regards to positive movements of our clients websites on the search engine rankings. It was at this point that we realised that many of the techniques that we utilised on a day to day basis were in-fact very effective SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tools. We then expanded upon this basis through researching into how SEO was changing in today’s online environment.

The next step was to find a specialist who could strengthen the Click brand. This person came in the form of an SEO specialist with over 10 years experience. He is an industry leader and has worked successfully at a couple of large online businesses.

I then created the site. To do this we decided to use a static site (html) and then use a bolted on WordPress blog. Myself and Jonathan shared in the content writing.

At this point, we were ready to launch. Here is the site:

Click Digital Marketing – SEO in Hampshire

Hope you like it!

If you or anyone you know requires advice on how to be found more on search engines then please let us know. We offer an ongoing 10% commission on referrals and are happy to build blogs, create and publish articles and many other services.

One of the clients we are working with at the moment has asked us to help them improve their search engine rankings. To achieve this we have to utilise a variety of SEO techniques, one of which being the creation of a blog.
We currently use wordpress for this task as it provides an excellent blogging platform, due to the thousands of extensions, easy to use interface and the supportive community surrounding it.
As a web designer, the question you have to ask yourself on every project is, what is the most effective option for comleting the task in terms of time and quality constraints? This usually means using a pre-created template and re-skinning it. This solution means that the complex benefits of modern themes are already in place, rather than having to learn to create them from scratch.
So I had to build a blog quickly and to mirror the design of the client’s current site. This was so the blog could be bolted on.
Here follows a quick rundown of the steps I took to re-skin the blog.

Step1:
Look at the design of the site you are trying to mirror. So this means looking at the width, height and makeup of the divs. A good way to do this is to take a screen shot and paste it into Photoshop, you can then measure the parts. Then compare this to how the template you are going to be altering has it’s divs arranged.

Step2:

Start to test out how you can alter your template to the desired design using firebug http://getfirebug.com/. Once you are happy, copy and paste the css into the correct files within your theme editor.

Step3:
So you now have a page which structually mirrors the design but probably looks nothing like it. Go back to your screen shot and find out the colours that make up the site. Add these and all the required imagery.

Step4:
Now it is time for the navigation and footer. This can be made far easier by just copying the markup and code from the original site.
Navigate to the site and view source. Now find the html for the menu and copy the entire div. Open your header.php file and paste in the code. Refresh and you will see a version of the menu. Now go back to the original and using firebug, copy the css of all of the divs included within the menu. Copy this into your css files. And there we have it.

Repeat this for the footer.

And there we have it.

SEO is a sore point for many people. From those who own websites and view the top spot on google with envy, to those whose job it is to compete for that sought after position.

SEO can take a lot of work AND a lot of money to effectively manage, I will give you tips on how to avoid these issues.

The first and most important thing is to incorperate SEO into your site as you build and maintain it, not all at one go at the end. Google seems to take in to account how links are built and in what time frame. You may be penalised if your website goes live and within a week has 1000 backlinks, as this is obviously not organic growth. So it is best to build links in a structured manner.

ONSITE SEO hints and tips:

• Meta Tags

  Not as important as they used to be but still worth using. Work out 5 or 6 words or phrases which you would like to be displayed on google regarding.

• Good Content

As they say, ‘content is king’. Well written, regularly updated content which is written with keywords in mind, WILL improve your search     engine rankings.

• Keywords

A very important part of your SEO campaign. It is best to focus your SEO on 5 or 6 phrases otherwise your online presence may be diluted and you will not compete on any of your keywords.

• Htaccess and Robots.txt

Each search engine has robots who scan the web to find new and updated content. The easier it is for them to find your content, the quicker you will climb up the Google rankings. This is why links are so useful.

• Be Creative

Use your keywords effectively, for example, name your pictures as keywords and try to make use of the H1-H6 tags.

OFFSITE SEO hints and tips:

• Social Bookmarks

Make sure it is easy to bookmark your pages. Create accounts on Facebook, Twitter and any others you may use.

• Directory Submissions

High PR (Page Rank) blogs can really help you to build your online presence, however, it is better to have five PR 5+ links than one hundred  PR 0-1. Knowing this can save you a lot of time and effort.

• Blog Comments

Leaving blog posts on large, relevant blog sites can also help. Make sure they have a high PR.

• Adwords

Adwords provide you with a totally separate avenue of marketing for your site. Here you pay to have your site at the top of Google listings for certain keywords and this