3 ways to pick your domain name.
You could buy as many domains as you need on for services, one for name, one for location and then use a domain re-direction point them to your site. However think about this before you do it, the more you buy the more links you’ll need to build for each name. Also do you want to be in competition with yourself? If you do buy extra domain names, then you will need to create 301 redirection to direct them to you site so that only one version of your site is visible to search engines, or you’ll end up with duplicate content which is another SEO NO-No.
Now We Are Do Follow.
Ok I know there’s mainly only me on here for now but in case you do want to leave me a comment, I have made Pippas web DIY SEO a do follow site.
What does this mean for you?
If you leave a comment after an of my posts you can opt to leave a web address / a link to your site, which will count favourably in Google eyes.
Yes the option to add a link was there before, but now the link will be given a little bit more influence from Googles point of view.
How to make a Blogger / blogspot site Do Follow.
The default setting of any blogger blog is to make it a nofollow. However to change the blog is surprisingly easy.
1. Go to Design and click Edit HTML.
2. Tick Expand Widget Templates.
3. Search for ‘NoFollow.’ On your key board press CTRL + F (short key) or click on the edit button on your tool bar next to file, then scroll down to Find. You will find at least two of them in the code.
4. Remove just the words “rel=”nofollow”” from the tag
<a expr:href="data:comment.authorUrl" href="" rel="’nofollow’><comment.author"> </comment.author></a>
5. The second nofollow attribute is for tracing sites that link to your post.
<a expr:href="data:backlink.url" href="" rel="nofollow"><backlink.title></backlink.title></a>
You can make these links dofollow or leave a no follow, it’s completely optional.
6. Save the template. Close and reopen your blog and check comments. Congratulations you are now DO Follow too.
Why not leave a comment to celebrate.
To see how Pippasweb could help your business, check us out.
5 thing to consider when naming your new business
It’s January a New Year, New Year, maybe a New company?
So you’ve decided to launch a new company. A company name is likely to be the first thing a potential clients knows about you and what you offer, so picking just the right name is important, here are a few things to consider when choosing the name.
1) Make it memorable, you want you potential clients to remember your business name, for example the name Cuts for a hairdresser is pretty common but it”s you’d remember it quickly. However be careful with unusual or difficult spelling. If the client goes to find you in the phone book, or even Google your name, would they be able to still find you or would the spelling of your company make you too difficult to find.
2) A positive response when a client reads / hears the name of your company they’ll automatically try visualize something about the company, a company name that allows this for example pampered pets, would be more memorable than for example shizam. You need to find a name that gives the potential client a positive impression or feeling rather than a negative one. For example cosy toes gives a more positive impression than cold feet.
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| Make your business name something visual and positive. |
3) Future Expansion, if you make earrings and call your self Red earrings, what happens in the future if you want to expand to other items of jewelry.
4) Domain name, Do a search on Google, check for other companies with the same or similar name? From an SEO point of view consider using a keyword that you will want your company to be found using Google, for example if you’re going to sell books, then you’ll want it somewhere in the company and domain name. Check if the domain name you would want is still available.
5) Sound it out and write it down some times when words are said or written down next to each other they create new words or sounds that will for Example Low hypnotherapy when written as a domain name lowhypnotherapy with the new word of why?
Ask the opinion of friends, and family. At the end of the day go with your gut feeling, if you like / don’t like it see where it takes you.
So what was your thinking when you chose the name of your business, why not leave me a comment and share? All the best with your new venture.
To see how Pippasweb could help your business, check us out.
Link building and Page Rank
When creating links to your sites, it’s generally accepted that you want to be looking for site relevance and the higher the pages Google page rank the more influence it has.
However Google must be working on a new plan, and it’s still anyones guess what it’ll involve.
Normally Google update sites page ranks approx every 3-4 months, but this year there’s not been an update since April 2010. So SEO experts and users are going to have to re-think their approach. At the end of a the day a link is a link. Some have more sway than others, but I find a balance of links works better than all perfect, do follow, high ranking.
links.
So for now just build your links and watch this space.
To see how Pippasweb could help your business, check us out.
Broken links and Sitemaps
During a quiet Sunday I was working through some background checks on my own website to make sure things were all running smoothly and I came across two useful sites.
The first is a Broken link checker, it checks both internal and external links to ensure all your links are to active pages.
So Why check bad links ?
Bad links are bad for users, they may take people away from your site totally and they may be left in link limbo.
If you go to a site and the links don’t go to where they’re supposed to, does this give you a good or bad impression of the care given to the site.
But the big one is search engines like Google crawl through sites using the links, and finding dead ends will count against your site.
How to check for broken links?
There are many different site that offer this service but I came across this one http://www.web-site-map.com.
I liked this one because
1) it worked through the full domain, no need to go page by page, which some of the ones I looked at today did.
2) It listed only the links that had a problem, some listed every link and I needed to scroll through to find any issues.
The second tool which is very useful from a search engine point of view is the site map. The site map of a site uses links to show the layout of the site, and then the spiders that crawl the sites for Google can crawl your site accordingly. They are particularly useful if you’ve got a new site, or added pages, or made changes to your sites structure.
1) go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com
2) Enter your web site url.
3)Change frequency, how often do you update your site?, weekly monthly?, yearly? Or you can just leave this set to none.
4) Last modification, when was the last change made to the site. set the date .
5) Set the priority, The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on the same site.
6) click start
7) Click on the link to download the file and save on your computer.
FTP the xml file onto the root file of your website.
9) log into Google webmaster tools > Site configuration > Sitemaps
10) Add the address where you uploaded the sitemap and submit.
11) To submit to Bing.com copy and paste url into address bar of your browser
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml
12)Change “www.YourWebAddress.com” to your domain name
13)Press ENTER
So how did you spend your Sunday?
Happy Customer – Bright Eyes Pet sitting
Let me introduce you to Bright Eyes Pet Sitting run by Sue & Joan.
Bright Eyes Pet sitting offers pet sitting and dog walking services between Bromsgrove & Hagley . Caring for a range of animals including, horses, cat, dogs and small animals. Pippas Web designed their website earlier this year, when they launched their new company.
This is what Sue has to say.
“We are delighted with the website that Pippa has designed or use. Its an easy to use, informative and eye catching website. In fact the various links and wording that Pippa incorporated gave use our first customers within week one of going live. The customer base has grown month on month since the creation of the website. We want our website to evolve as time goes on and this is being left in Pippa’s very capable hands.”
On Google – Nov 2010 Bright eyes currently occupies 2nd, 7th and 9th position for “pet sitting bromsgrove” from over 4000 sites.
Customer: Sue & Joan – Bright Eyes Pet Sitting.
Service: Original site design and some inital SEO.
Site: http://www.brighteyespetsitting.co.uk
To see how Pippasweb could help your business, check us out.
Happy Customer – OvenMagic
Having relocated in the summer I needed to change my sites SEO to Stafford
as part of this on going project in betwen client work I have also been asking for some reviews from some of my clients on Google places to let others know what my clients think of me. I am pleased to say that several responded so I would like to share them on my blog over the next few posts.
Let me introduce you to OvenMagic run by Kevin Kemp.
Oven Magic is an oven cleaning company based Droitwich, Worcestershire.
Cleaning residential and commercial oven, hobs and ranges in Worcestershire and south Birmingham. Making greasy, dirty ovens, sparkle again like new.
Kevin had a site that he’d launched early last year and wanted some SEO work carrying out. Having re-coded his site into CSS rather than it’s original table format making it easier to make future changes.
This is what Kevin had to say about my work.
“Oven Magic would like to thank Pippasweb for the continued support with the www.ovenmagic.me web site on keeping it at page One on google in the worcestershire area for all of 2010. Pippa has given me a better understanding of how seo works and i would without hesitation recommend pippas web service to any start up company looking for affordable seo. pippa has also up dated my web site with a super fast turn round time thank you pippa”
As Kevin said for most locations in his target area for the term “Oven Cleaning” he is on the 1st page of results and for “oven cleaning Worcester” as of Nov 2010 he actually occupied the No1# slot from over 53,000 results.
Customer: Kevin Kemp – OvenMagic.
Service: SEO and site Maintenance.
Site: http://www.ovenmagic.me
To see how Pippasweb could help your business, check us out.
Who is your site for?
When designing your website (whether you are doing it yourself or getting someone else to do it for you), it is important to consider who your site is for and what is it’s purpose.
I’m guessing the answer will be your site is to attract customers, but who are your customers, and what do they want.
For example are you selling to business to business, providing information that organisations, councils etc might want to read, or directly to the client. The style of the site could possibly reflect the content, for example if you’re providing something to help people relax, for example hypnotherapy etc then a calming style to your site. Sites do look good when kept simple and spacious, however you still need to ensure that all the relevant content is present. Google relies on content to help it decide your keywords and when to return your site in the results. Therefore the more information you put onto your site, will only help.
The balance you need to find is keeping the content user-friendly for the people reading your site and using the relevant keywords in the relevant places for search engines to find you too. Remember your site may look aesthetically pleasing but unless you have the information your users are looking for, or using keywords for search engines then it’s unlikely to be found by your potential buyers, site users.
To see how Pippasweb could help your business, check us out.
Feedburner Email Subscription
When I started this blog I and set it up I was just learning, and made a few errors. Ideally of course the blog should be on my main Site but never mind. Another problem I should have sorted out which has now been rectified was email subscription.
Blogger allows you to add a email subscription widget, what it didn’t say was I had to log into Feedburner.com and regsiter etc. So for months the widget sat on the blog, not doing a lot. Then while tryign to restart my personal one I worked out what you need to do.
So the easiest way to allow people to get an email reminder when you post to your blog is to login into Feedburner and do the below.
1) Go to my feeds
2) Add blog address in the box that says burn a feed right this instant. (tick box if it’s a podcast). and click Next.
3)Check with your blog for the address of the feed, for example blogs on blog spot look something like this. http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss. Go Back to feedburner and complete the blog title and the feed address. Click Next.
4) Select what Stats you want it to give you about the number of people who subscribe to your site via email etc.
5)Got to publicize and email abusscrition.
6) Select Activate
7)Copy the html code and apply it using html widget on your web site.
If you like this post and want to know when others are added the pick one of the subscription methods on the side. The simplest being adding you’re email to the box, and you’ll be notified whenever I add to my blog.
Cheers.
Check out how Pippas Web could help your business
The Advantages of Professional Web Design vs Doing it Yourself
You’ve probably got ideas running through your head about what you want to go on YOUR site, but the next choice is, who will create your site?
The two options
1) Hire someone to create your site.
2) Do it yourself.
OK firstly lets look at the idea of you creating your site.
There are many sites out there, that can help you to build without the need for learning any code, for example, http://www.doyourownsite.co.uk/ or http://www.webs.com/ or http://www.moonfruit.com/ .
Building your own site will Save you Money, and it will give you a great sense of achievement watching your site appear before you. However, depending on how you decide to create your site, you will need to learn about how to design a site, and then how to promote it afterwards, in order to make it work for you. A big positive is You can use your own ideas. You don’t have to try and explain to a web designer, how you want your site to look like.
Choosing a designer has its advantages.
You may have your ideas about what you want on the site and how you want it to look, but the designer has more experience about what does and doesn’t work. It sounds strange but just choosing a different site colour and logo could stop someone from leaving your site immediately, a designer can help with this.
Getting professional help may include SEO (search engine optimisation) preparing your site ready for Google and the other search engines to help get a better ranking. You can do this yourself, and my facebook page and this blog will offer ideas of you can, however it can be very time consuming so do you have the time?
OK so a designer will cost you money, and that amount may vary depending on who you get to do it. As with anything else I suggest you get some quotes. If you’re a new start up company or a sole trader then you budget is likely to be tight, (This is where Pippas Web comes in). So the cheaper option of doing it yourself may appeal, but weigh this up against the time it will take you, to learn to do and to promote your site. This is all time that may we be better spent doing what you know best, running your business, and let the designers do what they do.
