Feb 20
0

What Effects My Website Ranking

By | SEO Birmingham, Web Design Birmingham | No Comments

There are so many aspects of a web site that can decrease or boost your search engine rankings. Each web site is as unique as DNA and as such, will react differently to different marketing treatments.

What are these different factors that go into your SEO Pricing and your web site’s ranking? Here is a list of the most important aspects:

1. The State of Your Site Prior to the Optimization – Your web site can have many different attributes that contribute to its ability to rank well or not so well. Your site’s PageRank for example, if your PR is a 0/10 or 1/10, it’s going to take a lot longer and a lot more work to get your site ranking well. If your site is poorly designed, contains frames or is written entirely in Flash, a lot of work will be required to redesign your site so that it is search engine friendly. If your site has very few incoming links, a fair amount of link development will have to be done in order for you to see the rankings and traffic you’re after. A web site that has been around for a while and developed its PageRank, has a search engine friendly design and obtains links on a frequent basis, will be able to reach top positions much faster than other sites, once an optimization campaign is under way.

2. The Keywords You Are Targeting – Some keywords are less competitive than others. If you search Google for a keyword or keyword phrase, you’ll see at the top of the results how many web pages are listed in those results. That is the amount of web sites that are competing with yours to reach top page placement for that keyword or keyword phrase. For example, the keyword phrase “web design” has approximately 303 million web pages listed in the results.

This is why you must choose keywords wisely. With tools such as wordtracker.com, you can find out approximately how many searches are performed for a given keyword or keyword phrase. The more competitive those keywords are, the higher the cost will be to optimize your web site and the longer the optimization will take.

3. The Size of Your Target Market – If your site is targeting a global market, it will take a lot more effort to reach the top ten search results than if your site is targeting a regional market. It also depends on what sort of market you’re targeting. If your site sells a product that only a small group of people will be interested in purchasing, your site will be optimized easier than if the product or service appealed to the global population. For instance, the keyword phrase “real estate” will require a lot more effort to reach top page placement for than “real estate canada” and even “real estate vancouver”.

4. Competitor Sites’ SEO Campaigns – You might find that once your optimization campaign is under way, your site jumps and slips and jumps and slips several times. This can be due to many things, but the one we’ll look at is your competitors’ sites SEO campaigns. If your competitors are aggressively optimizing their own sites for search engines, they can also be achieving new rankings and displacing your site. This brings us to our 5th and final point…

5. Your Own SEO and Link Development Campaign – Your own link development and SEO campaign should be thorough, covering all the aspects of a well optimized site and utilizing all your resources for obtaining incoming links. If your SEO campaign isn’t approached properly, your competitors can surpass you in the rankings easily. You must be aware of your competition and adjust your efforts accordingly.

As you can see, there are many, many things that make your site unique in the services it requires. Some sites can reach top page placement by just changing a title tag, while others wait 6 months to even be listed on Google. The bottom line is, educate yourself, ask questions, choose the right SEO company and be patient. In time, your top page placement will come.

For more information about what could be affecting your website ranking, feel free to contact us at get a free report about your website.

Jan 22
0

How to View Adobe Photoshop PSD Thumbnails in Windows XP Win 7 Explorer

By | Web Design Birmingham | No Comments

For those who used Photoshop 7, and have since moved up to photoshop CS-2-3 or 4 will probably be missing the abilit to view PSD thumbnails within Windows XP or Winsows Windows 7.  Adobe has removed this feature as it would prefer you use its built in browser. However when you design website for a living you have 1000s of PSD files on your computer. Having to use the primitive Adobe browser just doesn’t cut the mustard.

The Adobe PSD Thumbnail View Solution

The solution is very simple and takes less than a minute to implement. You don’t even need to reboot Windows. The change is immediate.

  • Go to ‘Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System Restore’ and follow the instructions to create a system restore point. In the unlikely event things go wrong, come back to this menu to undo any changes you’ve a made
  • Download and open the file, photoshop_tpsd thumbnails Viewer Hack
  • Copy psicon.dll to C:Program FilesCommon FilesAdobeShell – if this folder doesn’t exist create it
  • Run Adobe.reg (double click on it )
  • You now can view PSD files in Thumbnails view within Windows Explorer.
  • When in the folder where the .PSD files are, Make sure that you select thumbnails from the views drop-down, or you may still see the icon as before.

 

Jan 19
0

How to View Adobe Illustrator AI Thumbnails in Windows XP/7 Explorer

By | Web Design Birmingham | No Comments

As a website designer its always good to be able to view the photoshop and illustrator files within windows. Adobe being adobe they want you to use their built in file viewer. That’s ok when your a new company and only have a few files. However when you have 1000s of loyal website design and design for print customers you cant afford to archive projects away as you know that you will only need to access them in a matter of days.

Any way ,  I thought it would be great if you could also see  Illustrator thumbnails in a folder.

  1. Download and open the file, illustrator_thumbnails.zip (92kb)
  2. Copy aiicon.dll to C:Program FilesCommon FilesAdobeShell – if the folder “shell”  doesn’t exist create it
  3. Run AI_Thumb.reg (double click on it )
  4. You now can view Adobe Illustrator (AI)  files in Thumbnails view within Windows Explorer.
  5. When in the folder where the .AI files are, Make sure that you select thumbnails from the views drop-down, or you may still see the icon as before.
Sep 06
0

Beware! Malware has been found to be redirecting to Google’s Search Results.

By | SEO Birmingham | No Comments

Do a search on Google, and you might get an unexpected surprise. A warning notice at the top of your results is warning you that your computer has been infected with malware. The screenshot below shows an example of this happening from a simple search.
SEO Birmingham Search Engine Optimisation

This problem has been causing concern, with the source and type of malware not being given within the details. Google blogs:

This particular malware causes infected computers to send traffic to Google through a small number of intermediatary servers called “proxies”. We hope that by taking steps to notify users whose traffic is coming through these proxies, we can help them update their antivirus software and remove the infections.

This is malware and so un-wanted and potentially threatening, menacing enough that Google are giving search results warnings, but Google is describing the problem itself as an exercise in data analysis. The posted blog doesn’t confirm that the malware is, of course, only a threat to Windows systems and neither does the help page make that clear. The option to ‘Fix’ the problem is merely a suggestion that the user should run an anti-virus program, but without telling the user what malware the anti-virus should be detecting.

If you do get one of these warnings on your computer (running Windows) and don’t already have anti-virus software, it would be a sensible time to get yourself some and run it through your system. However it would also be a little more helpful if Google provided some more details on the type of malware present.

Google, when asked about further information have mentioned;

“We detected a large number of variants of the malware. As a result, naming is not so straight-forward. From a user’s perspective, it is more important to understand their computer is infected and that they should take steps to fix it. You may have noticed that there is a feedback form in our help center for people to report what they have found.”

Therefore as a base procedure get yourself some decent anti-virus software if you own and operate a Windows computer. Malware isn’t new, nor have users of Windows computers been oblivious to it. Indeed, Windows itself will warn you of the need to protect against malware in various ways. I’m pretty sure Windows 7 at least warns you if you don’t have any anti-virus software installed. Get some and post your results to Google if this problem occurs, hopefully this will help clear up the problem efficiently and quickly.

Sep 06
0

In latest test AdWords appear at bottom of SERPSs.

By | SEO Birmingham | No Comments

It appears that recently Google has been testing a new AdWords placement at he bottom of search engine results pages. Some search engine users have spotted this testing and in the below example there where four AdWords at the bottom of the search results.

SEO BirminghamThe search engine giant is constantly testing new ad placements and formats in an effort to improve its response to certain search criteria. These test are usually shown to a small demographic to begin with and successful ones are eventually rolled out to the general public. If you spot any of these tests please keep us posted.