1. Add your company to Google Local Business (the little map at the top of search results). Free to register & try putting your product or service in as the Company name!
2. Make sure that popular search keywords and associated terms are in the Page Description, copy and Page Title.
3, Adwords – bit of a cheat here, but you can quite often obtain a free voucher for Adwords campaign. Try ebay – usually a huge discount!
4. Make sure that the images on your site have relevant keyword names and ‘Alt’ tags. Good for Google Images results & SEO
5. No Flash navigation or ’splash pages’! Absolutely not
6. Use a Google Site Map – its Google-friendly, Accessibility-friendly and Blackberry-friendly. Its just SOOO friendly!
7. Make sure you have your contact details in the page footer – nobody uses Yellow Pages, (I don’t even know where our’s is) so your website is usually the first place to find where you are (quite often when I’m running late for a meeting)!
8. Keep the content refreshed. News or blog pages are a great way of updating, providing you have something interesting to say. Suggest weekly additions, and dont forget to keep them keyword-rich.
9. Try and obtain back(inbound) links from popular sites. If you issue media releases, make sure that they have your web address in.
10. Use Google analytics/stats package to monitor referring sites, search terms, popular pages etc. And keep an eye on the ‘bounce’ rate – a sure sign of something to improve if this starts to rise.

and, because we always try and give a bit extra…
11. DON’T believe the guarantees from telemarketing or spam SEO companies – Google doesn’t publish its algorithms, you don’t always know what your competitors strategy is, and Google themslves advise avoiding!

Any more tips, and you’ll have to pay me!

If you choose to have your website re-designed or built from scratch, there are a few things we need to find out. We recently found an excellent set of questions on woobzine.com. A fair few can be ignored due to your business size and/or location etc… The list tries to find out what exactly you expect and would like from your new/re-designed site. We like to know as much as possible about you and your business to make the most effective website for you. To check out the list click here. The list should give you an example of the sort of questions we might ask and could give you some questions for us.

Ever wanted a Google Map integrated into website? Seeven Communications have found a way to embedd the map and add your company logo into your website.

1. Firstly you will need a Google Maps API code – http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

2. Add the following code before the </head> tags of your html and replace ‘KEY‘ with your Google API code:
<script src=”http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2&sensor=false&key=KEY” type=”text/javascript”></script>

3. Paste this javascript code before the </head> tags of your html:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
function initialize() {
if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById(”map_canvas”));
map.setCenter(new GLatLng(LAT, LONG), ZOOM);
map.setMapType(G_NORMAL_MAP);
map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl());
var marker = new GMarker(new GLatLng(LAT, LONG));
map.addOverlay(marker);
var html=”<img src=’map_logo.gif‘” + “width=’165′ height=’60′/> <br/>” + “We are here!”;
marker.openInfoWindowHtml(html);
}
}
</script>

You will need to replace LAT and LONG with the latitude and longitude of your location – This can be done by first visiting http://maps.google.co.uk/ and finding your local area through the ‘Search Maps’ button. When you are happy with your map position double-click over the location you require the coordinates for and the map will centralize on that point. Retrieve the latitude and longitude coordinates by clicking on ‘Link’ in the top right hand corner and noting them from the URL that is displayed. They should look something like (53.406667, -2.152899). The ZOOM is how zoomed in the map is – the values range from 0-17 – we tend to use either 16 or 17. ‘map_logo.gif‘ refers to your logo name and location.

4. Relpace your <body> tag with this: <body onload=”initialize()” onunload=”GUnload()”>

5. Add this code where you want your map: <div id=”map_canvas” style=”width: 500px; height: 500px”></div> you can edit the size of the map by altering the width and height values.

And thats it! Many thanks to justfigures for additional help

Useful? Questions? Comments? Let us know below!

At Seven Communications we test all our websites in multiple browsers and version variations to make sure there are no bugs. The testing process begins with Mozilla Firefox (something that we highly recommend), occasionally have to make small tweaks or hacks so that the websites work in all browsers.

I recently came across an error that was specific to Internet Explorer 8 (Microsofts latest version). The solution? to force Internet Explorer to use the IE7 rendering engine! just paste the code below after the < head > tag in your html. (remember remove the space before meta)

< meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

Big thanks to Ironpaper

Calling all web design and SEO companies, Google have updated their page ranks again. There was a page rank update in April of this year as well which begs the question why has it happened now. It is thought page rank is changed every quarter, although this is an average and comes from the fact it is usually updated 4 times a year. Hopefully this will mean the page rank will be update more often and all us SEO experts/Web designers can see the results of our hard work more often.