Web Design & SEO Blog

It never ceases to amaze me at how little knowledge so called SEO companies are proud of spouting as part of their sales pitch. We received the following email that I think was supposed to encourage us to pick up the phone but instead had us in stitches. [Read On]

Yahoo! have just released Yahoo Search Assist in the US. It's another technology enabler that searches the Yahoo! results database and makes alternative suggestions while you type. The idea is a solid one and as average searchers become more 'search savy', more accurate results can be produced with more accurate search terms. [Read On]

As a business we've invested lots of time and money in extremely comprehensive enterprise web applications - an excellent coldfusion content management system, document management systems and e-learning engines. They look great and work even better and we're at a point now where we're considering the future of one of the technologies that we use. [Read On]

Having your site penalised in the biggest search engine in the world is no laughing matter. One day you can be ranking well for your most important key phrase and the next, you're gone, nowhere to be seen. A deep search may reveal you languishing around the 450 or even worse 950 mark and that means no one is ever going to find you. [Read On]

DMOZ, the Open Directory Project or ODP, has long been considered a valuable directory from which to get a link. The process of obtaining one is, in theory, straight forward; use the submit link on the most appropriate category, enter your site details and wait for your site to be reviewed by the category editor. And wait. And wait. And wait [Read On]

A re-evaluation request can see your site pop back into the index. If you think that you may have infringed the terms and conditions laid down by Google then this is your chance to own up and get things moving again. [Read On]

Google doesn't give much away which is part of what makes the challenge of ranking well all the more interesting. Because the search engine has so many pages indexed, it's tended to split its results across 2 indexes, one more relevant than the other. [Read On]

We've heard rumours for some time now that in order to keep its results in check, Google uses a team of human evaluators to check the results of its automated search algorithm. The numbers of people involved are unknown but speculation suggests that there are somewhere in the region of 10,000 people worldwide who belong to this team. [Read On]

There are sites hosted in countries out there which will scrape or cache your pages using proxy servers to store copies of those pages. Having copies of your pages available to search engines means that someone is going to suffer duplicate content penalties (loss of rankings) and for some very strange reason it appears that, particularly in Google, the original content is being penalised in favour of the proxy content. [Read On]

Your website is more than what your customers see. A well designed site also makes it easier for you and your employees to do business by providing a secure space for exchanging information, updating content, communicating with each other and streamlining procedures. Intranets and extranets are ways to securely share a central body of information and tools with all of your employees. [Read On]