With the numerous Panda updates from Google in 2011, it’s been an interesting year, the seo forums have been echoing with cries of “why has my site dropped from the search results”, the answer usually being something to do with how they have had large amounts of duplicate content across their domains, sometimes intentional, as with those who spin articles to bolster their content, but also sometimes for those who simply did it by accident.

The general upshot being that many old school techniques simply do not work any longer, there are still plenty of companies out there offering spinning and submission services, although there are still some offering search engine submission services, which have been worthless for many years now (because the search engines will find you site anyway through the links pointing towards it, and if it doesn’t have them, it’s not going to rank anyway, just in case you were wondering!)

The ever increasing number of seo blogs out there are keeping increasingly up to date with the latest news about what does and doesn’t work in this fast changing environment. Whilst I’m on the subject WordPress blogs still seem a firm favourite with Google even though many of them aren’t really worth reading, but I guess it’s also used by many which do contain great high quality content, so I expect that will continue for a while.

Personally the thing I find most surprising is that Google (I always talk about Google as they send me the most traffic, as soon as Bleko, Bing or Ask do, I will talk about them instead) still p[lace so much emphasis on exact match domain names, it does look like it has lost a little weight over the last year, but it’s certainly still a major factor in the ranking algorithm.

The seo software companies have also stepped up their game, the seomoz tools have been constantly improved and a lot of new products are entering the market, some good, some bad and some are just a complete waste of money.

So it’s going to be an interesting year next year, I expect social media will become a bit more of a focus.

1. The title tags had the company name at the start and some were too long.

2. some prime pages had no text on them, so weren’t even in googles cache.

3. The h1 tag was the same on every page of the website.

Now whilst those issues in themselves do not indicate that keyword research had or hadn’t been done, the fact that all 3 were lacking would  indicate that it hasn’t. The poor guy had paid 2 separate seo firms to do work for him too.

Anyway the point of this is to stress how important it is to do your keyword research right at the start of a project. If you don’t, there is no way of making sure that all the hard work you do isn’t going to be completely wasted.

The w3c consortium develops standards for internet technologies, they offer tools for website designers and web-masters to parse their code and check for errors, this is an important stage of website designing, as correct coding on the pages is believed to be an element of the search engines algorithm, although nobody is sure of this. That being said, having correct coding on pages is a good way to know that all web browsers will display your pages in the way it was designed to show.

When establishing an on-line shop there are certain rules which must be followed, these relate specifically to on-line retailing and the use of certain payment providers.  We can help you to make sure that your site is compliant.

Also, dependant on what industry you are in, there may be specific rules, or best practices regarding availability of content for users who, for example, are partially sighted, again, we as a uk design and seo company, can help you to make it display correctly for each type of site visitor you expect to attract.