Google’s so-called ‘sandbox’ is one of the search engine giant’s many tricks to ensure their results remain relevant and of good quality. While this is excellent news for those searching, it does present a potential pitfall for new sites. Newly hosted sites can be placed temporarily by Google in a ‘sandbox’ while their quality is ascertained. Release can take anything from a few days to a couple of months, causing a major loss of traffic to new sites. So how can you avoid the sandbox becoming a sandtrap?

Run a soft launch: Putting your website live a few pages at a time can help avoid the sandbox. Pages are indexed as they appear, so by the time the whole site goes live Google is familiar with much of the content and less likely to sandbox the site.

Use an existing domain: Using a domain name which is already familiar to Google can help you avoid the sandbox, meaning your site is available to your market far quicker. However, using an existing domain for a new business will greatly limit the addresses available and your branding opportunities. It is also potentially very expensive to acquire.

Choose your keywords carefully: It’s great to compete on popular keywords, but very difficult to make a high-rank. Competing on less popular keywords will secure you a higher ranking and make the site appear more relevant.

Content is king: As with so many parts of Google, if you provide what they’re looking for – excellent, relevant content – you’ll be left alone. Make sure your site contains high-quality, original content and it is likely to be released quicker, or avoid the sandbox altogether.

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With time being one of the business world’s most precious commodities, it is important that websites load quickly and completely – or you risk losing the prospective customer. As search engines like Google continue to develop their ranking algorithms, evidence is emerging that loading time is now included in their scoring systems. Consequently, how fast your site loads will have an impact on your site’s position in the search results.

The easiest and quickest way to reduce your loading time is to limit the number of web elements on each page. Elements include items such as scripts, images and any Flash components. Each element requires an http marker within the page’s code, creating http requests to the server for each component. The more elements you have, the more requests and the slower the page will load.

Ask yourself – for every piece of your webpage – what value does it add to my site, to my SEO and to my customers? If the answer is low or none, then cut it.

This doesn’t mean images should be avoided completely, but if they are essential, make sure they are optimised. Images should not be written into your code as they stand, but should be saved as suitable for web, with a screen-only resolution of 72 dpi and in GIF or PNG format. It also makes sense to resize the images so they reflect the size on screen.

For more information and advice on how to optimise your website design for the search engines, and ensure it loads in the shortest possible time, contact NSDesign for a free no-obligation consultation.

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It’s a question we hear a lot  – mainly from clients that we’re building a “first” website for.

Why is my website not in Google yet?  Something must be wrong…

While all us experts may laugh at the naivety of such a question, for many clients the relationship between Google and their site isn’t so obvious.  Many people think Google IS the web..  and that if a site isn’t on Google, it’s not on the web.

In reality – Websites do NOT enter google automatically…  They enter Google because Google Discovers them, and “indexes” them.  Until then, your website can be alive and well, but only discoverable by typing it directly into your web browsers address bar. 

In most cases, Google can take days, weeks, or months to “find” new websites, and so they won’t appear in Google until then.  You can speed this up in 3 ways..

1. Submit the site directly to Google.  See: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/submit_content.html
2. Signup to Google Webmaster Tools, and submit an actual “sitemap” for all the pages on your site.  See: http://www.google.com/webmasters/
3. Get other sites (which are already listed in Google) to link to your site.  Google will then “follow” that link next time it “spiders” the other site.

Doing any (or all) of the above should see your website  listed in the Google results within a few weeks at most…  Getting it listed HIGH UP the results pages depends on how optimised your site is for specific keywords and phrases.  Search Engine Optimisation and understanding search keywords is an effort in itself, but you should be able to easily cover the basics of SEO yourself.  We’re always here to help if you need us!

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If you are maintaining a website, you will have come across the term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is a fairly complicated and complex process of improving your website ranking (in search engines such as Google) and therefore increasing the number of visitors to your site. SEO may completely overwhelm you at first, but when broken down into sections you will find that the techniques are simple, easy to manage and produce excellent results.

Link building is a very important technique and one which will be sure to improve your ranking. It is the main process when you are looking to attract like-minded visitors in large numbers.  The rewards are tenfold; not only improving your ranking, but also ensuring your site becomes visible, recognised and credible to potential customers.

Basically, link building is a form of internet marketing, whereby you generate inbound links to your own website (from other sites). There are a number of ways to do this with the most popular being:

•    Reciprocal links with other sites, where two webmasters agree to show the other’s link on their website

•    Listing your site in online directories: a task which needs to be completed manually at first, but after a while, you will find that you are automatically listed in many online directories)

•    Placing content on blogs, forums and e-zines (either your own or other people’s)

Remember, that while link building can be time-consuming, it is a very easy technique which is still the most popular and efficient way to improve your website’s traffic and ranking in the search engines.

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Following on from the previous article about optimising your website or blog text, the keywords you choose to focus on are vital to the success of your website.

The wording should not only be relevant to your site, but also relevant to what potential customers are searching for. A good idea is to try and think like your customers. For example, if you sell fishing equipment then words such as ‘rods’, ‘lines’ and ‘bait’ as well as brand names of specific products will regularly be searched for.

Unfortunately there is no way round it; you will have to spend time researching the most popular words. One of the best starting points is very simple; enter a word/phrase into Google and see how many results come up. This will give you a good idea of how much competition there is for that certain phrase; if there are millions of results and the first page is dominated by big players, then it could be too competitive.

Top tips for choosing the best keywords:

•    Understand your customers and think about who you are targeting
•    It’s fine to be creative, but you also need to be choosy
•    Try not to use overly competitive keyword phrases
•    You will need both creativity and persistence

Finally, make sure you use your keywords in your meta data as well as in the titles and copy of each page.

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In order for your website or blog to increase its rankings in the search engines, you need to make sure that the words you use are what people are searching for; otherwise known as keywords.

While the design of your website may be impressive, it is useless unless traffic is driven to it. Unless people are actively looking for your company, it will be very hard to find without a good Google ranking. Words play an important part in achieving this.

There are tools to help you decide which keywords to use; the Google Adwords keyword tool, for example, will help you to find the most popular keywords used in relation to searches for your business category. Take these words and insert them into your text. However, don’t simply fill a paragraph with keywords as this will have a negative effect and your website could be classed as spam and therefore ignored by search engines.

The best advice is to use the keywords in your titles and weave them into your text in a natural way. Ultimately, the more pages or blogs you have, the more chance there is of one or more of them getting picked up by the major search engines.

This is a major element of on-site Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), alongside your meta data. SEO can be a minefield if you are unfamiliar with the techniques, but even tackling small tasks at a time will increase the overall ranking of your website.

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If you read our blog, you will understand how important blogging is; especially for small businesses. It keeps you in touch with your customer base and allows you to demonstrate your expertise.

If you are setting up a blog, read our recent article about blog domain names before you start and either sign up to a free blogsite using one of the more popular blog sites such as wordpress.com or contact us if you want help integrating a blog into your business website.

It can be a bit overwhelming at first, especially if you are not used to writing; but remember that your blog is there to keep in touch with customers, promote new products, advise your customers, improve your internet marketing and generally show a more social side to your company.

It’s important always to keep the blog relevant to your business and to write regular updates. This will ensure that search engines such as Google pick up on the blog and improve your overall ranking on the internet. The higher ranked your website/blog is, the more people will come across it when running internet searches.

Once you start blogging, you will find that it provides fresh content for your website and keeps customers coming back.  You are providing a free service for them while at the same time enhancing your own business.

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There’s one particular UK webhost that’s investing heavily in advertising right now, with a campaign claiming that server speed directly impacts your website’s effectiveness in Google, to the extent that Google actually penalises slow loading websites.

Personally, I’m not 100% convinced, and even if Google does pay attention to speed of the server (load speed of the page is another matter) then I’m sure it’s significance is minor compared to many other things I’d consider first if my SEO needed improving.

That said…  a fast loading website (helped by a fast server) is clearly an important thing – moreso for users looking to minimise the time they spend hunting down info or browsing for products/services to buy online. 

At NSDesign, we had a hunch that our servers were among the fatest in the UK, especially since we’re what you might call a “budget host” (at £25 for a standard shared linux host – we’re certainly in the “budget” price range), so we did a little research…

Independant “performance benchmarking” site www.webperf.net lists 170 UK Webhosts, and regularly tests their performance (measuring the Mean Rate in K/Sec – ie: the speed!).  We’re currently at a respectable position 16, well ahead of many of the major Hosting “giants” (the ones you see advertising full page in .NET magazine).  A quick check of the 15 hosts above us, and it’s no surprise that on average, most of these companies charge considerably more than us, with a few just specialising in providing high-end dedicated servers (no end-user hosting at all).

Something to proud of for certain, but how do we compare to the uk host that’s claiming to be so fast that even google prefers them?  Well – unfortunately they don’t list themselves in Webperf, so we resorted to a quick a simple speed test of their own website homepage using www.alertra.com and also did the exact same on the NSDesign.co.uk homepage.

Once we’ve removed the duplicate test locations, the above results show that on average (across the globe), we’re over 60% faster, and when tested in the UK (the London test), our access was over 40% quicker.  FORTY PERCENT quicker than (if we believe the hype) one of the UK’s fastest hosting companies.  Not bad for a little webhost from Glasgow.  Maybe helps explain why our own Google Search listings are so highly placed….  page1, position1 for keywords such as “Web Hosting Glasgow”, and “Linux Hosting Scotland”.  Server speed, or just damn fine SEO?  You can decide, but no matter the conclusion, well done us

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Last week Google published a nice blog post entitled Quick and easy tips for the holiday rush.

It offers some great simple tips to get your website SEO in shape so that Google can better understand and index it, driving more traffic and generating more sales.  All sounds easy, and to be honest – most of it is not exactly rocket science, but of course if you’d like help with any of Google’s suggestions – things like:

• snippet content and titles
• labeled images
• 404 and 301 errors
• sitemaps
• sitelinks

Then get in touch and we’d be glad to help out!  Our own Search Engine Optimisation Programme deals with all the above and much more.

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One of the important concerns to web designers is striking a balance between the creative aspect of a website in terms of style and media and being able to implement the design into an accessible and standards compliant site which can be read by search engines. Web technologies have come a long way in a short time in helping to achieve this with xhtml, css and javascript providing a more flexible way of realising ideas while maintaining clean, structured code and accessibility standards. More recently newer developments are becoming available which are pushing the possibilities of the web and raising the bar in the flexibility designers and developers have. As long as the ideas keep flowing on what we would like to achieve on the web, the technology will continue to advance inorder to match this.

CSS3

Css3 has been in development for a few years but is now beginning have some of its features supported better. There a number of interesting features which have been developed to meet design trends, so as to make the implementation of these stylings easier, though many of them are still currently unsupported by browsers, especially Internet Explorer. Some of the features include:

- Multi column allows the developer to position blocks of text in several columns similar to print.

- Rounded corners can be achieved on elements by setting a radius on the corner.

- Border images allow the developer to create custom shaped elements by setting graphics for each corner and sides of an element.These 3 features are only currently supported in Firefox and Safari 3.

- Border color allows gradient borders to be used though are currently only supported by Firefox.

- HSL colors have been introduced, which aswell as setting the colour also allows you to set the hue, saturation and lightness of colours, providing a lot more flexibility in colour schemes. So far this is supported by Opera 9.5, Safari 3, Konqueror and Mozilla.

- One of the most popular features of css3 is opacity. This can be set on different elements allowing a gradient effect to be achieved. This is supported by most browsers except Internet Explorer.

- Box sizing is an interesting one as previously padding and borders were always added to the width of an element but now can be added inside a div. Firefox and Safari support this with the prefix -moz- and -webkit- respectively though Opera simply works with box-sizing.

- Font-face was included in css2 but was only supported by Internet Explorer if an .eot font format was used but Safari 3.1 now allows Truetype or Opentype font to be implemented in designs.

Flash accessibility.

Flash has always been a blessing and curse to both developers and users. It can achieve unique interactive experiences for users and bring a site to life but with search engines unable to extract text or links from the file, it has made flash sites often inaccessible and difficult to index. In the last 6 months it was announced by Google and Adobe that the algorithm Google uses is dramatically changing which will allow text and links from flash files to be read and allow sites to be indexed better in search results. Adobe is developing a flash reader for search engines which will allows the files to be read. Another technology which employs Flash and provides developers with more flexibility in terms of typefaces on the web in Sifr. This is a type replacement technology which allows any typeface to be employed in a website. Its fully accessible with all major browsers and can be read by screen readers.

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