Every business wants to maximise their SEO. And the best way to boost your search rankings is to call in the professionals. Ask your web designer (such as WebCreationUK) about their SEO service.

But how do you know if your website has been properly optimised? Here we bring you a few tips to ensure you have ticked the SEO basics.

Page title tags: If you look at the top of your web browser window you’ll see some text. The page title tags are where you write this text. Each page of your website needs to have an original and compelling title that describes the page content using the main keywords for the page.   Title tags should be up to 64 characters in length.

Description tags: These are used in the search engine ranking pages to describe a page’s content. This is where you will be trying to encourage web searchers to click on to your website. These descriptions should be 25 to 35 words long.

Heading tags: Each page of your website should use at least the <H1> heading tag. To give a keyword an SEO boost, use it in both the <title> tag and in your <H1> tag.

Keywords on the page: Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, are continually searching for keywords to add to their database. So keyword density on your pages is important. But do not overdo the use of keywords. If you do (called stuffing) the search engines might actually black list you. Many experts have their views on the percentage of keywords per page of your website but the best guideline is to write copy naturally but with a fair amount of keyword repetition, but not so much that the reader notices. Hire a professional copywriter if in doubt.

Image titles: Alt and title tags for images and links should be keyword-rich as this text is also read by search engines.

Sitemaps: Ensure you have two sitemaps for your website. One site map should be an XML version for the search robots, while the other site map is a display for customers to see your page hierarchy.

A recent survey revealed that 10% of website designers believes that SEO is not their business. But SEO is vital if your want your e-retail or e-commerce site to be noticed by the search engine spiders. That’s why it’s essential that you chose a web designer that knows the fine art of SEO.

At leading website design company WebCreationUK, SEO is an integral part of the website design service. The award-winning design company employs a team of search engine experts who ensure that all new and relaunched websites are created to have the potential to rank highly on the major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo.

But why are SEO-charged websites important?

Search engines employ automated web spiders to crawl through websites. These web spiders collect important information about the website. The information they glean helps them assess the relevance of a website for particular keywords.

The spiders then place the information in a database. So, when a user searches a keyword on, for example Google or Yahoo or Bing, the search engine dips into this database and lists pages according to relevance. Pages that are more relevant rank at the top.

So an SEO-friendly web design is clearly an asset for any business that wants to rank highly on search lists – and gain a greater potential for custom to their site.

Make sure you employ a web designer that is also hot on SEO.

Google seems happy to ignore latest figures that show a small dip in “paid clicks” in the second quarter of the year. Paid clicks fell by 3% compared to the first quarter.

But then any company will be confident if overall, year-on-year, they could report a 15% increase in paid clicks and net revenue of $5.09 billion.

The search engine giant, which employed more than 1,000 new staff in the second quarter claimed: “Solid growth in our core business and very strong growth in our emerging businesses drove 24% revenue growth year-over-year. . . .  We feel confident about our future, and plan to continue to invest aggressively in our core areas of strategic focus.”

Speak to WebCreationUK about our Advanced SEO Programme and how to maximise your websites performance.

Following its success in American, Microsoft has announced that it plans to launch the travel search engine Bing Travel into the UK.

Launched a year ago in the US, Bing Travel provides price comparisons for air fares and hotel rates. It also predicts airfare and hotel rates based on the time of year, telling travellers when it’s the best time to get the best deal.

It was Microsoft’s $115 million acquisition of travel website Farecast last year that gave the company the technology to launch Bing Travel. Microsoft is planning to do a similar deal with an existing provider in the UK.

You can speak to WebCreationUK for all of your web design and SEO needs.

So you have your shiny new website. But will the search engines notice it? Key to a new website is being found by potential customers. Here we bring you some tips for climbing the search engines – but without spending any money.

* Give visitors something to read: You website might look good but it has to have content on it. When they stop by to index your site you’ll need to have some words on it for them to look at.

* Make sure the words read well: Think about what your potential customers will be searching for and make sure you use these words and phrases on your website. Don’t overstuff the site but do include relevant phrases. Make sure you have well-written headlines. You can use techniques such as bullet points and bolded words to craw your visitor’s attention to important information.

* Grammar and spelling are important: Many visitors will be turned off by poor grammar and spelling so why risk it? Make sure you get someone knowledgeable to proofread your site before it launches.

* Go for links: Search engines look at links. To make your links search engine-friendly you’ll want them to be real text and you’ll want to include key words within the link. For example, “Click here to find out more about copywriting services”. It’s not enough to have image click-throughs or click “here”.

* Incoming Links: One of the best ways to move up on the search engine results is to have links to your site coming from outside sites. This is not easy, but there are a few ways to build links. Try to make reciprocal link requests (offer to link to a site if they will link back to you), place your link in discussion forums and blog comments, and don’t forget to get out there and promote as much as you can through social media sites and also email, leaflets and business cards.

The latest news from Yahoo is the launch of a pilot programme called “More Sponsors”, in which it will add links at the bottom of Yahoo search results for more Pay-Per-Click ads.

What this means in practice is that when a user clicks on one of the links it will bring up a page with nothing but sponsored search ads. The feature is supported by Yahoo’s Search Assist features, which is a search engine “suggestions” feature.

This is an example of how it could work: A consumer might type in “campervan holidays” and Yahoo! will then suggest holiday packages, trips or resorts.

The “More Sponsors” feature will appear on Yahoo Search to begin with, but Yahoo plans to roll it out across more of the Yahoo Network where ads appear. It is likely that the ads will include images or logos in the future, and that if the ads are ranked highly in standard sponsored results for a given search term then they will be shown in sponsored-only results for that same search term.
This is interesting news for a wide range of on-line businesses.