See our flyer below for details or contact us to find out more!

This is exclusively for business start-ups or new business under 2 years. We want to help our local economy grow and we believe a good website presence is vital to your success. So from as little as £35 + Vat per month, you can have a professional, sleek, user-friendly website which can grow as your business grows.

Today our Head Website Developer Lukasz has been showcasing one of his other skills – his photography. If you have been into our offices recently, you may have met our new team member Archie. Well he has proved be a very demanding little man, and has insisted on staring in our new branded website packages.

These are very nearly ready for launch, so watch this space!

Oh and we may well be introducing Toby – Archie’s brother soon. Apparently he heard about Archie’s new found fame and wanted a piece of the action.

Our team have been busy researching what our clients want, and what would make their whole Internet Marketing experience better. With clients all over the North West, Cheshire and beyond, we asked them for their ideas and feedback on our branding and our ‘message’.

We do this for our clients, so we decided it was about time that we practise what we preach. Every business should look at their Marketing activity and direction on a regular basis. We have done just that and guess what??????? None of you lot seem to know why we are called ‘Give the Dog a Bone’!

Well let me explain…initially it was because because we think a website is for life (not just for Christmas…….get it?????), but then we realised it goes a bit deeper than that.

1. A dog is an addition to your family, just as a website is an addition to your business. They need constant nurturing, pampering, love and attention. If you give them this, they will give you it back, and more!
2. Our team are like ‘dog’s with a bone’ when it comes to your website. We get excited about our work – we really do
3. If you throw them a stick they will ‘go fetch’. The same goes with your website. if you provide it with the incentive it needs, it will ‘go fetch’ you some visitors.
4. Websites can grow from little puppy’s to great big loyal, protective, hard-working Guard dogs, keeping your business safe and sound.
5. You can buy your dog lots of accessories and treats to make it look nice and behave better. Same goes for your site. There are endless additions you can add to your site to keep it up to date, and behaving as it should.

So enough of the Dog analogies. I hope that helps to explain a bit about our name. Next up is a lovely new branded set of website packages, introducing our puppy Archie, our Chihuahua Chico, Billy the Bulldog, Andrew the Collie, and our Great Dane Poppy.

Our designers have long worked on Macs and after some long consideration I personally converted to a Mac Book some 6 months ago, with some trepidation, as I have long been weaned on Windows technology. That 6 months has quickly shown me that I was ever wrong to doubt, and can’t ever see myself returning to Windows, certainly for as long as Apple continue to get it right.

As a brand they certainly seem to have nailed their marketing:

• High perceived, and I now believe, actual product quality,
• Unbelievable customer service (Have you been into an Apple store lately?).
• Both of the above then provide Apple with a platform to charge premium prices. Nice job if you can crack it!

The brand is estimated at being worth $153 billion.

Leading on from this it’s also interesting to note that 6 of the tip 10 valued businesses are technology based, including Google, IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, and China Mobile. This is clearly reflective of the growing level of importance that IT and technology plays in our lives.

For those who want to delve deeper the full report can be found at www.millwardbrown.com/brandz.

• There are 20,980,000 mobile internet users per month in the UK.
• The UK is the fifth largest mobile internet market globally.
• 23% of time spent accessing the internet is now on a mobile device.
• 52% of Ipad users read a magazine or newspaper on their device every day.
• 95% of smartphone owners have sought local information online.

Put simply if your marketing strategy doesn’t actively embrace the tidal wave that is the mobile intrnet you are likely to become significantly disadvantaged in the future. The mobile device is becoming an ever present in the lives of the great majority within the civilised world.

This will fuel the growth in local searches, and location based activity driven by the sheer flexibility and convenience of being able to access data on the go and stay in touch with both professional and social networks.

The internet of tomorrow is the mobile internet. Look to India now and we can already see that mobile internet users outnumber PC internet users by a ratio of 3 to 1; indeed this country accounts for 9% of all mobile internet users worldwide.

The improvement in smartphone technology and the rapid growth of the portable tablet sector will continue to accelerate this phenomenom. Quite simply, why be tied to a desk if you don’t need to be?

Though small keyboards and typing surfaces remain a limitation, developers are working hard on voice-based solutions that will circumvent this, and other interface developments will undoubtedly arrive to further fuel growth.

The world of mobile internet is definitely here to stay.

Use a tool such as the one found here (http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org) to check all redirects in use o your site return an effective status code.

2. Internal linking checks.

Look for pages that have excessive links (Beware of anything over 100). Ensure that effective anchor text is being used on all links.

3. Avoid use of unnecessary subdomains.

You may be best using subfolders as the search engines to not automatically apply the trust and link juice weight of a particular site to its sub-domains, which they see as more appropriate belonging to a completely separate site, and hence worthy of completely separate treatment in the eyes of the search engines.

4.Geographic Targeting.

If you are targeting a specific country you need to ensure that you follow the accepted guidelines for targeting your website at that country. You should also ensure that you have the required elements in place should you be targeting at a more local audience.

5. External linking.

Check the number and type of links you have coming into your site. It will be important to check this against the link setup of your key competition. There are various tools available to help you do this, such as that found at: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
Ensure that your primary keywords are showing on a regular basis as anchor text on links. However, ensure that you don’t overdo this and over rely on one particular keyword/phrase for this purpose as this may be picked up as a signal of purchased links.
Look for ‘deep links’, in other words links to pages other than to your home page as this will reflect a healthy situation.
Ensure that you are comfortable with the quality of the links, ensuring that they are as much as possible from good quality reputable and authoritative sites, and compare this to your key competitors.

6. Page load times.

Excessive load times will at worst interfere with crawling and indexing activity and at best it will disaffect human browsers who are likely to lose patience and turn their attention to your competitors’ sites.

7. Image alt tags.

Images are important to the enhancement of the user experience on your website. However, the search engines are blind as far as images are concerned. It is therefore important for search purposes that appropriate alt attributes and file names are given to images on your site.

8. Code quality.

Poor quality code can have negative impacts on your search performance, for example in inhibiting search engine crawl activity, so getting someone who can read code to check your site is a wise move. Alternatively you can use a tool such as http://www.seo-browser.com to get an understanding of how the search engines view a page.

Usability

Though not immediately obvious as an element that should be considered from an SEO perspective. We should always remember that achieving a high search engine ranking isn’t an end goal in and of itself. The real objective lies in achieving conversion on your site or a positive response to a call to action. It’s therefore vital to ensure that you review your site from a user’s perspective; does it serve up and deliver what it needs to in an effective, user friendly way.

Accessibility/Spiderability

Absolutely essential is that the search engines are able to effectively crawl throughout the site and discover all of its content without hitting any blockages. Sounds simple, but you must ensure that the site architecture allows for this.

Search engine health check

Use the“site:yourdomain” tool in the Google search box to see how many and which of you pages have been indexed by Google. This gives you a current view of which of your pages have actually been found by the search engines.

Try searching, at very least for your brand name in the search engines, as you should as a very minimum be returnno9ng well against this search. If you aren’t it may indicate a problem that you need to investigate further.

Use the “info:yourdomain” tool to identify when your site was last ‘cached’/visited by Google and what it saw at the time.

Keyword health check

Is your site clearly targeting the keywords and phrases that you’re going for? Are the pages and sections laid out in a logical sequence that facilitates seamless browsing between topics, and is there an easy to follow linking structure in place with the use of appropriate ‘anchor’ text?

Duplicate content checks

Make sure that you are not duplicating the http:// and www. versions of the site. One should be clearly designated as the “canonical” domain and the other pointed at it with a 301 redirect. Use the inurl: and intitle: commands to check for duplicate content within your site. If you feel parts of your content may be duplicated elsewhere on the internet paste a passage from your suspected offending page into the Google search box and see what’s returned.

URL check

Make sure your page urls are designed in simple descriptive format, basically providing some description of what the page is all about. Avoid long streams and numbers in the url text, and ensure that what is there will be easily read and understood by the search engine spiders.

Title tag review

Ensure that you title tags on every page include the keywords that you are looking to target on that page. Ensure tag contains no more than 70 characters, as Google will not read beyond this limit. Don’t feel that you need to include your company name on every page title. Limit the keywords included in your title to no more than two.

Content review

Does each page have good quality content targeting the keywords you are going after on each page? Does it include the keyword/phrase itself and relevant associated words and phrases? Do you have meaningful, easy to read passages that make sense I.e. not just meaningless repeats of a key phrase, which would be treated as spam by the search engines?

Metatag review

Ensure that each page has a unique meta description tag. Check to ensure that there is no robot.txt present such as noindex or nofollow that will provide instructions to search robots that would basically interfere with or even stop the spidering of your site.

Sitemap file and robots.txt file verification

Use the verification tool within Google Webmaster Tools to check your robot.txt, and to verify that your sitemap (ensure you have one) is identifying all of the canonical pages on your site.

Title tags

Considered by most experts to be the single most important facto in achieving good rankings. The words in the title tag tell the search engines a lot about the content of the page, so it’s vital that your critical keywords and phrases are used in the title tag.

Content is king!

You need to ensure that your website contains good quality content that is highly relevant to the search phrases that you are targeting on you site. If you want Google and the other search engines to classify you as an authority on pink elephants, make sure that your site talks about pink elephants.

Global Link authority

Establishing good quality (emphasis on good quality) inbound links from other relevant sites that are themselves deemed as relevant, authority sites by the search engines is a vital part of a good SEO strategy. This particularly applies in situations where there is a lot of competition on a particular keyword or phrase.

Anchor text of links

The text related to either a link into a site or internal links within a site is an important mechanism for sending a signal to the search engines. If a link is meant to send someone to content about a fridge freezer then that wording should ideally be used to link to the content page. Avoid ‘click here’ as an easy cop out as this will diminish your SEO effort.

Age of site/h2>

The search engines take a signal from the length of time a site has been up and live. Given the number of poor quality, spammy sites that regularly emerge in an effort to make a quick buck, the logic of this is easy to follow. The lesson here is that if you think you need a website to help promote your business or enterprise (you undoubtedly do!), then the sooner you get a presence online the better!

Internal linking structure

How you link pages within your site gives the search engines a strong signal as to the importance of different areas and sections of the site. A well planned site architecture with a logical and easy to follow internal linking structure can help immensely with your online search efforts.

Topical relevance of inbound links

Within reason any inbound link should provide support to your SEO efforts. However links form sites that are highly relevant to the content in your own site will undoubtedly count for more. The emphasis is on topicality and relevance.

Global link popularity of sites that link to you.

If a site you link to is itself deemed as being important by virtue of the sites it ‘hangs out with’ i.e. Those sites that link to it, then the more positive the effect of their link to you.

You site neighbourhood

If you have a well established link network established with organisations and businesses in your field of operation, this helps to provide a strong vote of confidence for your site.

Site refreshment

Keeping your site alive and fresh by adding good quality, relevant content on a regular basis sends a strong message that will make search engines want to come back to visit your latest works. Make your site a labour of love.

Good SEO is definitely not rocket science, but does take logical thinking and hard work. A diligent focus on applying key best practice can generate incredible results and improvements in the performance of your online activities.

1. Poor or duplicate content. The search engines feed primarily on the words that they can read on your website. Failure to provide them with the right level of quality, re3lavnt words related to your targeted search phrases will leave them with nothing to find and feed on. By the same token just lifting content from somewhere else on the web and ‘plonking’ it on your site could see you receiving a hefty ranking penalty. Don’t run the risk of trying to fool the search engines; if they’ve seen some content before elsewhere they’re smart enough to know you’re copying it!!
2. Your server is inaccessible to crawlers. The search engine crawlers need to be able to easily access your pages and content for them to determine the quality of your offering. If your chosen hosting server regularly makes this difficult the engines will automatically assume that you are a poor quality site and rank you accordingly. Therefore, ensure that your hosting server arrangements are robust from this perspective.
3. External links to low quality/spam sites. It’s that old adage again, you are who you hang out with by association. If you link to a number of poor quality sites this can definitely send a very negative signal to the search engines, so beware!
4. Participation in link schemes or purchasing/selling links. Search engines work on the premise that sites should link to each other for good reason…..providing relevant additional content, improving user experience etc. Therefore, either selling links in an effort to impact positively on ranking, or purchasing links through link farms are both regarded as negative actions and misuse can see your search rankings plummet. Next time you answer your phone to hear someone trying to sell you a ‘link strategy’ take care and exercise due caution.
5. Duplicated meta information. The search engines take a strong view from certain elements of meta information, particularly the title tag. It stand to reason then that you should take time to ensure that each page on your site has a unique title tag that is relevant to the key search phrases you’re looking to target on that page.

One simple mistake can scupper your search efforts indefinitely. Some simple care in avoiding some of the most obvious ones can help you immensely.