Place of design

Forbes Chartered Accountants are an award winning company, based in Braintree and Dunmow, Essex.  They offer strategic tax planning, IR35 and general accountancy.

Cash for scrap cars is a small company based in Leeds in the UK, who wanted a website to generate leads for their scrap car recycling business.  They pay cash for scrap cars, and then they take the cars and recycle them, making the world a greener and safer place

Here at Place of design we only offer ethical honest transparent SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).  We have made the long term decision not to offer any of the underhand un-ethical so called “Black Hat” methods of optimising sites for search engines.  Our approach makes very good business sense for you in the long term

Ethical SEO or “White Hat” SEO
What’s the difference? Black Hat, White Hat, Ethical Un-ethical… Well, in the SEO industry there are a range of practices employed to promote websites.  Some are honest, while others just outright deceive users and search engines, filling cyberspace up with useless links and recycled spammy articles that no one wants to read

Your website has a goal – to get the user to do something. That something could be to pick up the phone, to buy something, to register for a newsletter

We are going to have an in-depth look at the factors causing a low conversion. These may be blended – no real individual reason, but a blend of different reasons. It is worth both yourself auditing your own site, and having others audit your site for you against the following criteria. You need broad shoulders – be prepared to accept what others say, and understand that your view is possibly a little polarised

A microsite (or micro site) is a small website that has its own domain and hence its own URL. The purpose is for pinpoint marketing. Regardless of the marketing for the main parent site, marketing, SEO and measurement for the microsite is independent. The content of a microsite ought to be unique – both in terms of the main site it directs traffic too, and other websites. Microsites are uses to focus attention on a specific product or service; aimed at a specific group of users

Creative wedding planning is the business run by my wife Elizabeth – www.creative-wedding-planning.co.uk

Essentially Elizabeth is a wedding planner and event planner.  Seh organises weddings, and does on the day coordanation etc..  Elizabeth wanted a really small and easy to use brochure site that reflected her business and personality. The site is visually designed to “the boss’s” exact specification (you have to smile, I am under duress)

This is the first of a series of articles on SEO and conversion for e-commerce sites. This article introduces the very basics of e-commerce SEO and conversion, other articles will cover the details

Get this one in your head, it is the mantra for e-commerce:
Turnover = (average order value x conversion x number of visitors) – refunds

Merlins Wakefield is a bricks and mortar magic shop. They had a online store that was under-performing, and needed some web magic (couldn’t resist, sorry).  We were asked to provide a user-oriented site, with a community element.  The owners wanted a site they could be in control of, and update and generate new content themselves

Photolearn sold photographic training videos and PDF’s online on a home grown site.  They realised sales would be much higher with a more professional site from  Our brief was to provide an informative, user friendly site, that sold the product

I’m splitting this up into 2 areas:
Problems with your practices, and problems with design

Problems with your practices

Doorway pages and sites
These are now viewed as blatant SPAM, which will get you banned pronto

Keywords

Keywords are good, but there importance diminished in about 2003, when the SEO companies abused them so much the search engines demoted their input in the search. Nowadays search engines take into account the text “AS SEEN BY THE END USER” to establish rankings. As I mentioned before – the title tag is very important, as end users see this, as is the description tag