Category Archives: Development

Finding a decent online marketing company

When working on websites using a online media agency is a paramount to getting the boost you need in the rankings and promotion of your new or existing website. I’ve used many over the last few years but recently have used http://www.searchable.co.uk, They provided me with some on site SEO for a client of mines website and also provided me with some link building for one of my own projects.

Searchable.co.uk provides SEO, PR and Domain Brokering and a service helping you out with your social network profile. I’ve used several of the services and have found everything has been done to the highest standard possible, and my dealings with Adam Grunweg the company owner have always been pleasant.

Getting the right help with the promotion of your site via the SERPs and Social Media is what will make your site;  Getting not just traffic but the right traffic to your website is going to help with the conversion of advertising, natural promotion of your content from your site users and returning visitors.

It’s always best to find a good SEO Agency and for my current projects Searchable Media Agency are the people for me!

Using Royalty Free Images Within Projects

With the development work that I regularly undertake within the content management system side of things there is often a need for high quality royalty free images that add quality and a unique look to articles, content and blog posts. I’ve used stock image sites such as Fotolia and Shutterstock before and although they offer a wide range of images, they often feel quite stocky and it’s not too difficult to find a site using exactly the same images within the niche of the site I’ve been working on which can devalue content and take the edge off the unique feel of a site.

Over the last few months I’ve been using http://ImageSource.com, they provide high quality stock images sold for advertising & publishing; I’ve found great images that don’t necessarily have that `stock` feel to the images, this has given me the chance to make the websites I’ve been working on look more unique, more professional and generally better looking for the users of the website.

The ImageSource website has a modern design and is very easily to navigate; It has a power search engine that very quickly returns hundreds of images from a search result providing me with a wide choice of images for a specific search. Not only do they provide stock images, they also provide competitively priced HD video footage covering a huge amount of subjects.

The advantage of a site Like ImageSource.com is that once you purchase your royalty free photos you are then free to use them as many times as you like for a one off payment, allowing you to use the same image across a network of sites without the need for a payment each time you use it.

I’d strongly recommend giving them a try, a few well placed stock images can make a piece of content or a site homepage look a lot better.

Part Three: Redevelopment of Penalised Website

After a week of watching google umming and arring about indexing the page they finally got round to indexing the pages again, this is 100% more than the previous domain had indexed after Google removed it. The rankings are all pretty low so the traffic hasn’t really been effected but hopefully the rankings will improve over the next few weeks and the traffic will start to rise again.

I think I’ll be adding some more content to the site over the next week or two, and possibly re writing some of the existing content with the aim of freshening things up for the next time Google decides to index some pages.

The site made £19.06 last month on adsense, but that doesn’t include a full month in my adsense account, so a better representation will be able to be worked out at the end of February. In terms of traffic  from the 24th January – 30st January the site got 221 unique visitors which included 6 visitors from Google, 73 visits from Bing and 73 visits from yahoo to name a few.

In comparison from 31st January – 6th February the site got 189 unique visitors, 62 visits from bing, 46 visits from yahoo and most importantly the visits from Google had gone up to 34, so even though over the seven day period the traffic had dropped slightly the large increase in visits from google were a good sign.

Part Two: Redevelopment of Penalised Website

I’ve now had the whole site moved and 301′ed for a few days now and all of the pages can be found in Google now, they haven’t really been “indexed” as such however they are appearing searching with the “Site:” function on Google; This is a massive step forward as previous to this the previous domain had been completely deindexed and black listed.

No real increase in statistics as of yet, it’s currently getting around 30 unique visitors a day and making about £1.00/£2.00 a day on Adsense earnings.

Webmaster tools isn’t showing any errors and no warning messages have been sent to me as of yet unlike the previous domain, I’m interested to see over the next week or two if the pages will get indexed in a similar position to where they were before, of they are any better or worse.

Google’s crawl rate is up a lot over the last day or two so hoping to see some proper indexed pages over the next few days, Fingers crossed this can recover to the site it was previously.

More to follow…

Part One: Redevelopment of Penalised Website

I recently started working on a small mini site that had been hit heavily by Google and completely removed from Google’s listings. It went from getting a fair bit of traffic and making a nice amount of money to virtually no traffic (small amount of traffic from yahoo and bing). I’ve set myself a goal of getting this re listed in Google and hopefully back to making some decent money.

I’ve moved the site to  a new address, changed the content that was duped online elsewhere and moved it from a static site to a wordpress blog. This has enabled me to perform some on site SEO tasks easier and move the adverts around the page along with generating up to date sitemaps.

The site post Google is getting around 15-25 unique visitors a day and on the old address wasn’t even indexed in google let alone ranking. Today I’ve resubmited the site with the new content, domain and layout and 301′ed the old domain to the new one, Looking forward to seeing if Google even attempts to re index it or if it get’s shunned again.

I’ve also written a couple of new pages of content myself, I’m not a content writer by any stretch of the imagination but anything extra I can add I will do, the site address is http://www.designsoftwareinc.com for anyone that is interested in taking a look.