The final SEO update for 2008

To round the year off on the great SEO experiment, the results are as follows:

web site design swansea from position 180 to 125
website design swansea from 133 to 64
web design swansea from 134 to 74
swansea web design from 143 to 129
web designer swansea from 131 to 74

Even for 'web site development swansea' we're at position 59.

But is it working? Are people getting to the website?
According to Google Analytics, 17.75% of our traffic is from Google organic searches for 'web development swansea', 'web design swansea' and 'web design company wales'.

We still have a bit more work to do...but it does look to me like content is definitely a big part of SEO work judging by the pretty large jump in results!

Happy New Year's Eve! Don't forget to make your new year's resolution a new website.

Pre-Content Search Engine Update

Before I add the extra content to picseli.co.uk I thought I'd better have a baseline to measure against. I was quite disappointed when I found out that in Google we had dropped several pages for some keywords - but this does show you that we need to stay on top of SEO and how quickly things can change. The results are:

web site design swansea from 128 to 180
website design swansea from 76 to 133
web design swansea from 85 to 134
swansea web design from 125 to 143
web designer swansea from 81 to 131

I also added a few other searches:

web site development swansea - position 71
website development swansea - position 85
web development swansea - position 60

Then I decided to see how we were doing in the next most popular search engine - Yahoo!
I was delighted to see that we were doing pretty well!

web site design swansea - position 9!
website design swansea - position 6!
web design swansea - position 117
swansea web design - position 95
web site development swansea - position 7
website development swansea - position 2!!!


What are people searching for?
However, it doesn't matter how well you are doing in the search engines if no one is searching for that particular phrase. So I have decided to focus on the phrases that are beign searched for. According to the Google Adwords Tool, from the phrases I have been focusing on, the ones people are actually searching for are:

website design swansea (average monthly search volume = 140)
web design swansea (720)
swansea web design (720)
web design (823,000)

I also have a list of 200 recommended keywords that I can going to use to target the content on the recently added pages.

Is Content King?

For the great SEO project I have so far focused on adding the relevant "tags" where they should be, in other words, doing all the background work, and you will notice that up until now there hasn't been a huge amount of content on the website - apart from this blog. As we are now within the top 10 pages of Google -with only 2 weeks left unil the new year - I have decided to bring out the big guns and show you how targeted and well written cotent will (hopefully) boost this site to the top of the search engines.

I will post the final results in the morning, before I add the content and will keep you posted! Wish me luck!!

The Picseli Pixies!

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How to...Set up a Blog

A blog is a great way of starting a website without having to know about html or register a domain name and there are many free services available. This blog is powered by Blogger.com which is a free service owned by Google. It's very easy to set up and get started. The hardest thing is deciding what to write about.

Step 1 - Get a Google Account

If you already have a Google account all you need to do is visit http://www.blogger.com/ and sign in using these details.


If you don't have a Google Account you can create one here. Just click 'Create Your Blog Now' in the big orange arrow and fill in the details on the next page then click Continue.



Step 2 - Choose a Name


On the next page you will need to fill in the details for the name of your blog.



The blog title is what will appear in the header of your blog. For example, 'Rhian's Web Design Blog'.

The blog address is what people will need to find your blog, I would use 'rhians-web-blog' in this case. Click the 'Check Availability' link to see that the name you have chosen isn't being used by someone else. Then click continue.

(This is a basic set up, so we're ignoring the Advanced Options for now.)

Step 3 - Choose your Style

Select the design you like best for your blog and click continue.

Step 4 - Start Blogging
Yup. That's it! All you need to do now is click 'Start Blogging'. The next screen will display the Create a Post screen. Simply enter your title and blog entry and click Publish Post. Your first blog post! To view your blog, click 'View Blog'.

Here's the one I created while writing this post:

The little pencil icon will allow you to quickly edit a post while you are logged in, and you can add Tags, change the layout, add widgets and loads more...but I'll leave that for another blog post!

Again, if you do set up a blog after following this How To, please post it here. Good luck!!

December Search Engine Update

I have been in Scotland for the last week and (quite sadly) one of the first thing I wanted to do on my return was find out whether the website has progressed in the search engines especially as nothing has changed on it since 27th November. It's good news... the resutls are in:

web site design swansea from position 132 to 128
website design swansea from position 101 to 76
web design swansea from position 99 to 85
swansea web design from position 154 to 125

With things starting to quiet down for Christmas I'll be spending a bit more time 'beefing up' the website and including content on things you will actually want to know, like prices and what we can do, more information on our e-commerce packages and a series on how to write content.