Archive for February, 2010

18
Feb 2010

Search Engine Optimization

Posted by Steve  >  Search Engine Optimization
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Search engine optimization… a very important part of developing a web site.

We believe that central to any websites’ success is visibility in the Search Engines. Currently Google dominates the search market and because of this, we focus on improving results in Google, but our techniques will apply to all search engines.

There’s a wide range of factors that affect how your site will rank on the Search Engine Results Pages. These include technical factors such as making sure the website uses valid HTML markup, optimizing content for particular key phrases and a linking strategy.

We ensure that all the websites we build meet the technical requirements laid down by the W3C. Once the site is live, we usually then begin work to address content optimization and link-building.

Our SEO work is spilt into two parts; first a strategy needs to be developed – the focus of which will vary depending on the objectives for the site and would usually consist of a review of the existing website. Competitor analysis, initial keyphrase identification and a link-building strategy are all part of the strategy which usually requires 4-8 days work, depending on the size of the website.

Once the Strategy has been reviewed and approved, it needs to be implemented. Any technical issues should be addressed first and once completed, we like to recommend a 12-month contract for a fixed number of days work per month (again the number of days required would depend on the size of the website and the amount of work that needs to be done). This allows us to get to know the business and understand the metrics of the web site and allows us to dig deeper to optimize a web site.

We can also tailor our services to meet your requirements. Read more here >

17
Feb 2010

Building and improving web sites.

Posted by Steve  >  Analytics, Search Engine Optimization
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We’ve spent the better part of the past four years building and optimizing web sites for a group of clients on Vancouver Island and Montreal.

Without fail, these sites have doubled, tripled and quadrupled, and is several cases, achieving much greater increases in grading online. Some achieving 10 times the amount of ranking we began with a year or two earlier.

For example, www.campbellrivercruise.com – shown at left, started with a very low grading of 3/100 when we first launched the site and after a year of work, we’ve built that grading to 30/100. That may seem modest but it is a 1000% increase, unless my math is way off.

Cruise Victoria – www.cvscruisevictoria.com – ranked 9/100 when we re-designed their web site and this week, the site passed a score of 80/100 in optimizing effectiveness. That’s an increase of 900% !

And these are not shots in the dark. We’ve consistently increased the online effectiveness of every web site we’ve touched over the past two years.

www.sidneypier.com – 28/100 t0 94/100. Not only have we drastically increased the online grading of the web site, their conversion rate has skyrocketed by 21%. This translates into tens of thousands of additional dollars being brought in by the web site…

www.littleanddavies.com – 16/100 to 35/100 after one month of work.

www.lisawilliams.ca – 16/100 to 64/100 in one month since we put the new site online.

www.traditionaltoys.ca - 1/100 to 82/100.

www.swanlake.bc.ca – 12/100 to 83/100.

It’s not like these are flukes. This is the underlying process of a Discovery Process followed by intelligent web design and search engine optimization. Without our Discovery Process, a properly structured web site cannot be created with measurable results.

3
Feb 2010

Increasing The Sidney Pier business by 400%.

Posted by Steve  >  Search Engine Optimization
No Comments

About a year ago, I was brought in to The Sidney Pier to assist them with some web problems they were experiencing. The site graded out at a fairly poor score of 28/100 for basic optimization and needed help badly.

After an initial presentation to one of the board members, I was introduced to the dynamic Director of Marketing and we began working through the site together, communications the pre-set goals of first increasing the overall back-end optimization and then beginning the process of re-designing the web site.

Over a period of one year, as consultants first and web designers second, we shifted the web site from an ancient Cold Fusion System to an open source Joomla CMS System, creating a modern web site which the staff of The Sidney Pier could now update themselves with  little training along the way.

The overview is that along the way, we achieved the following for The Sidney Pier;

• Their Online Reservation conversions were up by over 400% year over year

• Their page rank increased from 2 to 5

• Their Web Site Grading increased from 25/100 to 96.9/100.

• Their Alexa ranking rose from 18,902,146 which was only in the top 61.53 % of all websites to  of 1,132,847 which is in the top 3.643 % of all websites globally – an increase of what, if my math is correct – 1,800 per cent !

• Their backlinks increased from 34 – 510.

• Their pay per click costs fell from 6.65% to 3.13%, thereby increasing their organic search results while lowering their pay per click costs – exactly as I said would happen. This saved The Sidney Pier thousands of dollars annually.

We believe that we can achieve similar results with virtually any web site through applied optimization and good internet strategy,