Thanks for the reply you have certainly reinforced the value of my post!
Firstly nothing that I have said is in anyway misleading although as we shall see a number of things you have said clearly are. Firstly, you state that quote ‘I have my website, that i built myslef’ yet the site you refer to i.e. the UKTelevision site infact states that it was designed by Web3Design. Now if you are infact the web designer and not who you imply you are i.e. the TV installers then say so. However, when we look at Web3Design we see a web standards non-compliant site that with your comments clearly make you fall into the category of web designer I identified in my post which is don’t use web standards because you don’t understand them. No doubt Web3Design if that is you tend not to mention such things to your clients pre-design? Either way as a web designer based near Torrevieja it didn’t surprise me that the top two rankings when to our company CB Web Solutons (number 1) and another company who are also compliant. Sound familiar web standards = (inpart) ranking?
Alternatively you are speaking as UKtelevision in which case maybe you’d like to explain the link you gave which does not show your site at all as you are not found again in keeping with my post. Instead it shows Rainbow Tv who I assume you are a part of but NOT the same on the net. Furthermore, when we investigate the google findings we see (up to page 3 before I gave up) only Tv installers per page and therefore not a competitive market on line if your carefully selected search phrase is anything to go by. Given that not one of the companies runs a web standards compliant site so when someone does it will win the ranking game. Of that I’d bet my mortgage.
When we look at your website (UKTelevision) and other sites designed by amateurs or worse low grade web designers I think web standards and then accessibilty. If you have never heard of Accessibility then I suggest you do so. The Uk Government sometime ago stated that UK citizens falling into this category of internet user had an annual spend of about £30 million. As your site chooses to stick two fingers up at that group and their counter parts in Spain I wish you good luck and also would like to point you towards section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act in the USA and the fact that the EU is now actively considering similar legislation against poor quality sites such as the three I have named as they actively discriminate against them. I doubt you have any idea what your moving text may look like for those with poor vision, old browsers, browsers with javascript disabled or even those who use screen readers to operate the internet?
And as if by accident a web standards compliant web site also tends to automatically be very close or even compliant to the three levels of accessibility?
On another note, the internet is not one homogenous lump rather it is an ever changing entity and given that the W3C who promote web standards the THE companies in electronic communications - how can your point of view have any value?
When you talk about top of the range sites not being necessaryt you have completely missed the point. That is the point it that the bar has been raised and your site(s) are well below that minimum level to survive the future. In addition, if it is so easy to do especially as using table-less design as we do why can’t most web designers including W3design do it? Clearly you don’t understand the issues at hand.
I suggest you read my post again and do a little research as this will make you understand the value of the post and also understand why we are the leading web designers on the Costa Blanca. Furthermore, when using the word misleading as a response especially when you are clearly lacking the creditials required to have a valid opinion it is laughable in the extreme. So, TV Installer in Spain (don’t sky call that leakage?) or a web designer with a non-compliant site way of the radar on Google versus CB Web Solutions the leading web designer in Torrevieja with years of experience, is it really me who mislead.....????
Good to see that someone stands up and puts the case for good compliant design. The problem is that business needs educating and this attitude of ignorance will always be a problem as long as any charlatan with a copy of Front Page thinks he can be a web designer.
compliant sites mostly do fare marginally better in SERPS than poorly designed ones all else being equal.
but its also true that it is currently still easy enough to get a totally non compliant table-designed site way past the nice new compliant one in the SERPS by manipulating other on and offsite factors, i.e. its possible to put a poorly designed site, tables etc, but with good content & seo way ahead of a compliant site with poor content / seo.
I think overall, a W3C compliant infastructure is a relatively insignificant slice of the total seo performance pie, unless the code is so bad that internal linking / navigation is affected.
After reading this I’m so glad that I found a great Web Designer ... he created http://www.sizlu.com for me and I now rank top in google for my search terms and in fact have the first two pages for some of the terms! I’m so impressed with them ... communication was fantastic, they explained everything simply and now I retain their services on a monthly basis. As you said, it needs working at to maintain your ranking. So, if anyone needs a new website or would like to know more about Search Engine Optimisation etc I can highly recommend thewebshop.es
If you want to pay for Web Design that’s fine - there are some great web designers with excellent SEO knowledge. But not everyone can afford to pay for web design and SEO advice.
Here are some free links to help you make an SEO friendly website:
Google Analytics - Register and analyse Your website with Google: Google Analytics
Hi, i did find your article very interesting, however if you are going to set yourself up as an authority on SEO and criticise other companies and individuals for their standard, knowledge and level of web design then you need to give a holistic and accurate article.
I run a computing company in the UK and have moved to spain. To say or even imply that you can be top of google by complying to W3C standards is ridiculous to say the least.
If you take a website into the following categories:
1.Coding and metatags
2.On Page Content
3.Link Popularity and quality.
What I will say is that each search engine has a different algorithm and no one in the world can guarantee to make you top of google, no matter how much money you pay them. It is a mixture of art and science and skilled SEO(search engine optimisation) professionals are making educated assessments and guessing as to how to make yours and their website come higher in the search engines. That does not mean they will not make you top of google, but just that they cannot guarantee it.
That said, my personal educated guess is that the three areas of importance that I have mentioned are in the following percentage ratio of importance.
1. Coding and metatags (which is essential for W3C validation) 10%
2. On Page Content (What you write on your website) 30%
3. Link Popularity and quality (How many links are coming in to your website, and the quality of those links) 60%
Try the same to validate websites CSS at
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
And you will find similar results.
As for accessibility, this is where I do agree with CB as I think it is important to respect your customers and their needs, and not everyone has 20/20 vision and great hearing etc. So anything you can do to make your site more accessible to people, whatever that means, be it coding, styling, structure, navigation or help files then you should do it. Whether the absence of it will affect your search engine results is another thing entirely.
Another thing to bear in mind is even on page content is not that important, when the film IROBOT came out its website shot to the top of google, and if you looked at the website in text mode, the website was completely empty. It contained not one single word, it was simply a large image.
What shot it to the top of google, and other search engines, was that it comes linked to a massive film studios website.
If you think of inbound links as a vote from another website to say your website is interesting, valid, useful popular etc then you would think the more the better. Well this is not necessarily the case. I will take google as the example here as to be honest, they have over 70% market share and if your not high in google, you dont exist.
Google ranks a website out of 10 for importance, and a higher number means more importance. It is exponential so to get from a 0 to a 1 you can expect to need (and this is a very rough estimate just for illustrative purposes) 1 - 50 links. To get from a 1 to a 2 you would need more like 100 - 1000 links. As i say these numbers are not whats important, its the factor of 10 increase which you should note. So it would be better to have 1 inbound link from a page rank 7 website, than say 100 or even 1000 page rank 0 or 1.
What I am trying to get across in this reply is, yes standards are useful to comply to, but if you don’t comply and even if your website has little or no content it could still get top of google.
The problem you will find is if your business rivals have used good SEO, got their code clean, and validated. Created useful, informative content, and are creating fresh content and adding to the site regularly and have employed a method of getting people to link to the site, be that manually or employing someone to do it for you.
It is in this scenario when your business will suffer as your rivals are informed and taking steps to be Search engine friendly, and also building inbound links. Both of which are likely to lead to a website which is found highly in google etc for desired keywords.
Any website can get high in google for their own web site address as who is going to be competing for people searching for someone elses business name? What you need to be competing for are things which are not only searched for by your potential customers but that will convert to sales.
Anyway, I just felt the articles were flawed and innaccurate. I am by no means an SEO guru, but have done courses in SEO and think the information I have given to be a more holistic view of SEO.
Kevsta seemed to be of my way of thinking, I probably just have more spare time on my hands to give a fuller reply lol.
Anyway happy SEO’ing.
Excellent points llcooljsl1983 and well worth reading!
I have quite a few adult sites, (Obviously I can’t link to them from here ), and although the type of customers I wish to get to my sites are not the usual sort (or perhaps they are ...?), I do find all that you have mentioned extremely useful to anyone wanting to promote their website.
Of course, the keywords I use are rather different than the average, but not necessarily ‘adult’.
I have a couple of sites on the first page of Google (and several on the second and third pages for their particular topic) based on keywords which offer something sightly different than the usual ‘adult’ keywords, but which research has shown me will get lots of hits (and no, they are not obscene at all).
In my industry, it is very, very difficult to get to the front pages, we have so many rivals! So SEO is vital to us and that includes getting good inbound links.
Writing in to forums on the subject/item you are selling is a good way of getting search engine interest in your site as well as incoming links. Search engine spiders love forums - so many words to crawl. And if you show enthusiasm about the products you are selling so much the better - it shows you care and have knowledge about your products.
This is the only forum I go to where I do not put some of my sites in my signature, as I usually reply to adult webmaster forums and I have found that a well-considered reply is worth a lot in terms of SEO (but don’t be someone who just posts to display their signature - that will make you enemies fast!).
Anyway, that’s my further two cents.
Good reply llcooljsl1983. I hope people will read it before they pay out money without checking whether they could really do all these things themselves.
Hi zania, thanks for your comments. Search engine optimisation is unfortunately often an afterthought and massively underestimated. If you want to be top of google, and your market is competitive then expect to spend 6-18 months promoting your site, and constantly updating, improving and contacting other website owners to link to your site.
Seo is a full time job for any company wanting to make serious income from their website. If your website is merely informational it is probably not cost effective to spend a lot of money on SEO.
If you invest in a company to do it for you expect to pay £3000 - £6000 per year from a UK company, depending on your market, keywords and your competitors.
I personally would read around the subject as much as possible, do your own market research and keyword research. Make sure your website is in great shape, both in terms of coding and appearance and then I would weigh up whether my time or my money was worth more to me.
If you view it as a full time job, then suddenly £3000 - £6000 a year does not seem that expensive, most people would not work full time for a year in a technical role for that money, so I would use a professional. It is piece of mind and will free your time up to focus on other areas of your business.
If anyone has a website and have read my comments and feel they could benefit from either a site makeover and/or search engine optimisation service or advice then pm me.
Thanks
as long as you can edit HTML on your site and upload via FTP anyone can in theory do their own SEO.
the real key though is to have been doing it long enough to know what works, and what doesnt because most forums are unfortunately full of know-alls who really dont know very much when it comes down to it, just posting the same old stuff to get more signature links.
we have only been doing this for 3 and a bit years or so now, and only started the company in November 07, but in that time have learnt a HUGE amount which now means we are more than confident enough about what we can do, and what we cant, and are able to apply it on behalf of our clients.
when I think back to when I first started doing this I probably did more harm than good to the sites to be honest, but as they were mine I learnt as I went along and it didnt matter much. If this is a business site, you need it working now, because you may have gone bust if you have to try to learn SEO before you can make a living. so if youre not absolutely confident what youre doing its probably best to seek advice.
in THIS THREAD introducing ourselves we actually offered free SEO advice to anyone who is interested via the forum, and who is capable enough with web technology that we dont have to teach that too, because its definitely a pre-requisite otherwise you could really mess things up bad.
however for adult sites you are really up against the big boys & their black hats crew so a few (strictly white hat) tips on here isnt going to help much i’m afraid
I personally would read around the subject as much as possible, do your own market research and keyword research. Make sure your website is in great shape, both in terms of coding and appearance and then I would weigh up whether my time or my money was worth more to me.
Exactly what I did and, at the beginning, time was all I had - no money!
llcooljsl1983 - 28 February 2008 05:50 PM
If you view it as a full time job, then suddenly £3000 - £6000 a year does not seem that expensive, most people would not work full time for a year in a technical role for that money, so I would use a professional. It is piece of mind and will free your time up to focus on other areas of your business.
If anyone has a website and have read my comments and feel they could benefit from either a site makeover and/or search engine optimisation service or advice then pm me.
Thanks
I agree on this point. If you do have the spare cash then use a professional after you have done as much as you can yourself.
Running a website (about 100 websites [including blogs] in my case!) takes time and a great deal of effort. Promoting your products/services/whatever.... takes up all your time. It’s a 24/7 operation and then some!
Have you advertised on your own thread? (I can’t see the forum while I am posting this, so I have no idea).
as long as you can edit HTML on your site and upload via FTP anyone can in theory do their own SEO.
the real key though is to have been doing it long enough to know what works, and what doesnt because most forums are unfortunately full of know-alls who really dont know very much when it comes down to it, just posting the same old stuff to get more signature links.
Very true, especially in my ‘industry’!
kevsta - 28 February 2008 06:16 PM
when I think back to when I first started doing this I probably did more harm than good to the sites to be honest, but as they were mine I learnt as I went along and it didnt matter much. If this is a business site, you need it working now, because you may have gone bust if you have to try to learn SEO before you can make a living. so if youre not absolutely confident what youre doing its probably best to seek advice.
True. My first sites were rubbish! Strangely enough though, because they were ‘wordy’ .... and had loads of incoming links (from directories), two of them got google page rank 4! To this day, though, I have yet to sell a thing from either of them! BUT what they do do is link to all my other sites which do sell, so there’s always a bonus if you look for it!
And that’s another thing - page rank is good if you can get high page rank sites to link to you and it is good if you have a high-ish page rank because you can then trade links with high ranked sites who request certain levels of page rank first. BUT, at the end of the day it won’t (by default) get you thousands of clicks on your site and it won’t get you sales (or sign ups in my case). Sometimes it comes down to the idiosyncracies of the surfing public, or sheer luck!
kevsta - 28 February 2008 06:16 PM
in THIS THREAD introducing ourselves we actually offered free SEO advice to anyone who is interested via the forum, and who is capable enough with web technology that we dont have to teach that too, because its definitely a pre-requisite otherwise you could really mess things up bad.
Good thread - I’ve just had a look. Thanks for pointing it out.
kevsta - 28 February 2008 06:16 PM
however for adult sites you are really up against the big boys & their black hats crew so a few (strictly white hat) tips on here isnt going to help much i’m afraid
Yep, I’m up against the big boys alright! Doing okay though! (with lots and lots of effort!)
happy to have a quick look over the sites if you like, and see if theres anything I may be able to suggest you hadnt thought about etc? ..although if youre doing ok in that industry you probably dont need too much help, but sometimes a fresh pair of eyes and different ideas can help. pm me the addresses if you’d like to me to have a quick look
happy to have a quick look over the sites if you like, and see if theres anything I may be able to suggest you hadnt thought about etc? ..although if youre doing ok in that industry you probably dont need too much help, but sometimes a fresh pair of eyes and different ideas can help. pm me the addresses if you’d like to me to have a quick look
I didn’t what to quote llcooljsl1983 as his article was too long but I felt the need to respond and atleast in part defend the article because llcooljsl1983 was clealry missing the point and on occasions was talking about things that were either false, showed lack of knowledge and clealry little idea about what having a commercial website is about,especially if your business depends on it.
As someone who has been designing for years in the UK and in Spain, I agree with the general premise that the CB web Solutions member is making in that decent quality design standards do help sites most in ranking albeit the evidence can sometimes be anecdotal. I have personal experience that would more than back that up as my company has redesigned many a site merely put together but a web designer without any thought to much other than asthetics.
For me, I think you have missed the point of the original article which was to introduce Web Standards and not to discuss in depth (which would not be possible on this forum) the dark science that is SEO. To that end, I think that content not unreasonably was set aside although judging by the broad premise of the article I would imagine that CB Web Solutions probably does recognise the importance of content but as I said you can only put so much into the article. Furthermore, with decent design in the first place it is open to debate whether it would exist at all atleast to the extent it does - Why did you ignore this as it is a statement of the obvious and goes to the heart of what your reply was apparently heading for.
You had me laughing with your ‘proof’ as I have heard this before from an associate of mine as he used this examples to ‘prove’ the lack of worth of Web Standards in Ranking. So let me ask you the question in an attempt to perhaps move you towards the real issue in hand, that is, do you understand the difference between a multi-billion dollar organisation with a massive marketing budget and a small organisation relying (often too much I might add) on the internet for trade? If so, why use examples such as ebay and Youtube as references especially given there history and ownership. Here atleast inward links most notably with Youtube do of course have an affect. However, most things I have been reading for sometime show that links are of reduced importance due to abuse of the system so check of the blogs etc and then I suspect you’ll agree (but 70% - do me a favour!). If you don’t understand it I suggest you read up as I think it would change your opinion - I did.
Your references are exceptions rather than the rule as you probably well know. And Google? Well don’t you think that they would retain a top page ranking using their own system? I thought that was one of the strangest things you posted.
I liked the percentage breakdown regards ranking which you then kind of forgot as you mentioned the algorythm of Google! If there was ever an over-simplistic answer to something that really does misled, I am sorry but I think you have to take the prize. An extremely limited number of people know the algorythm of Google and it certainly doesn’t breakdown into a nice neat percentage as you state. Indeed, it also changes thereby altering ranking of sites from time to time. I believe you should have spent time on this but you ignored it.
Having read the article I would say that it tries to do two things 1. Self-market and let’s face it why not it is free after all!
2. It introduces the concept of decent design from the outset and NOT SEO which is overwhelmingly repair work which probably should be expanded upon with other articles if the author is reading this - mr CB web solutions!!
You in your reply miss this by discussing SEO when actually it is about decent design in the first place and as I understand it you have some experience of web design you like me will know that in reality the overwhelming conversations on this topic are with clients who already have a site and therefore it is a post-design issue. I believe the intent of the post was to introduce decent design standards in the first place which is commendable don’t you think?
So inconclusion I would say that it was a post regarding marketing of their company and to introduce the idea of better design standards rather than SEO itself. So I’m with Harley Andy on this one and recommend you do also as Web Standards aren’t just for fun they will continue to have an effect on what is or isn’t decent design.
Poor response llcooljsl1983 but CB Web did say there were three types of web designers or something didn’t he?
), and although the type of customers I wish to get to my sites are not the usual sort (or perhaps they are ...?), I do find all that you have mentioned extremely useful to anyone wanting to promote their website.
