Their target market is visitors from abroad, primarily those visiting Britain from the USA and Australia, who might want to take a short countryside break in the middle of a tour of major cities. As such people may not have a specific county in mind prior to their visit, they may be unlikely to type “Yorkshire cycling holidays” into Google. Furthermore, when I did some search popularity research with the location set to the US, I found that the monthly searches that include “cycling holiday” are fairly low. Thinking this was simply a case of the UK’s “holiday” being equivalent to the USA’s “vacation” I tried “cycling vacations”. Surprisingly, this was even less popular, according to Google’s Keyword Tool. After a bit more research, I found that the more commonly used term is “cycling tour”, and similar variables.

Choosing exactly which phrases to optimise the home page for was tricky for this site – they wanted to keep their position at the top for “Yorkshire cycling holidays”, and were already on page 2 for “UK cycling holidays”, which, although less popular, still brought them some traffic. “England bike tours” was the primary phrase I chose, while keeping the Yorkshire and UK cycling holidays content included so that they would maintain their positions. As the site had previously had very dilute and unfocused SEO content, the SEO for the “cycling holidays” phrases was improved by the treatment, even though they were only secondary terms. The site has since risen several places for “UK cycling holidays” and remains at position 1 for “Yorkshire cycling holidays”. It has made an entry a little further down Google’s search results for “England bike tours”, in which it could not be found anywhere prior to any treatment. As the SEO work is not yet complete, this is a promising start.

The meta keywords before the SEO treatment: the existing content was dilute and unfocused – more than half of the keywords had little relevance to the content of the page, or the SEO target. Google pays little attention to these anyway, so they were of little use, and getting in the way of the real content.

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This may sound like common sense, but it’s quite easy to accidentally write a site’s content in a way that means it could be ignored by Google for what it supposed to be its target key phrase. A common mistake is making the title tag of the homepage just say “Home”. Another related problem is starting the website with a generic heading such as “Welcome to my Website”. These are the first things that Google will read when it encounters a site, so, if you are a York builder, as one of our recent clients is, these two important places ought to include phrases such as “builder in York“. If you have graphics and headers already proclaiming that this is what you do, it’s sometimes easy to forget that although the human eye sees these as prominent, search engines may not. Even if there is relevant alt text behind the image, Google wants to know that you’re so certain of your identity as a York builder that you’ve made it your website’s main heading. Preferably twice, in the title bar and as the H1 heading.

However, search engines, although not yet sentient (we hope) have evolved a bit of cynicism. If, for example, a webpage has headings declaring that the site belongs to a York architect, but the body text does not contain phrases such as “architect in York” or even mention the words “York” or “architecture” very much at all, Google may look at it, get a bit hopeful at the beginning about its relevance to architecture, but then be disappointed when the rest of the site’s content doesn’t follow through. It needs to be reassured that the title isn’t just a red herring. Fortunately, it’s quite an easy adjustment to make. If someone genuinely is a York-based architect, it’s a sensible thing for them to state on their website, if they haven’t already.

This is another illustration of how writing content for search engines should not be regarded as a separate art from writing for human readers. The fine-tuning of the details is what makes the difference.

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P² People & Places geodemographic people classification is an application that shows demographics by postcode. It uses their tree and branch lifestyle classifications, which describes groups from “Mature Oaks” to “Urban Challenge”, each with a number of ‘branches’ within them. These types are defined by a variety of factors including age, wealth and cultural background. On the free version you only get to see the various ‘trees’ for postcodes in your search area, with a different colour circle used to represent the types of people who live around your search area.

As well as being an interesting insight into how birds of a feather flock together, knowing the demographics of different areas is crucial when deciding where to locate say a branch of a retail chain. For example, a vegan café would probably work best in an area that was mainly in the New Starters and Qualified Metropolitans trees (characterised by many graduates who have a keen interest in healthy eating). A Bingo hall would be more likely to be successful in an area that was mainly in the Disadvantaged Households and Urban Challenge trees (poorer, ageing communities). The P² application provides a fast, comprehensible overview of each area, which can save a lot of time when analysing data in order to make such decisions.

Businesses with multiple branches can take advantage of another application, “Where’s My Nearest…?” which, as its name suggests, allows customers to find their nearest branches based on their postcode. The demonstration version shows users the location of their nearest football club, but the app can be customised to show a business’ own outlets – e.g. banks, supermarkets, or garden centres.

SEO

The Beacon Dodsworth site runs on the Expression Engine CMS. We’ve recently been working with them to improve the SEO on this site. Rather than just doing all the SEO ourselves as we usually do, we’ve been guiding Beacon Dodsworth staff through the process of looking at the site’s statistics, and working out which key phrases the pages should be optimised for. As all of the SEO content can be managed within the CMS, it means they can adjust this as they discover which phrases work the best and generate the most organic search engine traffic (rather than traffic from targeted Google Ads).

The products which have been targeted in this recent SEO campaign are the GIS mapping software, driving time and distance calculator, route planning software and postcode areas and boundaries data.

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We are currently testing the water regarding SEO for the much more competitive phrases “online curtain shop” and “buy curtains online“. Originally we built the site as a low-cost e-commerce solution. It features a budget bespoke catalogue management system, integrated with Mal’s Cart. As the site was coded by us, it was built to our usual coding standards which allow for maximum SEO treatment if required. The client did not ask for SEO in the original quote, but they have since approached us to add some optimisation, both for the main “online curtain shop” phrases, and also some secondary geographical optimisation to target nearby Wetherby and Tadcaster.

The site received a rigorous, in-depth SEO treatment, and also has a few backlinks from our other clients’ links directories (although the effectiveness of these is now uncertain…). It will be interesting to see how much improvement this treatment produces in what appears to be a very competitive area – can this site compete with the established sites? They may be older and larger, but may not necessarily be as concisely coded.

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One such project that we have taken on was for Pharmaceutical Market Access specialists Roboleo. Since we did not know much about this area, this project involved extensive discussion with the clients, to determine which phrases best described their site. The second phase of this preliminary work was working out which variations of these phrases were actually searched for, through the use of Google’s Keyword Tool and previous web statistics on the client’s existing website – after all, being top of the Google results for a phrase which nobody ever types into Google’s search box isn’t much better than having no SEO at all.

Another project we’ve just taken on is for driving instructor Andrew Taylor or AAA Instructor Training – but again, his field is specialised. Andrew does give regular driving lessons in Wakefield to learner drivers, but his main area of expertise is training others to become driving instructors themselves. As with any profession, there are acronyms and technical language which can be hard to contextualise just by looking at the site as an outsider to the area. It may have been relatively straightforward to decide on the phrase “driving instructor training courses in Wakefield“, but “fleet ADI training courses” was a little more elusive. I’m guessing only a driving instructor trainer – or someone who wanted to become one – could tell me that was a sensible phrase for which to optimise the site.

While the Roboleo site was designed and coded in house at Semlyen IT, the AAA Instructor Training site is a classic example of a website created using a third party content management system which was not very search engine friendly. In this case we have taken on the site ourselves and stripped out the CMS, which means that we will now have full control over adding the SEO content.

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The car park provides 24 hour access to its secure premises in the Q-Park complex on Kent Street, and customers receive a dedicated Named space and personal transponder. There are even a few extras thrown in with the parking contracts, such as meals at the nearby York Pavilion Hotel and Langton’s Brasserie.

In other news, the new e-commerce site for Andrew’s Golf is now live – you can read more about this golf accessories shop in my earlier post. Another recent development is the Shandy Hall online gift shop, which is now fully operational on the website for the Laurence Sterne Trust.

Glamping site Jollydays Luxury Camping have just commissioned a major project for their online booking and payment system, and the gifted education publishers Royal Fireworks Press have asked us to use Issuu to provide sample pages for the books available on their site.

On the SEO side of things, organic children’s clothing retailers Twigs4Kids have commissioned some additional work. Having obtained a no. 1 position on google.co.uk for the search “organic children’s clothes”, their next target is to improve their positions for the named brands that they stock. The first two that we’ll be working on are Frugi and Little Shrimp.

The next sites in line for us to build are a new site for York estate agents Nigel Naish, and an online outlet for York curtain shop L & G Adams.

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In building websites which are, in effect, an online business card or flyer, we can apply some of the same design criteria as we would to an equivalent paper document – prominent contact details and a brief description of what’s on offer so that site visitors get an instant overview.

But simply making an online flyer isn’t the end of it – there are other considerations when marketing on the web, and probably the most important is SEO. If a website isn’t properly optimised for search engine visibility, it almost certainly won’t be bringing in many new customers – and in some cases, may as well not exist at all.

Fortunately, optimising a website for search engines has many parallels with providing information to site visitors. As well as contact details and a quick overview, providing a more detailed description of the services a business offers is beneficial to both human readers and search engines. The more the readers know about what a business does and how it operates, the more likely they are to pick up the phone and get in touch. The more written content on a website, particularly with relevant key phrases, the more valuable it will appear to Google.

A very useful tool for one page sites is a Google map. Google makes it possible to create a marker for any location, and embed the map in a website. The embedded map is more than simply an image of a map – it is interactive, and allows the user to zoom in and out, as well as use navigation controls to display different areas. York car valeting company KleenKar have this tool put to good use on their site:

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Also in the property area,  York student accommodation specialists Levi Dale Lettings have a new website profiling their  portfolio of managed student and non-student properties in the York, Selby, Goole, Malton and Whitby areas, which is currently undergoing a thorough SEO treatment.

In yet another area of the property market, high-end York letting agents City Lets have recently commissioned some social media integration in the form of Facebook and Twitter feeds. These will not only include company news and updates, but will also feature an automated property details feed. New properties posted on the City Lets website will be automatically posted in the City Lets Twitter and Facebook streams.

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