SEO | Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

Barbican Secure Contract Parking recently commissioned a website from Bivouac Design Solutions, which was coded by Semlyen IT. This site for a secure car park in York is another one-page site, which includes an embedded Google map.

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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Much of our work is in the development of multiple-paged, often complex, dynamic websites, but there are occasions when this kind of site isn’t needed. Some small businesses, such as an aerial installer in York whose site we made recently, simply require an online presence so that their customers can find them on the web. If your business doesn’t need to sell products online, take online bookings or offer a range of different services, your website can be a simple, one-page static site and still be an effective tool in attracting new customers.

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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York estate agents Smiles Property have extended their business to include holiday properties. Their new holiday and short term lets section will provide a range of high quality York holiday apartments and cottages for visitors to the city, and caters both for leisure and for those who are visiting on business and require a short term serviced let. The Smiles site is designed and maintained by Loyalty Matters, but is receiving additional SEO treatment from Semlyen IT.

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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In providing an SEO service, we often find ourselves dealing with different situations from site to site. Some clients who approach us to improve their position in Google searches are doing so because their existing sites are set up in a non-SEO-friendly way; others may be set up correctly but missing optimised content. Or, in an ideal situation, we will have coded the site ourselves with the intention of integrating effective SEO from the outset.

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This site was coded by Semlyen IT, and the SEO – both onsite and offsite – was provided as part of the original site development. The site, which sells craft kits for children, has done well for various search phrases. As a follow up, the site’s owners have commissioned an SEO boost in the form of some additional work for those phrases which are lagging behind. We keep track of how well each phrase is doing by logging the position of each in Google results every few weeks.
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WordPress is a powerful, yet simple, blog management system which runs online. Installation and customization is simple, it can be skinned to look like almost anything and if you don’t have a design in mind there are hundreds of themes available. The license allows us to modify the templates as much as we like and does not even require we credit WordPress… oh and its completely free!

This makes WordPress a great, highly fexible content management system, take a look at our post on using WordPress as a content management system here.

But WordPress is just as useful ‘out of the box’, it contains everything you need to set up and manage a successful blog and can be a great asset to your website, giving it an up-to-date feeling, while increasing repeat visits and improving SEO. There are thousands of plug-ins available for WordPress which do a range of things from running automatic backups and basic security, to automatically updating your Twitter account and turning your blog into a photo gallery.

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