Initially we looked at the search results and have made a significant difference to the ranking for their key terms.  Over the past couple of weeks we have been adding the new seasons fashions from the leading designers, giving a page to each to show the newest wedding outfits.  There are many stunning images like my favourite one shown here from Condici.

The new pages are doing well, achieving page one listings and climbing.

Personalised search has arrived whether you are logged into the big G or not.

Up until now all you’ve had to do is log out of and run your search.  Those a little more savvy have the excellent firefox plug-in from yoast that still give you a non-personalised search, meaning you should be able to see the listings for a search that everyone else will get.

Not any more!

Take a look at this screenshot -

That all looks ok, I’m at No. 1, but wait, what’s this -

So now we are seeing customised searches based on your previous search and you’ll see this whether ot not you are logged in.  All is not lost though, if you click the view customizations link and then “without these improvements” link you should actually see proper search listings.  Quite what this is about, or what google is up too only time will tell.  But now I can tell everyone I can get their site to position 1, all you have to do is find your site in the search, click it and then do the search again, and as if by magic, your site is no. 1.

The site aims to showcase the hard work John and Carole have put in during the last 5 years or so and has information about them, their alpacas and the alpacas for sale.

Once again, it’s been our pleasure to work with this client and we wish them the greatest success with the site, and our continuing partnership to improve it still more.

Checking  Google I saw that it was listed for the combinations of the terms for searching such a download, and getting hits for all kinds of variations including someone searching for list of counties of united kingdom web developers.

Glad to be of service.

Coming upon a well written and concise post from Tad Chef at SEOptimise that addresses my concerns,  I thought it’s a post well worth investing some time in and sharing here.  It does mean that my way of thinking needs changing and methods need updating.

Enjoy

• The images are straight from their camera so are too big to fit the desired format and/or eat away at their bandwidth.
• The image needs cropping.
• The image needs some other changes.

What is needed is a quick and easy way of making the desired changes without having to go to the extent of buying some software to do the job just for their website.  If it’s just a few images I don’t mind making the changes, but often the owner wants to do it themselves straight away.

So what do I do, recommend they use an online free editor.

I came across a post from http://woork.blogspot.com/ where 5 online photo editors are compared. Of these there are two of my favourites that do most jobs.

1 – Pixlr

Has a very Photoshop like interface, easy to use, most changes are catered for and you can upload and save from and to your computer.

2 – Picnik

Different layout but very easy to use and you don’t have to register! Also allows you to save to your computer or share your photos on Flickr  and  Picasa and most other popular photo sharing web services.

Good luck with them both.

How wrong can you be? Lots of lists, but none of them complete and most out of date. Spent far too long looking and eventually had to make my own. I think it’s pretty complete, though, as ever, you probably know better.

I’ve added a text file you can download with just each County name.

Please let me know what you think or if there are any missing by adding a comment. I promise I’ll be grateful and will add any missing counties.

Finally if you make use of the list, feel free to link back to this page http://www.imaker.co.uk/blog/list-of-uk-counties/

For such a major upgrade, giving a totally new look admin, it was much easier that previous releases (2.6) and gave no problems at all.

We thought it’d be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.

There are also “pitfalls to avoid” that are listed here:

Page title tags:

• choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
• using default or vague titles like “Untitled” or “New Page 1″
• using a single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages
• using extremely lengthy titles that are unhelpful to users
• stuffing unneeded keywords in your title tags

Description meta tags

• writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
• using generic descriptions like “This is a webpage” or “Page about baseball cards”
• filling the description with only keywords
• copy and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag
• using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages

URL structure

• using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs
• choosing generic page names like “page1.html”
• using excessive keywords like “baseball-cards-baseball-cards-baseballcards.htm”
• having deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/page.html”
• using directory names that have no relation to the content in them
• having pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g. “domain.com/page.htm” and sub.domain.com/page.htm”) access the same content
• mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure
• using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and remember them better)

Navigation

• creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site to every other page
• going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (it takes twenty clicks to get to deep content)
• having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations (many, but not all, search engines can discover such links on a site, but if a user can reach all pages on a site via normal text links, this will improve the accessibility of your site

HTML Sitemap

• letting your HTML sitemap page become out of date with broken links
• creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without organizing them, for example by subject

404 page

• allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your webserver is configured to give a 404 HTTP status code when non-existent pages are requested)
• providing only a vague message like “Not found”, “404″, or no 404 page at all
• using a design for your 404 pages that isn’t consistent with the rest of your site

Content

• writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes
• embedding text in images for textual content (users may want to copy and paste the text and search engines can’t read it)
• dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation
• rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to users
• having duplicate or near-duplicate versions of your content across your site
• inserting numerous unnecessary keywords aimed at search engines but are annoying or nonsensical to users
• having blocks of text like “frequent misspellings used to reach this page” that add little value for users
• deceptively hiding text from users, but displaying it to search engines

Anchor text

• writing generic anchor text like “page”, “article”, or “click here”
• using text that is off-topic or has no relation to the content of the page linked to
• using the page’s URL as the anchor text in most cases (although there are certainly legitimate uses of this, such as promoting or referencing a new website’s address)
• writing long anchor text, such as a lengthy sentence or short paragraph of text
• using CSS or text styling that make links look just like regular text
• using excessively keyword-filled or lengthy anchor text just for search engines
• creating unnecessary links that don’t help with the user’s navigation of the site

Heading tags

• placing text in heading tags that wouldn’t be helpful in defining the structure of the page
• using heading tags where other tags like <em> and <strong> may be more appropriate
• erratically moving from one heading tag size to another
• excessively using heading tags throughout the page
• putting all of the page’s text into a heading tag
• using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure

Images

• using generic filenames like “image1.jpg”, “pic.gif”, “1.jpg” when possible (some sites with thousands of images might consider automating the naming of images)
• writing extremely lengthy filenames
• stuffing keywords into alt text or copying and pasting entire sentences
• writing excessively long alt text that would be considered spammy
• using only image links for your site’s navigation

Robots.txt

• allowing search result-like pages to be crawled (users dislike leaving one search result page and landing on another search result page that doesn’t add significant value for them)
• allowing a large number of auto-generated pages with the same or only slightly different content to be crawled: “Should these 100,000 near-duplicate pages really be in a search engine’s index?”
• allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled

Social media promotion

• attempting to promote each new, small piece of content you create; go for big, interesting items
• involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services

General promotion

• spamming link requests out to all sites related to your topic area
• purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank instead of traffic

Fairly standard stuff from the big G, nonetheless worth a look.