Google Warns Against Advertorials

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In February 2013 Google penalised Interflora and various UK News Papers for using advertorials as a link selling process.

Google clearly stated in 2007 that paid links would lead to a penalty and this latest action shows that in 2013 the penalty still stands.

Matt Cutts said:- Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or “advertorial” pages on your site that pass PageRank. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations. The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results.

Ratio Referring Domains to Backlinks?

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Referring domains and backlinks are an important part of the SEO process and providing that they are organic, give your website the endorsements needed to climb the SERP. However, some people are not sure of the difference between these two concepts, and what the ratio between referring domains and backlinks should be to ensure SEO success; below is a brief explanation of this.

Backlinks refer to the links which are pointing to your site from an individual page on a website e.g. chameleonwebservices.co.uk/seo, chameleonwebservices.co.uk/web-design. The referring domain is the domain name of the site from which the links are coming, so in the example above the referring domain is chameleonwebservices.co.uk.

This means that you can have many backlinks on one referring domain; but is it good to have lots of links or will the have a negative effect upon SEO? The short answer is…it depends. Unfortunately this is an unanswerable question as there is no set ratio between backlinks and referring domains, it is achieved through trial and error.

To give yourself the best chance of climbing SERP, ensure that you have a variety of links which are organically sourced and relevant to your site content. If you need any extra help and advice, call Chameleon today on 0121 314 5504.

 

Web Design Training Courses

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Most businesses today realise the importance of having a functional and great-looking website in order to boost sales and raise awareness of your company profile. However, lots of people are worried about the cost of hiring a web design company and instead feel that training their own staff to build the site will be cheaper to create and maintain in the long term.

There are lots of institutions offering web design training courses in many different formats. There are college, online, week-long and university courses amongst many others available at a cost of between £200 and £9000.

The majority of companies will not pay for their staff to be put through a 3 year university degree in order to get a website, this is just too time consuming and expensive. However, some businesses opt for the 3 – 4 day web design courses which offer an introduction to the process. As mentioned earlier, these cost upwards of £200 and so may sound like a bargain; but what are the trainees actually getting for £200?

A professional web designer will have years of experience of creating sites to order for clients, ensuring functionality and style are of the highest quality. Even the most talented member of staff will not have the same calibre of skills as a professional from a short course.

It is a common misconception that websites have to cost thousands of pounds, when in fact a simple website created by a professional can cost as little as £300 and will be completed faster and to a higher standard than if a novice designed it.

Do not waste money on web design courses, speak to a Chameleon Web Design professional instead. Contact Us for a free quote today!

Twitter mentions vs Hashtags for SEO

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The world of social media is growing by the day, and Twitter is one of the newest yet most well-known and used social networking site of them all. The popularity of the site means that it is essential to be involved with it for SEO purposes.

Twitter has a number of features which allow you to link posts to topics and other people, the most widely used being ‘hashtags’ and ‘mentions’. for those of you who are relatively inexperienced with Twitter, here is a brief explanation of what each feature does.

Hashtags – These are used to highlight a word or phrase within your tweet in order to put it in a category e.g. #friday. Once hashtags are created, they can be clicked on by followers; this will bring up any other tweets which contain the same hashtag. If lots of different people post the same hashtag then this becomes a ‘trend’ and will have more exposure on the Twitter site.

Mentions – These are similar to hashtags, but instead of words or phrases, you tag people in your posts e.g. @beyonce. Once a person is mentioned, they will receive a notification of this and can reply to the tweet directly.

In terms of SEO, involving social media is a necessary and growing trend. This is because having lots of Twitter followers will increase the visibility of your company, and linking your website to your Twitter account will turn these followers into endorsements of your company. The more times that your business information is viewed, the better for your company profile and brand awareness.

Essential SEO

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We get asked frequnetly if SEO is important and our reply is that “SEO is essential” if you have an online business.

Search engine optimisation carried out correctly will give Google the opporunity to find the information they need in way that makes Google like your website more than a competitor.

A good way to understand how essential SEO is to your online business you can watch this video by Matt Cutts. In this video Matt explains how Google ranks a website using a unique evaluation process. The crawling that Google does and the analysis of a website is the starting point and how crawling is carried out over a long period of time.

This video helps explain the Google dance and also explain how Google crawls and updates more and more data today than they did before.

The frequencies and priorities of crawls and indexing is a very important part of the Google search and the filtering processes within the Google indexed databases.

How does Google Search work?

Essential SEO

An expert SEO company will help Google find all the data that is required to help you get your website into Google search results for the keywords that you want to be found under. This is an essential part of your online business and SEO works to improve the rankings simply by helping Google find the details it needs.

What about Negative SEO