FAQ's

This is one of the hardest questions to answer - there are so many variables and differing steps to each element of a web based project, that it's practically impossible to answer. The digital version of "how long to paint a fence"? We seen projects that are completed within a few days, alternatively they have been around the studio for months, and every possible scenario in between. It is all dependent upon how complicated the project is and how organised the accompanying documentation is before it goes to build. The more organised the project is, the quicker we can turn it around.

Yes, if the value is over £500.00 we will raise a 50% deposit invoice of the fee we have agreed (based on our ballpark quotation).

Most of the project we undertake on your behalf are normally organised and discussed over emails are the telephone. The problem with trade prices is that there's not enough profit to allow us to spend a half day out the office discussing a project. If we charged additionally for that time then we will be approaching retails costs. However, we normally like to meet new clients to put faces to names, introduce ourselves properly and iron out any queries that you may have before outsourcing to us.

You can supply the text for a website in any format you find easiest as long as it's something we can copy and paste. If the visuals are created in Photoshop then the most common format is Microsoft Word, you can supply the .PSD's but the associated file sizes normally cause more hassle. Additionally, if the visuals are created in Illustrator for example then .PDF's are also acceptable, as long as the text isn't outlined and remains dynamic.

Yes, if we cut-up the visuals and produce the internal pages we can insure that everything complies to the latest standards and all associated Title and ALT Tags are in place. However we will only implement 'common sense' keywords therefore the website will only be optimised to a certain level. For further optimisation requirements please visit our Search Engine Optimisation services.

We will not release a website visual until we are truly confident that it meets the website brief supplied to the best of its ability. We also assume that you will not showcase the proposed visual to your client unless you are initially happy. Therefore if your client isn't happy with the website visual then it will be down to the initial briefing. This is no reflection on our design service therefore if an alternative visual is required then we will change an additional fee, however this has never happened to this date.

Please review our Terms of Business. A PDF version will be emailed to you before any design or development work commences.

No, we usually prefer to host the website during development but once its completed and providing the other server is capable of running the website in question, and any components required are installed then it should be a nice easy transfer. However we will need a key contact to lease with during the transfer.

Yes, Rackspace are scheduled to take a server backup every night. We can back date websites to previous backups if required and we charge for the time required. It's normally within one hour depending upon the specific elements that need extracting from the backed up files

Yes no problem, we normally like to schedule a 3 hour feasability study which is designed to all us to download the website, get a local development version set-up and farmilarise ourselfs with the code. Once we have completed the feasability study we will then be in a position to forsee any probable complications before anyone commits to anything.

If you are not sure how many hours your project should take you can always send us your brief. We will then analyze the spec and break down each development phrase into chunks before assigning development times on each section.

Every employee has a one month's notice period before quitting the company. The project manager immediately assigns a new person to your team. The project manager also ensures that the new person gets all the background knowledge of the project and becomes productive ASAP, all of which is transparent to you.

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the process of both raising the number of visitors and the quality of visitors to a website from search engines via 'natural' or 'organic' search results. Typically, the higher up in the search engine ranking positions (SERPS) a website appears for a given search term or keyword, the more visitors that website will receive.

A website's ranking is dependent on many factors, of which some are under your direct control (known as on page ranking factors) and others are seemingly outside of your control but can be influenced (known as off page ranking factors).

On page ranking factors include modifying your page titles, content, internal links and meta data to make your website more relevant to search engines for the keywords and phrases that you are interested in.

Off page ranking factors include obtaining links from other websites to your website ensuring that the keywords or phrases that you are interested in are contained within the link. This is also known as link building.

Your website ranking will also be dependent on the key phrases that you are targeting and how much competition there is for those search terms.

A keyword, also known as a key phrase as they are often 2, 3 or 4 word phrases, is a short piece of text highly relevant to your business, product or service. This keyword or key phrase becomes the piece of text that we focus on so that when somebody types that same text into a search engine your website comes out as close to the top as possible.

A URL (stands for Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of a website or web page. So www.bbc.co.uk is a URL and so is www.xyz.com/page.html.

Titles, or page titles, are the text that is displayed at the very top of your web browser and describe what the particular page you are on is about. Page titles are also used by search engines and are displayed in the search results when you search for something.

Meta tags are pieces of data and text that is not normally visible when you visit a website but is present in the code so can be accessed by search engines and other automated software programs that may visit your website. Common meta tags cover topics such as a description of the page, what keywords are of interest, who the author of the website is, etc.

A title tag should not consist of any more than 70 characters including spaces. Most search engines will cut off titles longer than this and will not display the additional characters within search results.

There are no clear guidelines on the length of meta tags but some studies show that search engines do not index after around 250 characters.

Once the optimisation work has been completed, it will generally take between 3 to 6 months for the updated pages to be indexed by the search engines and results begin to emerge. We always recommend an SEO campaign of at least 6 months to produce meaningful results.

Ideally, each page of your website should be optimised in order to realise the full potential of your site and gain as many high rankings as possible. This is certainly true for a small website. For larger sites where there are often time and budget constraints it is very important to at least optimise the main pages and most important areas of the website first of all and then return to the minor pages at a later date.

Search engines send out small software programs called crawlers or spiders to regularly visit as many of the pages within their index as possible. They do this to update their index with any changes and so keep it as fresh as possible. They also look for any new pages by foollowing links from one website to another.

Once the web pages are recorded and stored within the search engine's index, it is possible to search for it by typing in some text.

Search engines use a complex series of algorithms to rank websites in order once any text is input by the user (also known as a search term and what we target as a keyword if it is relevant to our campaign).

Search engines are constantly adapting and changing the way they work to make their results more relevant to the searches being performed and so it is an ongoing task to keep up to date and to optimise websites so that they continue to rank well for a given set of keywords.

Frames present problems for users and search engines alike. A website built in frames is actually a number of individual web pages linked together to form a frameset, which is what is viewed on screen. A typical frameset could be made up of 2 or 3 individual web pages, usually with 1 page for the navigation and another for the main content area. Search engines are not aware of frames and so index each web page individually (providing they can find their way to each page in the first place). These individual pages, when accessed from search results, are then not viewed within their correct frameset and effectively become orphaned from the rest of the site.

Therefore, the 2 main problems are that search engines may not be able to index all the pages and that using frames results in orphaned pages. There are a few solutions to dealing with each problems, namely ensuring there are links to all pages that search engines can follow and automatically building in the full frameset if a page is viewed on its own but our recommendation would always be to not build your website using frames at all. The best solution in our view is not to use frames.

Historically, search engines have been unable to index flash files and so any text content contained within those flash animations has been essentially hidden to search engines (and people searching for that content). Best practice with regards to using flash has always been to use it sparingly, do not create whole sites in flash (or provide a html alternative) and make sure that any content you want to be put in front of search engines is not contained within a flash file.

However, Google announced in July 2008 that it is now able to read the contents of flash files and so these best practice methods are in the process of being updated. There does appear to be some room for improvement in Google's abilities in this regard and no guarantee that other search engines can index flash files so watch this space.

The term black hat SEO is used in connection with individuals using tactics that go against search engine guidelines or their terms of service such as spamdexing, of which there are many types but include attempts to redirect users to particular target pages without their intervention (also known as URL redirection) and giving search engines different versions of the web page to index to those viewed by real visitors (also known as cloaking).

White hat SEO methods are always in line with search engine guidelines and tend to take longer to implement and generate results but will generally last a long time, as they are approved by search engines. Black hat SEO tactics can gain results more quickly but will often receive bans or penalties once search engines discover what is happening.

In the UK, the most popular search engine is Google, with 90% of the market share (according to Hitwise, figures correct as of December 2008).

In the US, Google is also the most popular search engine, with a lower market share of 72% (Hitwise - February 2010).

It is advantageous to consider search engine optimisation as early as possible when redesigning or updating your website. SEO will naturally benefit from decisions that you make in terms of who your website will be targeted at, what type of content will be available and how often that content will be updated. Once those decisions have been made and the website is under development, the structure of the site, the navigation, technologies used, links between pages, etc. are all areas in which SEO needs to be considered to avoid any potential major rework at a later date. This is why is does benefit the site to think about search engines as early as possible, certainly when the website is still in the planning stage and before the development work begins.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising works by creating a small advert through Google Adwords or a similar PPC engine and placing a bid on a particular key phrase or phrases. Each time your advert is clicked on, you pay the amount that you have bid up to your budgeted limit. Once you hit your budget the advert is removed from view. PPC is very good for quickly gaining traffic to a website and can be used to test a new or updated website for its effectiveness as converting visitors into customers. Some industries are very popular and so PPC is getting to be prohibitively expensive for a lot of businesses. What we do is look for niche key phrases that are not so popular but will generate good numbers of visitors at a realistic cost per click.

A reciprocal link is where you put a link to a specific website on your own website and then that website reciprocates by linking back to your website. This is a useful way of building the number of links pointing to your own website through agreements with websites in your field of interest. It is generally considered better if there are solid reasons to link to your website such as interesting and relevant content and other resources rather than just the fact that there is a link in place. Search engines are starting to pick up on reciprocal links and so their appeal is reducing.

It is not necessarily a good tactic to purchase a lot of domain names with your favourite keywords in them. Search engines may believe that these domain names are trying to gain an unfair advantage and so could penalise your website as a result.

There are no hard and fast guidelines on what percentage of the body text should be certain keyword or phrases. It is important to not repeat your key phrases too many times, as search engines may think that you are keyword stuffing or trying to gain an advantage merely by stuffing your keywords into your content rather than just writing decent content. What should be focused on is the prominence and placement of your key phrases so making sure they appear in heading, lead paragraphs and in bold text.

Looking at the keyword density, i.e. how many times a keyword or phrase appears in a section of text, should be compared with the top ranking pages for that keyword or phrase to see how where improvements can be made in your site.

If there are common mispellings of particular key phrases that you are targeting then optimising your website to include those key phrases could be extremely beneficial.

This should be included as part of a full key phrase analysis to identify any potential mispellings and also any regional or international variations of your products and services.

For instance, property lettings in the UK and property rentals in the US.

They do help in some search engines and not in others. Currently Google does not take much notices of the keywords meta tag but Yahoo does recognise it.

The description meta tag should always be employed, as this is the text that search engines use in their search results page. This description text should aim to describe the page accurately so search engine users feel compelled to click on your site and know what to expect when they view your web page.

A Google sitemap is essentially an XML file that lists all the pages contained within a website. It also allows you to include information about each page such as when it was last updated, how often it changes and how important the page is in relation to the other pages in your site. These details help the search engines understand more information about each page in your website. The Google sitemap, or XML sitemap, should constantly be updated as pages are updated or new pages added to the site.

Verification with Google and Yahoo enables those search engines to understand that you own the site and then allow access to certain tools to find out some essential information on how often the search engines are returning to your site, what pages are being indexed, whether there are any errors and what external pages are linking to yours and more (especially in the case of Google).

Verification doesn't affect PageRank or affect your site's performance in Google's or Yahoo's search results but it does help gain more information so that your site's performance can be improved.

Google Analytics is free software that records all of the visits made on your website and statistics about each one such as where they came from, i.e. a search engine or other website, what pages they viewed on your website, how long they spent on your site, what browser they used, whether they completed a search on your site and what they searched for and many other statistics.

Used in the right way, Google Analytics can offer great insight into improvements that can be made to your SEO campaign. One of the ways of doing this is by organising KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track the progress of your website for such items as keyword performance, pages bringing in search engine traffic and bounce rates (if your bounce rate is high for a particular page then it needs attention).

Tracking the above items with Google Analytics can help you understand where to apply your efforts for your SEO campaign.

Blogs can be fantastic for SEO, if they are updated regularly with well written and information articles. It is all about the content and having blog posts that people want to read in order for it to be successful and do well in the search engine rankings.

Keyword Density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared with the total number of words on that page. This technique can be employed to determine whether a specific web page is relevant for a particular keyword or phrase.

This really depends on the directories and your market. There are lots of directories out there and many of them are not wort submitting your site to so it is a case of choosing wisely to get your site into the most worthwhile directories for your site and industry.

It is possible to remove pages from Google's index by using the noindex meta tag. As long as Googlebot fetches the page, it will see the noindex meta tag and prevent that page from showing up in the web index.

Another method for telling Google you do not want certain parts of your website to show in its index is by using the robots.txt file. Googlebot will check for this file when it arrives at your website and so if you include the sections that you do not want indexed in this file then Google should not index those sections.

The best method to determine when Googlebot is visiting your website is to use Google Webmaster Tools, which can tell you when your sitemap was last downloaded and how many of your pages have been indexed by Google. Yahoo has a similar set of tools called Site Explorer.

There is confusion over the difference between these 2 terms and, in order to answer the question, I did a bit of research to see what other people thought the difference was. There appears to be no real agreement on what the difference is. The more established phrase these days is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, which covers enabling your website to appear in the top natural positions on search engines, i.e. the main listings on the left-hand side.

There is some evidence that older domain names or domain names whose DNS has not been updated for a long time can fair a bit better in search engine rankings. But if your domain name was registered recently then there are many more important aspects to getting a good search engine ranking such as focusing on your content and creating something that other people want to read and link to.

To get your site listed in the Google Directory, you need to get your site listed in the Open Directory. The Google Directory is created from the data included in the Open Directory. In order to submit your site to the Open Directory you need go to http://dmoz.org, find the perfect category for your site, click on Add URL and then carefully read the page and fill out the form.

There are a couple of places that you can position keywords and phrases. You should ensure that you have a title tag and meta description and meta keywords tags that are tailored to this individual page. You can then use alt text for each image on the page that should correctly describe what the image depicts. Merely stuffing keywords into your alt text could get spotted by the search engines.

Other than the above the recommendation would be to alter this page to allow for some text to be displayed (if it is a page that you want to rank highly). Does it have to be purely graphical?

It is not necessary to optimise every single page of your website. In fact, you may not want to certain pages to rank highly in search engines such as terms and conditions or login pages. It is important to optimise all the main pages in the website plus any pages that have interesting and relevant content for users.

If a web page has a high search engine ranking and appears to have no or little content on the page then it is often due to other ranking factors or the competitiveness of the search term. It is possible to obtain top rankings for key words and phrases that have little or no competition by making sure that you correctly employ title tags, meta tags and alt text. For more competitive key phrases then usually links from other websites to the top ranking web page will come into play. Search engines attribute importance to quality sites that link to another web page so it could be that there are lots of quality incoming links to the top ranked web page. Further analysis can often uncover what is happening in order for the top ranked web page to gain its prominent position.

It is possible for search engines to index dynamic sites but is generally recommended that you employ URL rewriting to turn your URLs that have query strings in them to use a / instead of a ?. This then creates a URL that looks like a static page and is nicer both for search engines and real visitors alike. Further to this, if you had a product ID of 123, which was actually a product for an Oak Table your dynamic URL might look something like this:

http://www.my-website.com/products.asp?id=123

but after URL rewriting it would look like this:

http://www.my-website.com/products/123

but you could then get your key phrase into the URL by adding the product title as well as the product ID so your URL becomes:

http://www.my-website.com/products/123/oak-table

This helps the indexation of the URL and also ensures that you have key phrases within the page URL, which is helpful for search engines but also helpful for site users.

The answer to this is it can affect search engine rankings.

There are 2 main things to look out for, as follows:

• i) Make sure that the IP address of the host you are moving to is not blocked or banned by search engines, as this will affect your rankings when your website is moved to the new host.

• ii) The process of moving where your website is hosted should be as seamless as possible so that no downtime is experienced. This involves getting your website uploaded to the new hosting company so that everything is ready to go before changing your DNS.

Making sure you take the above items into account should minimize any impact of changing where a website is hosted.

If file names have changed in your new site then you should employ 301 redirects to ensure that visitors are redirected from the old page URL to the new page URL. Search engines will also follow these redirects and index the new page URLs. See more detail on 301 redirects in the answer to question 8 below.

There are many aspects to redesigning a website that could affect its SEO rankings. How many pages are contained in the new website, the technologies employed in producing those pages, the content displayed on each page and whether the filename of the page has changed could all affect your rankings to some degree. If the redesign is a complete change in direction, with new pages being added or old pages being taken away, introducing new features, rewriting the content, etc. then the SEO of the site should be considered right at the start to ensure that all of these factors are taking into account as early as possible in order to minimize any impact and ensure that rankings can be improved upon in the future.

Employing a 301 redirect enables you to redirect visitors from one location to another. Therefore, if your website is being moved to another domain name then you would employ a 301 redirect (which is a permanent redirect) to redirect any visitors arriving at your old website to automatically be sent to your new website. Search engines will spot this 301 redirect and will therefore understand that they should index the new website and discontinue indexing the old website, as a 301 redirect is permanent.

One of the main things here is to ensure that if you site is down that it returns a 503 error code so that the search engines will know that the site is just away for maintenance and will continue to crawl it later on as if nothing happened.

In terms of exactly how long your website can be offline before it affects Search Engine rankings will depend on the search engine and how many times they have tried to visit your site and got errors or a slow response. The search engines will retry several times before considering giving your site a penalty so if your site has a temporary outage then it is probably nothing to be worried about. However, if you site continues to be down or is regularly slow then the search engines could impose a penalty.

In order to minimize loss after a domain name change, the most important thing to do is employ 301 redirects for the old website address to the new website address plus ensure that all old pages redirect to the correct new page. If you have also changed page URLs between the old domain name and the new domain name then you should map old page URLs to the new page URLs. If any pages no longer exist on the new domain name then in most cases you should send the visitor to your site's 404 page but ensure that this 404 page has links on it to the main sections within your site to that the site visitor can decide where to go next.

These measures will keep visitors going to the correct pages on your site and also ensure that search engines follow the 301 redirects and start indexing the new page URLs. It will not guarantee that you will keep all of your traffic but should minimize any traffic loss.

The Sandbox (a.k.a. Sandboxing or the sandbox effect or the Google penalty) is a phenomenon that people have claimed to observe in the ranking of web pages that is performed by Google. It is the subject of much debate. Its existence has been written about but not confirmed, and several observers state that they have observed the contrary to what is claimed for this perceived phenomenon

The phenomenon that people have claimed to observe is that Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its "sandbox", in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google's page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new website from other websites that they own before creating that website.

Websites that were ranking well can unexpectedly find that some pages or even the entire website now are listed on the end page of Google results. This loss of approximately 950 places is known as 950 penalty by Google.

The -60 filter is a penalty that Google applies to websites that use spam SEO techniques. If Google applies -60 penalty to a website, the rankings of that site are lowered by 60 positions.

The minus 30 penalty (also referred to as the 4 pages back penalty) is usually reserved for good and beneficial websites that have a few minor flaws. Usual infractions include SEO steps like keyword spamming, hidden text, or too many affiliate links, and duplicate content issues amongst other similar infractions.