I hooked up with videohive.net (part of the envato network of websites) and quite rapidly built a portfolio of over 70 motion graphics movies and After Effects project files.

And this week, to my amazement, I scored top slot – and a very handy US$1,000 cash prize - in a project file sales contest! Congratulations to Plamencvetanov (Bulgaria) and Drudoran (UK) who came second and third respectively.

Click to watch the previews at videohive (new window):

Pages

iShow

Thunder

Glide

Eclipse

Grunge Wall

The Projector

Spin

Logo Light Writing

Deep

And that would include our dog Hamish, who we rescued from the home when he was a six-week-old puppy. He’s grown into a wonderful best friend, guard dog, office assistant and general lay-about and so what better way to say thanks to the Dogs’ Home than giving it a brand new website:

The focus of the site is two-fold: obviously to encourage people to adopt a dog but also to ask for donations, because the Home relies entirely on support from the public and sponsorship from businesses.

There are also numerous stories of successful adoptions that demonstrate how hugely rewarding it can be to give a dog a second chance.

So if you’re thinking about getting a dog - large, small or medium - do please visit the Dogs’ Home website before you go to a breeder or your local pet shop.

If your site isn’t performing, it probably wasn’t optimized for search by your web designer in the first place.

That’s certainly what we’re finding from a recent spate of enquiries about our Search Engine Optimization services (customers who found us on Google using search terms including SEO expert Perth).

We’re seeing some very attractive sites but on taking a closer look, many of them must have been built by web designers who lack basic SEO knowledge (despite their own websites claiming SEO as an expertise, speciality or service).

The last five websites we have been asked to review - for the purposes of providing a quotation for SEO services - all suffer common problems which dramatically limit their ability to rank well in Google, Bing, Yahoo!7 etc. These include:

• poor or duplicate page titles
• inappropriate, duplicate or missing page descriptions
• lack of search-engine-friendly URLs
• lack of h1, h2 etc page headings
• little or no targeting of researched keyphrases and keywords
• images used to display text
• poor navigational structure
• meaningless anchor text
• little or no site promotion…etc, etc, etc

It’s always easier (and much more cost effective in the long run) to optimize a website for search during development. This is the approach we take in all new builds (and re-builds) and while the upfront cost may be slightly more, the need for future, major expenditure on SEO is significantly diminished.

SEO is an on-going process so we always recommend clients set aside time/funds specifically for site promotion and on-site SEO tuning.

If, in the current economic climate, you don’t have budget for a new website (or a major overhaul of your existing site), then there are some basic things you can do to improve your performance in search results.

To get you going, why not download Google’s own SEO Starter Guide (pdf 600KB).

I won’t list all the domain variations, but available as of today are: golfshorts.com.au, rugbyshorts.net.au, sportsshorts.com.au, filmshorts.com.au, movieshorts.com.au, musicshorts.com.au, gigshorts.com.au and quickshorts.com.au.

There’s also: hotshorts.com.au, sexyshorts.com.au, yourshorts.com.au, myshorts.com.au, shortshorts.net.au and who could forget…noshorts.com.au!

I subscribe to TPP Internet’s purged domain service and their daily emailed list of previously held, now available domains has been growing steadily for the last couple of months. Throughout last year each list was typically quite short (!) at maybe 10 domains. Today’s list including all the ’shorts’ was definitely of the long trouser variety, at 90 or so.

PS. If anyone’s interested (and who wouldn’t be) unlimitedorgasms.com.au is now also up for grabs! Ideal if you have a shorts fetish, I suppose. Better leave it at that…

Whether it’s laziness or oversight, there must be millions (if not billions) of websites that are a year - or even more - out-of-date. Or at least appear to be. Is your site among them? Have you checked?

I’m of course referring to your copyright statement, which usually appears in your webpage footer. Have you updated it yet? Have you ever updated it? If not, there’s every chance your potential customers will notice and maybe not get that positive feeling about you that you had in mind.

You can easily update your copyright statement yourself, or get your web designer to do it. In fact, why not ask them (or us) to install a simple script to automatically take care of this important detail for you?

Watch the video to find out more:

Why was I pleased? Because small makes us agile, responsive and attentive.

“When I need to have even the simplest change made to our website, the job has to be booked-in and scheduled and often takes three or four days to get done,” my prospect had said, referring to her current web designers.

Being small allows us to hire-in task-specific specialists - to assemble the optimum team for each unique job. Bigger agencies tend to rely on a rank of salaried generalists, who often sit expensively twiddling their thumbs between projects.

Being small means we have lower overheads, savings we pass on to clients. Being small means we spend less time on admin, arcane procedures and management, freeing up more time to focus on clients.

Being small cuts out chinese whispers: client briefs account executive; executive briefs account manager; manager briefs studio manager; studio manager briefs creative. If but one word changes at each stage the outcome is invariably different to the client’s original brief. And the process starts over.

And being small avoids the ‘Everybody’s Job Story’ in which there are four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody…

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when actually Nobody asked Anybody.

Having worked in senior roles at some of Europe’s and London’s biggest marketing and communications firms, I’ve been there, seen it, done it. If nothing else (in fact I learned a lot) big agencies taught me just how not to do things…

PS to Everybody: If Anybody needs Somebody to do Anything for the next two weeks, Nobody’ll be here. But Anybody, actually Everybody, can still make contact by email. Life’s a beach, just once in a while.

By staying within search engine guidelines, ethical SEO is designed to deliver long-term, lasting results. But it’s not a quick-fix. Sure there are things your SEO expert can do to quickly bring more traffic to your site but the process of lifting your search rankings - which will improve not only the quantity but also the quality of your traffic – is a carefully-considered effort that can take months to bear fruit.

And it shouldn’t stop there. Regularly adding new engaging content to your site and building valuable in-bound links, are just two examples of SEO activities that should be on-going in order to improve and consolidate your website’s relevancy and search rankings.

Tick that off the list and leave it

Unfortunately, many businesses seem to take the view that once their website is up and running that’s it. “We’ve got a website. We get reasonable search results. Tick that off the list and leave it.”

Well it’s not just them that’ll leave it. Eventually the search engines will notice your website has become stagnant and irrelevant compared to your competitors who are regularly updating their sites, engaging with their visitors and gaining more authority.

Without on-going SEO your traffic will dwindle. Your website will slowly, inexorably, slip down the rankings into what Google this week, rather eyebrow-liftingly, referred to as the “cesspool” of the internet.

Paraphrasing what CEO Eric Schmidt went on to say:

“Google’s algorithms are trying to find the most relevant search results … not the sites that best game the system (a reference to black-hat / grey-hat SEO?).

“The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevancy,” he added.

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