We’re trustworthy!  However, many, many others aren’t and will be happy to promise everything, take your money, deliver nothing and then point to the small print.

Thankfully, Google has come out and gone on the record about these guys.  Don’t trust them.  Trust us instead!

“Guaranteed Number One Listing on Google!” (not quite…) is a post from Mass Media Web Design

That’s not ground-breaking.  If a site is dead slow then it makes sense that people will be less impressed by it and less likely to use it.  If they don’t use it then it’s no interest to Google and they’ll push you down the rankings accordingly.

Forget about SEO for the moment though and consider the impression that a slow website presents to your clients.  If your site takes too long to load then they won’t hang around to read it.  If they do wait for the home page to come up but then nevigate somewhere else in the site then they’ll give up.

The impression it puts across is of money saving.  You’ve gone for cheap hosting to save money.  The question they’ll ask is: “What else are they trying to save money on?  Are they using cheap materials?”.

We’ve just beefed up our clients’ hosting (and are planning a further upgrade later this year).  It’s not cheap, but it’s quick and it’s reliable.  If you already have a site then it’s worth checking the speed out.  Not just for the sake of Google, but for the sake of your visitors and your professional image.

Test your speed here: http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

Is your website fast enough? is a post from Mass Media Web Design

I’m pretty sure they’re not getting into the web design business in Slough, but it’s a peculiar search result all the same…

Google gets into the web design business (maybe…) is a post from Mass Media Web Design

Often the sites are all fairly similar – clean, fresh designs but they never have the ‘wow’ factor.

However, it’s possible to have a clean, fresh design that puts a professional image across and still blow people away when they load it up.

Many of the website design blogs like to showcase designs that they like and one of my favourite blogs is designshard.com.

They’ve recently compiled a list of stunning but simple websites.  When you’re looking for design inspiration – this is worth a look:

http://www.designshard.com/inspiration/19-impressive-stunning-simple-web-sites

Website designs for inspiration is a post from Mass Media Web Design

Jon Wiley, senior user experience designer at Google, said in a blog post that the new layout is an effort to meet the “rising expectations for search” from increasingly web savvy users.

“As the web has evolved over the past decade, people have been typing more sophisticated searches and seeking specialised search tools to match. Our goal was to take a design known by millions of people and make it better,” he said.

Wiley also explained that Google had spent a lot of time working on the left-hand navigation panel in order to offer the best balance of additional functionality without distracting from the primary search results.

“Using the lessons from Search Options introduced last May, designers, researchers and engineers worked to explore a vast array of possibilities for a permanently open panel of search tools,” he said.

“We made hundreds of prototypes and gathered feedback from user studies, Googlers and experiments. In the end, we came up with a design that provides dynamic, relevant search tools on the left, while lightening and updating the aesthetics all around.”

Marisa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, said at the unveiling of the new design that it “refreshes and streamlines the look, feel and functionality of Google, making it easier to pinpoint what you’re looking for”.

Source: ukfast.net

New Google search results page is a post from Mass Media Web Design

It’s very widely used now but it’s not 100% accurate and if you make a mistake with it (which can happen) then don’t expect Google to help you out, as this experiment shows.

For what it’s worth, I don’t use it on any of my sites.  You can build a site without having to bodge duplicate content up.

Don’t rely on Google is a post from Mass Media Web Design

With some great screenshots, they’ve shown just how awful some of the major websites make the user experience.

Check it out over here: http://www.redcardinal.ie/conversion-optimisation/31-08-2009/how-to-smother-your-prospects-and-kill-your-leads

How to get rid of all your visitors is a post from Mass Media Web Design

http://www.startupcommunity.co.uk/speakerscorner/speaker.asp?id=74023

So if you have any website or internet marketing questions, head on over there and ask away.  There are lots of other resources for small business owners or start-ups too.

Ask an expert is a post from Mass Media Web Design

It’s generally accepted that dmoz is tricky to get listed in because they have a small number of editors but a huge number of submissions.  However, there’s a difference between something being tricky and something being impossible.

For over a year now, I’ve been trying to get a couple of websites listed with Dmoz.  Not once have I had any success.  I though I’d try to contact dmoz to see what was going on but after a look through the site, I couldn’t find an email address or even a feedback form. This is despite them having the following sentence on their website:

“The Open Directory team welcomes comments and feedback about the directory generally. Please let us know what you think, and how we can improve the service. Thanks!”

They do have a blog, so I took a look at that and found the comments were generally all from frustrated people in the same boat as me except some had been waiting 3 years.  3 YEARS!

Perhaps I’m being picky but if you’re making your people wait 3 years then it might be time to look at your processes and see what can be done to streamline them.

I accept that dmoz is a volunteer run website and that it’s free to submit and be listed.  Really I shouldn’t be complaining at all because I’m not paying for anything.  But I do find the situation frustrating because there is no way to address the problem and there’s no feedback from them.  It’s genuinely and case of submitting and then crossing your fingers and hoping.

Have you got any tips on how to get a listing in dmoz?   Add them in the comments.

DMOZ – one big frustration is a post from Mass Media Web Design

Of course, I don’t always follow my own advice and I like to keep a track of where our websites are ranking for our most important keywords.  In the past I’ve done it manually because I didn’t find any tools that worked well for me.  They either kept querying Google repeatedly (which is against Google’s Terms of Service) or they were unreliable and would miss out days, websites and keywords meaning that the results that I got were pretty useless.

So I reverted to keeping a few spreadsheets and tracked the most important keywords for my main sites myself.  It was time intensive so I only did it once a week but it was good because you could see the competition as they came and went.  Still, it took a lot of time!

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying out Advanced Web Ranking and it’s the first automated search engine ranking tool I’ve used that works well for me.  The nice thing about it is that it just works, calmly doing its thing in the background without getting in your way – that can’t be said for most of the tools out there.

It runs on my desktop, so doesn’t require installation on a server anywhere and it doesn’t screw up Google with repeated requests that ends up getting your IP banned.  I don’t know how it does it but it works in a perfectly natural way without upsetting Google – that’s a very good thing!

The key features for any product like this is that it should be able to track any number of websites, any number of keywords for those website and it should keep records so that you can see any trends over time.

AWR has all of these features and quite a few more.

Scheduling

You can set up your websites and the schedule AWR to check the rankings periodically.  So if you want to check your rankings every day then AWR will do and it runs as a service so you don’t need to have AWR running all of the time.  Of course, your computer needs to be switched on but if you’re at it all day then it’s not a big deal to schedule it to run at 11am every day.  There’s no noticable degredation in performance.

Reporting

The reporting functionality is fantastic.  You can create customised reports to show your keyword positions and schedule AWR to generate them periodically.  You can also email them – either to yourself or to your clients. So if you spend a lot oftime generation SEO reports then AWR can really seriously minimise the time you spend doing that.

Search Engines

I’ve only used AWR with Google but you can choose from a mind boggling range of search engines (regionalised or not) to check your rankings.

Graphs

The graphs are extremely useful because, at a single glance I can see my search engine ranking and immediately check out any issues with my keywords.  By showing a trending graph of each of my keywords, if I see a sudden drop or something that doesn’t quite look like, I can address it straight away.

In the past, checking every keyword every day was pretty much impossible in terms of the amount of time it would take, so if a keyword dropped out for any reason then you wouldn’t notice it unless you chanced upon it.  But now, by combining the scheduling functions with the keyword rank graphs you can immediately see any issues as they arise.  I’ll need to update my advice so that instead of checking your ranking every day, you check AWR every day to make sure that everything is ticking over nicely!

Do I have any criticisms?  Not really.  It took me a little bit of time to understand how I should be setting it up, but I didn’t really read the manual or check out the tutorial so I can’t complain about that!

Also, if you have a lot of keywords then it can take quite a while to gather the results.  So if you’re looking for the results quickly when you first set up the project then you’ll be disappointed.  But the tool is meant more as a reporting tool than an instant ranking tool and in that respect it is excellent.

Conclusions

I’m not one to get too excited about software but AWR works nicely.  Once you have everything set up then it sits in the background and only notifies you about its existence when you fire it up or when you get an email with the ranking data.

I haven’t yet fully explored the software so there is probably much more additional functionality for those that need it. There’s also a keyword research tool. For me though, it does everything that I need and without any drama.

Prices start at $99 for a single licence for the standard edition.  For most website owners, that will be enough and you’ll make your money back very quickly in the time you’ll save for checking rankings.

For more information, check out the AWR website at http://www.advancedwebranking.com

How to automatically check your rankings is a post from Mass Media Web Design