Website Design St Helens
Website Design and Website SEO is now a huge industry, even in a small town like St Helens there’s plenty of Web Designers to choose from. If you’ve already had a website designed then chances are you’ve received numerous calls from companies promising to get you to the top of the search results, some companies even attempt to sell you keywords. if you haven’t already figured this out, these people are cranks.
There’s a very easy way to get to the top of Google using adwords (pay per click) advertising but it can be expensive and it isn’t what I am offering. Instead I can optimise your existing website (or design a new website for you) so that the search engines “like it” and using various proven website SEO techniques I can get your website high up on page one of the search results, the organic FREE results.
I’m a freelance Web Designer based in Merseyside. I design websites for small to medium size businesses in St Helens, Wigan, and Warrington. I also offer website SEO services for clients with existing but under performing websites. Some of my clients are happy to just operate in their catchment areas whilst others have expanded all over the North West and even the whole of the UK. Effective SEO can help your business and your website grow. St Helens or Wigan today – Tomorrow the world!
“I’ve had a website before – It didn’t bring me any new business”
Some people pay a web designer to design a company website and then they expect it to fly almost immediately. A year or so down the line when online enquiries are slow the business owner generally does one of two things, Either
- Doesn’t bother to renew his website hosting fees and puts the whole thing down to experience or
- Starts to spend money on PPC (pay per click) advertising.
Now the last thing I want to do here is to bad mouth PPC (or indeed website designers), PPC works, it can be damn expensive and time consuming but it does get the traffic. I don’t get involved in PPC much. I’ve dabbled with it, I’ve spent a small fortune on it and I’m grateful it exists because without it, I wouldn’t have had the motivation to SEO my own websites or to design SEO friendly websites to get on the front page of the search results organically. PPC is good short term for getting a new website some exposure whilst you wait for it to be indexed by the search engines.
Websites however simply wont fly on their own, they have to compete against hundreds of thousands of others. A website needs to be nurtured like a plant, Watered and fed so it can flourish. There are some fantastic graphic and web designers in Merseyside who I have worked with but the honest ones will admit that they know very little about optimising the website for the search engines. I can either edit your existing website or design you a new website that is built with SEO in mind. Click here for Web Design and SEO price guides
So what are organic search results and what is SEO?
In a nutshell, Organic search results are the results that a search engine returns based on what their software or algorithm decides is relevant to the search term that is entered. The list of websites are displayed in order of relevance (and a few other small weighted factors).
Search providers such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others constantly refine and change the criteria that makes up their algorithms and so in turn companies and so called SEO (search engine optimisation) specialists are very often fumbling in the dark. Happily however, the basics of what search engines like and what they don’t like remain quite constant and so with experience we get to learn the basics of playing the results game with the search engines. Our web design is SEO friendly straight out of the box.
Why do I need SEO? I’ve paid a web designer a lot of money to design my website!
Web designers are usually just graphic designers! Don’t get me wrong, I can design a website that works but i’m no graphic design specialist. Web designers know how to design a website but not all know how to make the search engines “like” the new website. Adrian Newey has designed some of the most successful cars in F1 racing for Mclaren and now Red Bull racing, put my Gran in one however and it wont win races, The cars he builds are the best in the world but they need a talented driver to get them across the finish line in 1st place.
Happily for me and you web design has shifted over the past couple of years. I design CMS (Content management system) type sites like the one you are viewing now. The flashy type of website favoured by graphic designers are now less common as they aren’t terribly search engine friendly (See this article less is more for further information) All websites however regardless of if they are CMS based or designed by a graphic designer on a design program such as Dreamweaver can all benefit from SEO.
Ok, well I already have a website so what do I do next?
Well what I would always suggest is to start with a simple list. Take a look at your product or service that you are promoting on your website. Write down your products starting with the main ones, For instance “widgets” then write down the area in which you wish to sell your products, for instance Wigan or St Helens, are you a small company that only covers a small geographical area or do you supply products to the whole world? Next, write down the benefits to your products and company for instance “Smallest Widget”, “Next Day Delivery” “Cheapest Widget”. What you have just created is a keyword list. A list of words that when they appear together in a search query ( key phrase) should trigger the search engine to consider your website in the results that are displayed. Now comes the tricky part and that is, competing with all the other websites that want a bite of the cherry.
This is where I come in. There are methods being used by high pressure SEO companies to cheat their way to the front page. I can assure you that search engines aren’t stupid. Don’t entrust your business website to someone who promises you first place within a week. Search Engines have software known as spiders that crawl websites. This software is highly developed and pretty much knows every trick in the book. A popular scam used to be to hide hundreds of keywords on a page by using white text on a white background. Such a practice is frowned upon by search engines and will at best demote your website, at worst, your website will be “sandboxed” for abuse. Another mistake made by website owners and SEO “specialists” is to get as many links as possible. Too many links on sites known as link farms and you’ll hurt your rank again. You have to remember what Google™ aims to deliver and that is quite simply “relevant results”. Remember this and you wont go far wrong. Your website needs designing so to have the right keyword density, easy to understand URLs , clear navigation, accurate meta descriptions, relevant content, quality links and much more. The more you get this right, the higher the search engines will “rank” your website. The more you get it wrong and your rank will be lowered.
You have a few choices here. You can either
- Stick your fingers in your ears and repeat la, la, la, and miss out on what the internet can bring to your business
- Devote your time to learning about SEO and get someone in to run your business whilst you develop your websites visibility
- Employ the services of someone who has years of trial and error experience in producing organic results and getting your website visibility in the search results.
So why should I use you to SEO my website?
No reason really! You don’t know the first thing about me, I might be a complete fraud sat in the sun somewhere on a laptop. Equally so, you don’t know the person who phoned you last week with a cheeky voice from an unknown office somewhere promising to get your website to page one of the search results. The difference between us is that I will come and meet you at your place of work or home. I’ll talk through your requirements with you and discuss how we will achieve results.
I’m not part of a huge company, There’s just me. SEO and website design is something I’ve learned whist running businesses for years in other sectors. I retired aged 40, I took a couple of years off and then the boredom set in. A friend asked me to take a look at his website to see if I could improve it any. I was glad to have something to do to be honest, He was so pleased he told a couple of friends about the results. I now have a handful of clients who each pay a modest fee and I run their SEO, I update their website content, monitor the competition and ensure that they maintain a first page position and do another few tricks that I’ve learned that I wont disclose here in case their competitors get wind of it and copy it! I’m based in St Helens and so can easily come to see you at your place of work in St Helens, Wigan, Warrington and Widnes.
A few of my clients wish to remain anonymous for obvious reasons however a couple have kindly allowed me to use their websites as examples. I can’t disclose all the Website SEO techniques that I use in the interests of client confidentiality or all of the keywords. Read my other Web pages that cover some SEO case studies about how I have helped company websites to get to the top of the search results in St Helens, Wigan Merseyside , Cheshire and Manchester. Click here to see how I can help your website get to the top of the search results
Website design St Helens | Web design St Helens | Merseyside web designer | SEO Merseyside
