Website Design St Helens | SEO Merseyside | Web Designer St Helens Merseyside

Website Design and Website SEO is now a huge industry, even in a small town like St Helens in Merseyside there are 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, the majority of these companies are offering PPC services.

Yes, PPC is a very easy way to get your website to the top of the Google search results, I’m a member of the Google Engage programme if adwords is what you’d like to learn about although this isn’t what i’m talking about here. 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 Web Designer in St Helens Merseyside, I provide web design services for small to medium size businesses in St Helens, Liverpool, Wigan, and Warrington. In addition to website design I also offer Website SEO services for clients with existing but under performing websites. Some of my web design and SEO clients are happy to just operate in their local catchment areas of Merseyside or Cheshire whilst others have expanded all over the North West and even the whole of the UK. Effective Website SEO can help your business and your website grow. St Helens or Wigan today – Tomorrow the world!

I’ve had a website designed before – It didn’t bring me any new business

Some people pay a Web Designer to design a new website and then they expect it to fly to page one of Google 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 which can yield results instantly but can also be very costly if not done correctly.

Now the last thing I want to do here is to bad mouth PPC (or indeed other website designers), PPC works, it can be damn expensive and time consuming but it does get the traffic. 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.

Web sites 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 as good as they are at website design, they know very little about optimising the website for the search engines.

I can either edit and optimise 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 website 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 often just graphic designers! Don’t get me wrong, I can design a website that will get you to the top of the results but it wont be the prettiest website as i’m no graphic design specialist. Graphic Designers know how to design a website that looks pretty but from my experience very few 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 website 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 morefor 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’ve already had a website designed 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 areas in which you wish to sell your products, for instance Wigan, Liverpool, 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 more than likely see your website demoted right down the results list 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.

If you don’t know what the search engines look at when they see a link to your website then you may as well not bother getting the link in the first place. You have to remember what Google™ aims to deliver and that is quite simply “relevant results”. Remember this when doing any on site or off site SEO work 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, correctly formatted images, 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 to rank on page one of the search results.

So why should I use you to SEO or design 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 (assuming of course that you are in the North West). I’ll talk through your requirements with you and discuss how we will achieve results. If you aren’t in the North West UK I’m still happy to discuss how I can help you with a new web design or SEO services and we can communicate by phone, email or Skype. 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 its performance 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, Merseyside and so can easily come to see you at your place of work in St Helens, Liverpool, Wigan, Warrington and Widnes. You can search Google (as you perhaps did to find me) and see for yourself that I rank on page one. Search for “Website SEO Merseyside” and see where I am in the search results.

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 provide more examples by email but my clients prefer for me not to publish them online. 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 SEO can help your website get to the top of the search results