Every business wants to maximise their SEO. And the best way to boost your search rankings is to call in the professionals. Ask your web designer (such as WebCreationUK) about their SEO service.

But how do you know if your website has been properly optimised? Here we bring you a few tips to ensure you have ticked the SEO basics.

Page title tags: If you look at the top of your web browser window you’ll see some text. The page title tags are where you write this text. Each page of your website needs to have an original and compelling title that describes the page content using the main keywords for the page.   Title tags should be up to 64 characters in length.

Description tags: These are used in the search engine ranking pages to describe a page’s content. This is where you will be trying to encourage web searchers to click on to your website. These descriptions should be 25 to 35 words long.

Heading tags: Each page of your website should use at least the <H1> heading tag. To give a keyword an SEO boost, use it in both the <title> tag and in your <H1> tag.

Keywords on the page: Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, are continually searching for keywords to add to their database. So keyword density on your pages is important. But do not overdo the use of keywords. If you do (called stuffing) the search engines might actually black list you. Many experts have their views on the percentage of keywords per page of your website but the best guideline is to write copy naturally but with a fair amount of keyword repetition, but not so much that the reader notices. Hire a professional copywriter if in doubt.

Image titles: Alt and title tags for images and links should be keyword-rich as this text is also read by search engines.

Sitemaps: Ensure you have two sitemaps for your website. One site map should be an XML version for the search robots, while the other site map is a display for customers to see your page hierarchy.

If you’re an on-line business and you want to improve your reach, marketing efforts and traffic then a few new updates to Facebook could be just the ticket.

The “Like” button social plugin on Facebook now has three updates:

1)    The ability to Like canvas URLs for Facebook apps that represent things such as causes, movies, or other real world objects.
This means: App users can like pages from within an app. This will then place a like in the user’s newsfeed, linking to the app. The chances are this will increase app growth.

2)    The ability to link a Like button to a Facebook Page.
This means: Page owners can use the Like button or the Like box to increase user engagement.

3)    The “box count” layout that displays the total number of likes above the button.
This means: The new layout offers another option to suit different website designs. To decide which Like button is most effective at driving traffic for your website, you can check out the ref attribute for tracking.

Jerry Cain, from Facebook, is reported as saying: “Since we launched social plugins in April, we’ve been listening to user feedback and working with developers to optimise the Like button to make it as seamless as possible for people to ‘like’ content around the web and share it with their friends.”

WebCreationUK can assist you in not only website design but social media, come speak to us for more information, you can also find us on Twitter and Facebook!

Social bookmarking, as defined, is a method of saving and sharing favourite websites or just posts of a website to another site that anyone online can access, view and vote. Voting is the most important aspect while as the number of votes increases the more chances of hitting “most popular bookmarks” page which translates into a flood of traffic which can result in short term viewers or can become regular readers.

Social bookmarking is associated with viral marketing or link baiting and in a way it’s almost the same thing: a link is shared, the story becomes popular getting more and more votes, the word is spreading and it can become a fantastic way of marketing a site. From traffic perspective, this is extraordinary, but how important is this for search engine optimisation?

Although lately many bookmarking sites have changed their policy into adding nofollow to outbound links, whenever an article or site is bookmarked that very website gets a link from an authority and popular site. This might seem as a great way of link building but as other great methods can have a negative aspects, this should not be over-used as well, as spamming it.

Another positive aspect of social bookmarking sites is that bookmarking definitely increases the time for search engines to index in a new page or a new blog post recently added. Last, but not least, another trick most people seem to forget is using tags when bookmarking a website while tags might help the targeted keywords to rank higher.

Although one should not create an entire SEO campaign based on this method, it would be best to include it in the “to-do list” for promoting a website and ranking it as high as possible in the end.

Or better, allow the experts in web design at WebCreationUK to apply their advanced SEO programme and skyrocket your website to the top.

Although many folks create a website as an online presence for their businesses or online shops, there are many people creating blogs or informative sites that in time present the possibility of monetising. Whether it is about traffic transformed in clicks or targeted visitors transformed into buyers, there are several ways of making money from a site and this article will talk about the most popular ones.

1.    Pay Per Click
This is one of the most used methods for squeezing some money from a website. Basically there are programs that pay publishers for exposing ads on their website, publishers that get paid when visitors click on the ads. The most popular ones are AdSense and InfoLinks, however there are many others available out there, it seems Google’s AdSense is the most generous program available.

2.    Cost per action
Or simply said, CPA programs. Those are more profitable if applied “by the letter” but also much more difficult while the traffic a blog or site receives should convert into buyers. So just clicking on the ad will not be enough but an action is requested for publishers to get paid. Most well-known advertiser is eBay.

3.    Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing seems to be the most popular way of making money online nowadays. By this marketing practice, publishers drive leads to products, if those leads transform into buyers the publisher gets commission. Amazon Affiliates and ClickBank are two of the top affiliate programs available nowadays.

4.    Link sales
Though this is a practice that does not stay under Google’s TOS, it is very popular among webmasters with high amounts of traffic and authority websites in different niches. The problem is not with the links selling but with the fact that usually websites selling links do not apply the nofollow tag to the outbound links they sell, thus if nofollow would be applied the link buyers would not  get the same benefits as before.

5.    Websites flipping
This is one of the most easiest way for making money online, though it involves creating not one but tens of websites, one after another. Basically the idea is to create a website (there are two popular methods: self-creating with the popular blog engine WordPress or getting into a partnership with web designers that could do this job), getting hosting, populating the site with content, building links and finally, when traffic and PR are making their way, selling on popular sites like flippa.com.

If you are interested in creating traffic to your website, speak to WebCreationUK about our advanced SEO program and any other web design needs.

Cuil, the search engine which launched in 2008, went offline Thursday. Started as what was supposed to be the “Google killer” it seems that it is now gone for good. Reports from TechCrunch said that company’s employees are already looking for new jobs while their salaries have not been paid on Cuil’s last week of living.

Rumours say Cuil is looking for a potential buyer of its algorithms and index, it’s supposed that it will come back online, but these are only online waves, nothing to be trusted. Nothing was confirmed by the company, but two things are very clear: Cuil is down and former employees say it is the end of another of Google’s competitors.

Although it was launched with great expectations, Cuil faced nothing more than low traffic making this search engine not the “Google killer” everyone was seeing it as before. Did anyone even use this search engine at least once? It was developed by Anna Pattersons and Russel Power, two former employees at Google and Cuil’s CEO, Tom Costello whom was a former employee at IBM. At the moment of its launch, Cuil reported it has over 120 billion web pages in their index, more than any other search engine available.

Stay tuned for more information about this issue, follow the WebCreationUK website design blog for future news and eventually a confirmation from Cuil’s officials.

Google Instant has now been rolled out on the Google.com platform. The new feature hasn’t yet been launched in all countries but it is being rolled out worldwide so you’ll want to know more about this great new function.

Essentially Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows changing results as you type.  There is no need to hit the search or enter button as the results start to appear as soon as you type a letter.

This means that when you’re searching for something you’ll be able to scan a results page as you type.  For slower typists the “predictive” function (which many are familiar with on mobile phones) will aid the speed of your search. This means that your results could well appear even before you finish typing the search keyword.

The likelihood, too, is that Google Instant will change SEO. For example, if you were to search for “chocolate biscuits”, then the search results for “chocolate” would appear first, and this may be where users stop their search.

So in terms of keywords in your website you need to think about less words, rather than phrases of words and making sure that words are to the point.

If you need advice about how Google Instant may affect the SEO of your business website then speak to leading web designers WebCreationUK.