With Lisburn’s continual growth as a city there has never been a better time for local business to reach out to their customers via the internet by establishing an online presence with web design in Lisburn.

Upon a recent visit to Lisburn something that struck me was the amount of small niche businesses that did not appear to have websites listed in the outside of their premises.  The majority of which would have their company name followed by a telephone number, so it was therefore my assumption that these businesses did not have websites due to the fact that they were not publicising them.

This is all very well for somebody driving past and no doubt these businesses are also listed in local business directory books and can easily be found if somebody takes the time to look for them.  However, we are now in an age of technology where people are increasingly using information on the go such as laptops and smart-phones with internet access.  Calling directory inquiries for a local florist costs money whereas a quick search on a search engine such as Google costs nothing.

Imagine a person who is running late at work and won’t have time to prepare dinner so they decide to get a takeout.  They might have a few venues in mind but would like to check the menus first.  Do you think they will be more likely to order from the restaurant that has a website with a menu and contact details or from the restaurant that doesn’t have an internet presence?  Why make it more difficult for your customers to find you?  In terms of restaurants many people feel under pressure when ordering from a menu, especially if they feel they are being rushed into making a decision so having the luxury of being able to take your time can have its advantages.

This carries through with all sorts of businesses.  People tend to prefer to read up on products and services before making a purchase.  Websites are a perfect gateway to do that.  You get the relevant information (depending on how well the website has been presented) without the added pressure of a salesperson.

You can also go a step further and set up an e-commerce website in Lisburn where the customer doesn’t even have to set foot inside the door of your premises.  They can simple order your product via your website and pay by credit card or the increasing popular services such as PayPal, which debit the money directly from a user’s bank account.  These services are relatively inexpensive to create and take a smaller percentage of each transaction made.

So if you are a local business and Web Design in Lisburn would be something of interest then please get in touch.  Belfast SEO has a wealth of experience ranging from small to large projects with the added benefit of a specialised knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation, which means not only will your website be designed the highest standards but more importantly it will be found on search engines such as Google from one of the most SEO experienced companies in the country.

Written by Barry Connolly

If you are having trouble getting your business found on the internet in Derry as many businesses are discovering, it’s not just a simple fact of creating a website and sitting back whilst the traffic comes to you…it doesn’t work like that.  For a start search engines don’t know how to distinguish one website from another in terms of keywords unless this has been stipulated in the code and content.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that it’s just a simple matter of creating a website i.e. John Smiths Solicitors and hoping people from your area find it without taking search engine optimisation into account.  The basics of SEO are simple.  First off, if your business is in Derry then make sure that you have this in your title i.e. John Smiths Solicitors Derry.  The next step would be to mention your keywords within the content at least 3 times or so and also include them in your meta tags and description.  This way a searchengines will be in no doubt what the website is targeting.

Registration on Google places is another good method of being found.  This does not appear for all keywords but for the ones that it does appear for it is very valuable and also provides your location on a mini-map along with address and contact details.  The best thing about it is that it is free!

For a lot of businesses in Derry the above mentioned on-page optimisation may be enough to get you ranked in the SERPs (search engine results pages).  However, if your keywords are competitive then everything changes.  What happens if John Smiths Solicitors has multiple competitors? All of whom have optimised there pages to a similar level.

This is when professional SEO is usually required.  When page authority and domain authority come into contention and when external link building is needed.  When people talk about the World Wide Web, it is just that… a web, especially when search engine optimisation is involved.

Imagine there are two websites…website A and website B.  Website A has no external links coming into it, whereas website B has 100 external links from other related websites and directories.  In the eyes of a searchengine website B will have a much higher authority because of the other websites linking to it and more importantly because of their relevance to the subject matter also.  This means that it is viewed as a more important website and is ranked higher than website A accordingly.  Obviously this is a simplified explanation of external SEO and there are many other factors that are taken into account when ranking a website i.e. the highest number of links will not guarantee you a high page and domain authority.

If you do not already have a website and are thinking creating one please keep in mind that not all web agencies are fully aware of SEO so when they try to sell it to you, be cautious.  Many will sell it as an add-on to your web design package with no real guarantee of success or for long tail keywords that are easy to get results for but that aren’t competitive and which nobody would be searching for anyway.   It’s very important to make sure that you are paying for actual results rather than an endless monthly bill.

Being brought up in Magherafelt most of my life before moving to Belfast for work reasons, I have my roots there and some of my early SEO work was for from FP McCann in south Derry, one of the largest precast concrete firms in the UK.  I definitely see SEO in Derry as an untapped market for many businesses due to the fact that it is not quite as competitive as other cities in Ireland such as Belfast and Dublin and in this economic climate now is a great time to get the edge over your rivals by having your website rank highly for popular keyterms for your business.

Written by Barry Connolly

Search Engine Optimisation doesn’t have to be expensive. Before visiting a profession company there are many things that you can do to increase your online presence locally. Here are 3 top tips that should help anybusiness jump up in Google’s rankings.

Google places

For those of you who are not aware Google Places is a tool used by Google to help local businesses get found in a particular location. Most importantly it is free!

An example would be if you were to type ‘solicitors’ into a search. When the search results are displayed you will notice a set of results listing by letters. Below you can see the results for E, F and G, followed by the organic results underneath and the local map and paid links to the right.

These local listings provide a very big advantage over more powerful domains with SEO applied. As you can see above the UK based website www.solicitors.co.uk is outranked by local companies even though it has a stronger overall domain.

You can register on Google Places by simply setting up a Google account. To register you will be required to confirm you place of work. This can be done by a postal confirmation or by verifying your telephone number.

Directories

Sometimes you will notice that when you make a search for a particular keyword you may see results coming from other directories such as Free Index Directory, 4NI, Belfast Directory or Yell. It may be in your interest to register your website on these directories because if they are already listed in the search results for a particular keyword this is a very quick way to get listed. Just be wary of what some directories charge as not all directories have a set price and use sales people, which means one person may be quoted one price and somebody else another.

On page Optimisation of Content

It may sound obvious but including your keywords in your targeted page along with the location is very important for increasing your local ranking.  You will find that in smaller towns with little competition that this is very easy.  You could even go one further and name a specific part of a town or city.  The more specific you are the more relevant Google will view your search.  So Rather than ‘Belfast Restaurant’ in the title tag try ‘Belfast Restaurant Lisburn Road’.  These simple changes will easily increase your rank and actually help your target audience find you.

Before recently attending a SEO Meetup in Belfast I had the preconception that it would be all the local SEOswho were in the industry sharing their experiences with each other but to my surprise this was not the case. The majority of those who attended were not SEOs at all but rather people who were affiliated with the SEO industry such as:

Developers

Copywriters

Conversion Rate Specialists

Designers

Bloggers

            PPC specialists

All these people were making money from internet marketing and the majority of whom were self employed and ran their own businesses out of this. Although part of my job is to do all of the things listed above, it just amazes me that 10 years ago SEO was a niche of Web Design, yet now there are so many niches that revolve around SEO. Search Engines such as Google have a big part to play in this development as they have changed the face of Internet Marketing in recent years. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing meta tags and buying link farms and sitting back whilst your SERPs climb.

Nowadays you have to work hard for results by adhearing to strict standards and trying no to get hit by the likes of the Panda update so SEOs like myself constantly have to change with the times, which means InternetMarketing has became a very complex job that involves many different skill sets.

Written by Barry Connolly

As many of you will have noticed Google has recently added a new dimension to its search results by introducing Google Instant Previews. In essence this gives you a quick snapshot of the website before entering it and leaving the Google results page.

What affect will it have on a business that has already invested money in SEO?

In my opinion there are 3 main things that will definitely be impacted as a result of these snapshots and they are as follows:

Meta description

The meta description is the brief summary of a website which you will find on the Google results page. Up untilGoogle launched Instant Preview the meta description was the only way of judging how relevant a website was to your search before actually clicking through to the website itself. Although the meta description has no actual influence from an SEO point of view in terms of affecting the rank of a page, a well worded meta description has the potential to pull in a lot of traffic.

Traffic and Bounce rates

This leads me to my next point. Given the fact that you have a limited amount of space for your meta description many businesses can end up having very similar descriptions to that of their competitors. This is not entirely their fault because if you have more than one product you will be inclined to plug each one and a lot of the time you will see some companies basically listing their description as products that they sell. An example of this is the descriptions like ‘We specialise in Search Engine Optimisation, PPC, Online Marketing, Web Design, Graphic Design etc. So from a potential client’s point of view it can be hard to compare 2 different websites giving similar descriptions without actually visiting them both.

This may lead to either an increase or decrease in traffic depending on the relevant content that you have onyour home page via the snapshot. Some may see a decrease in traffic due to this. However they may also see a decrease in the number of bounce rates and it may actually give you a better indication of what your traffic actually is as opposed to people who land on your website looking for something else and instantly click back to the Google results page.

Bad Web Design will be punished!

There’s no getting away from this one. If you have a poorly designed website you are going to lose traffic with Google’s Instant Preview. The reason for this is that first impressions are everything! Regardless of how good the content may be on the website, if the design looks amateur or lazy it is going to put people off entering. In the past poorly designed websites will have gotten away with this due to relevant meta titles and descriptions so once a potential client has clicked through they would be more likely to give the bad design the benefit of the doubt as they are already on the webpage and continue to read the relevant data.

Now people are much more likely to scroll down the snapshots in a matter of seconds choosing to enter the website that looks professional and aesthetically pleasing as opposed to the website that looks as if it was put together by a child who just happened to be pushing buttons on the computer.

What’s the bottom line?

Not everybody will like these new developments Google has introduced, especially those with poorly designed websites as they have the potential to damage their existing traffic and sales figures but given the fact thatGoogle is the most used search engine on the internet by a country mile if you want to stay ahead in the game a general rule of thumb is if Google says ‘jump’, we all have no option but to reply ‘how high?’

Written by Barry Connolly

When it comes to keeping secrets about Search Engine Optimisation nobody does it better than Google. The methods that they use to determine the ranking of a website are by far the most sought after by millions of businesses wanting to get an edge over their competitors. So getting the chance to meet some of the guys in the know at Google and have them share their secrets is easily the holy grail of any business.

But what’s the catch?

The catch is that you must be a charity. Google has decided to give non-profit charitable organisations some inside advice on how to beat those nasty money grabbing corporations who invest thousands if not millions of pounds on Search Engine Optimisation. They will do so by publishing their analysis and advice for each website on their Webmaster Tools forums.

Google’s Webmaster Tools forums has always been a place where the public can ask questions and have them answered by Google employees but having them give details of how specific websites can improve theSearch Engine Optimisation of their website is going to be something else.

Written by Barry Connolly

When I first started learning about Search Engine Optimisation there were two main elements that appeared to be paramount to the success of a highly ranked keyword.

The first being the coding of the website itself i.e. identifying your keywords via URLs, title tags, H1 tags, alt descriptions, keyword density etc.

The second was link building i.e. the more websites that link to your website the more important search engines such as Google recognises it. Also if you are able to obtain a link from a website from a highly reputable website such as the BBC, then that link could be worth up to 20 links from a regular website.

To a lot of SEO’s this can cause a problem. Generating links from companies like the BBC isn’t exactly easy, especially if you are planning to target more than one keyword. So the next obvious step is to register with directories to get a few more links to your website but these will soon be exhausted.

So how then do you generate links to your website?

Internal links

Internal links are simply links from within your own website pointing to other pages on the same website.
An example of this would be the home page of Belfast SEO where I have described both keyword phrasesSearch Engine Optimisation and Web Design in my opening description and I have applied both H1 and href tags pointing them to the related pages.
At first I was very sceptical about internal links because as an SEO myself I was always under the impression that the external link was king….. and to a certain degree this is obviously true but don’t under estimate or devalue the importance of internal links. Recently I had been working on the keywords Belfast Sunday Premier League for Collingwood FC’s website. At the time of writing this article these keywords are currently occupying 3 of the top 5 positions of Google and the reason for this is purely on the basis of internal links. Collingwood FC previously had a handful of links but by going into each page and simply adding internal links the website now has around 60 internal links and with a strong SEO architecture for these keywords they are now comfortably ranking above websites with 108 links.

Last but not least is the blog. This is the perfect way to generate free links to your own and other websites and keep the content on your website fresh and up to date. Obviously don’t go overboard with the links but I always try to get at least 3 on each post, depending on the size of the article. 3 may not seem like all that much but by posting 1 or 2 blogs every week these links will soon start to add up, along with your rank.

Written by Barry Connolly