Optimising sites for search engines by Retiarius Internet Design

Now that the official announcement has been made in the December issue of 009 News, the official journal of the 009 Society, an international society dedicated to the small scale modelling of narrow gauge railways. I can now reveal that I have been appointed as theIe new Webmaster.

I will be responsible for all the Internet-facing activities for the Society and I am currently designing and producing a new website for them.  I have nearly 20 years experience of professional web design following a 30 year career as a research scientist and I am grateful to the 009 Society for this opportunity and their trust.

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We were recently asked by Satimola Ltd. to produce a landing page for installation on their server to serve documents to assist them with resolving a problem they were having with the Kazakhstan Potash Company Limited (KPCL).

We were able to design and implement the page at http://www.satimola.com/kpcl/ with a comprehensive visitor logging system within the short time-scale required.

As part of this request we also implemented a Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/satimola  allowing Satimola senior staff to post updates as required.

Retiarius Internet have enjoyed working with Satimola Ltd. for over 9 years, providing technical support and web site development on a retained basis.

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• Rags for Gypsies, a new SEO optimised business website

Rags for Gypsies

Rags for Gypsies is a new site developed by Retiarius Internet Design to take advantage of the growth in the use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook to drive traffic to a business.

Rags for Gypsies utilises the power of the WordPress platform to provide an easy to use and update web site that the site site owners can maintain and expand themselves.

Their website is linked to both Twitter (@ragsforgypsies) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/rags4gypsiesdesigns) and also to their marketing account on Etsy.com (http://www.etsy.com/shop/RagsForGypsies) to provide a comprehensive net exposure for the unique designs produced by Poppy Fields.

Retiarius set up the clients Etsy account to automatically announce new designs simultaneously on both their Facebook and Twitter accounts and any new posts on the main site are also automatically ‘Tweeted’

This site shows what can be done to integrate the social media sites into a Search engine Optimised WordPress site.

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LeaCFD.com, the website of the UK’s leading independent computational fluid dynamic specialist Dr. Chris Lea, was recently updated and brought up to current W3C and SEO standards by Retiarius.

Dr. Lea has reported that within days his site is now page 1 listed on Google for the terms “expert witness CFD” and “CFD expert witness”, the terms that he requested we optimise his site for.

Retiarius took his existing site, written in 2004 in HTML 4.0 and revamped it to use fully compliant  XHTML and utilised our several years of SEO experience to  tailor the site to reflect best SEO practise.

To gain page 1 Google ranking for the target search terms in a few days demonstrates that taking care to ensure code compliance and correct use of meta statements and <h1>-<h6> tags etc. can make a significant difference to your Google ranking.

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Capital Aesthetics, a leading London cosmetic treatment clinic have commissioned Retiarius to build their new web site.

The brief was that the site’s owners would like to be able to modify and maintain the site themselves with minimum effort.  This required the use of a form of content management system.

We decided to use the excellent WordPress blogging software as a content management system. There wer several reasons for his:

• The base software is free
• There are many excellent themes for this software that can be adapted to get the look and feel required by the client.
• WordPress can be extended to incorporate powerful SEO plugins that increase the SEO of the site with minimum extra effort.
• The use of an industry  standard software base provides proven upgrade and extension features.
• WordPress is easily read by Google and other search engines
• WordPress can easily incorporate the Google Analytics trafiic measurement system

The client has expressed his satisfaction with the design we have produced which, in his opinion, closely approximates the look and feel of his original site whilst providing the flexibility he needs.

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Retiarius Internet Design have just been commisioned to produce a search engine optimised site for the Rose and Crown public house at Allgreave on the edge of the Peak District.

The original site for the pub had been cleared of content by the previous landlord when he left the business and the original domain name (http://www.theroseandcrown.net) offered for sale at what I believed to be a very reasonable price for such an applicable, and already Google Page 1 ranked domain of several years registration .

On our advice, the new owners were fortunate to, via a third party, quickly purchase this existing domain name from its previous owner and they are now having Retiarius produce a brand new site to take advantage of Google’s preference towards domain names of some age.

As speed was of the essence to prevent Google losing, or reducing, the position for the domain name in its ranks following its closure by the previous owner, a temporary, fully optimised, index page has been put in place on the same day we received the commission.

This page will be  a place holder whilst the final design is discussed, agreed and designed.

It is important in SEO to try and weight the chances of getting good ranking in favour of your client. The purchase of an existing applicable domain name which has a decent ranking can significantly accelerate the SEO process.

Retiarius Internet Design’s experience in such matters can be a valuable resource for its clients.

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Retiarius Internet Design recently were commissioned to upgrade and redesign the site of alternative-vet.co.uk, London’s leading homoeopathic veterinary surgeon Lise Hansen.

A careful redesign, optimising keyword density, meta statements, page titles, page names etc, whilst retaining the look and feel of the original site, has achieved the required page 1 listing in Google.co.uk for the search term “homeopathic vet London” in a remarkably short 14 days!

The page 1 status achieved for this site is a vindication of the methods employed by Andrew Jeffcock of Retiarius Internet Design.  Andrew employs a holistic approach to web design which marries, amongst other things, meta statements, page names, titles, keywords and keyword density to produce a site optimal for search engine spidering.

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Elaine Walker of Elanga International Language Services already had a web site for her language translation business but wanted it fully redesigned to be search engine optimised. The new site had to be easily maintained by herself and to use Web2.0 techniques.  Her prime concern was effective search engine optimisation of the new site.

As with Ford & Kidd an optimised front page and blog solution was used as this provided the most cost-effective solution. The front page incorporates PHP code that posts SEO optimised resumés of posts made in the WordPress blog which comprises the majority of the site. The PHP code produces fully W3 complaint XHTML code, the result being a site index page with automatically updated content that cannot be detected as such by search engines as being produced by a script.

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Retiarius Internet Design’s latest project has just gone online. Buxton Press, a leading Derbyshire, UK, environmental award-winning printing company employed Retiarius to produce them a cost-effective, SEO enabled web site that will promote their position on search engines with respect to their competitor’s sites.

Retiarius were chosen because they were able to demonstrate that the sites run by Buxton Press’ competitors, though some were looking good, were search engine unfriendly and had virtually no searchable content due to the use of Flash and Shockwave includes which slowed down page loading and prevented the search engines finding searchable content.

In this very competitive marketplace search engine placement is critical for acquiring new ‘off the street’ customers. By ensuring that the Buxton Press site fully met World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) coding criteria, and that the text within the site was optimised for search engine semantic checkers, it is expected that Buxton Press will soon have a top Google ranking.

The new site incorporates its own on-line help system and a blog set on its own subdomain to automatically create a link back to the parent site.  This effective use of subdomains (they don’t cost anything!) enables the setting up of SEO ‘child’ sites to act as feeder sites to the parent site.

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