Category Archives: SEO

How to Add a Blog to a Adobe Muse Website

How to Add a Blog to a Adobe Muse. Adobe Muse is really great for the creative web designer but it does have one major flaw, it is not very good for clients adding content. Adobe Muse does have in-browser editing but currently it does not work well. When editing in the in-browser often the changes can result in undesired effect to the styling. A few third party developers have offered solutions, some better than others, but there is a simpler solution, and that is to add a blog using c-panel, the choice of blogging is vast including WordPress, Ghost, Serendipity etc.

Why add a Blog to your Muse Site?

Clients should be encouraged to add new content to their website, it helps with SEO, websites that have regular new content will out perform SEO of those websites that are static and have no changes made. By adding the blog into the background of your website it will be seen as new content for the website. A blog is easy to add content, both images and text, and most blogs are responsive.

How to add a Blog to Muse

Please view the video I have produced that will show you the full process of installing a blogging platform on your Adobe Muse Website. In summary the steps are;
To add a blog using the c-panel which lots of website hosting companies offer.
Once in cpanel you can use Softaculous to install your prefered blogging platform including WordPress.
When installing make sure the installation is in it’s own Directory and not the root directory.
Add a manual menu in Adobe Muse and a link to the blog directory
Add a Manual menu in the blog to link to the Main Adobe Muse website.

Once the blog is added it can be customised to match your Adobe Muse website styled differently to give the blog its own unique style. Dont forget you will also need to add a Google tracking code to the blog site if you want to track in Google analytics.

The video on How to Add a Blog to Adobe Muse can be seen here on my You Tube Channel >>
https://youtu.be/g-4jdjtiUak

Responsive vs Reactive Websites

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Responsive websites are websites that automatically resize to the screen size the website is being viewed on.
Reactive websites (adaptive) displays a website especially designed for the device type the website is being viewed on.

Responsive websites are not always the best solution for web design. Firstly an explanation of what a responsive website means and what it isn’t. There is much misunderstanding that the only way a website can be a mobile friendly website is to design it to be responsive, as in a wordpress website. This is wrong, you can design a website that adapts or provides an alternate display on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. The difference is responsive websites automatically display correctly on mobile devices as they resize to the display screen size. Reactive – Adaptive websites gives a totally different website version for the screen size allowing specific design for desktop, tablet or mobile. Both the responsive and adaptive approaches are endorsed by the Google Mobile Friendly test.

Some reasons why adaptive might be best

With adaptive websites you can choose what to display on your desktop version and what you want to display on mobile versions. For instance you may have strong ‘call to action’ for mobile users such as “download our mobile app here” or even giving your mobile version a more app feel and look.

Adding a download App to only mobile devices

Being both a website designer and a photographer I realise that sometimes a photo looks fantastic when seen on desktop but not so good on mobile. With an adaptive you can choose which photos you show dependant on the device.

SEO Responsive vs Reactive (Adaptive) Websites

More SEO options available with reactive design

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can also be advantageous having two or three versions (you can have separate versions for desktop, tablet and mobile). This allows you to keyword and change the SEO for each of the pages depending on the device version, this is particularly advantageous if you ‘Local SEO’ for mobile searches, such as directions, local business etc.

If you would like more information on reactive vs responsive websites call Mick Kenyon on 07738 255499

Google+ the best marketeer?

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Google+ The Marketeer

Is Google+ the best marketeer? It certainly can feel like it is your businesses best friend if you get it well optimised, it can increase visibility, give driving directions and help customers contact you ultimately increasing more sales.

Case Study

I recently optimised a clients Google+ page to make it visible on local business. This increased the visibility of the business in search queries and helped customers find the business via a number of tools increasing the customers user experience.

Measurable

With Google insights any changes made to your visibility and customer interaction on the Google platforms can be measured.

The overview gives a quick view of your visibility performance over the last 30 days

You can see much more detail by clicking on the ‘view insights’.

Search Views

The date range can be changed as required from 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or all time. This shows the number of impressions returned on the Google searches, Maps and mobile.

Clicks

This is broken down into some really useful sub categories including;

Driving directions – This is the number of clicks in Google Searches and Google maps for driving directions to your business, in the above infographic you can see 259 people have clicked for directions to the business.
Clicks on Website – This is actual clicks on to the website from Google platforms of Searches and Maps (excludes things like direct clicks, searches on Bing, Yahoo etc.), 1360 direct clicks from Google are shown in the infographics.
Phone calls – This is the number of clicks on the phone number from Google Searches, Maps and Mobile – you can see that 83 phone calls were made from Google search. These can also be shown by the day of the week etc within the insights.

Search Results

When you type the name of a business into search engines (without the .co.uk or .com) it returns a snippet of information on the right hand side of the page about your business this is fed from Google+.

One final word, don’t panic if you don’t have too many followers on Google+, the UK have been pretty slow to embrace Google+, this will come in slower time. The main importance is getting the Google My Business pages optimised, this will feed the search results with your business. To get your pages optimised call Mick Kenyon on 07738 255499

More information on Google insights.

Is Your Website Really On Page One?

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Is Your Website Really on Page One? Why is that when you Google your business it appears on page 1 of Google but when someone else searches they get different results? Quite often when speaking with businesses they think all is good with their Business rankings on search results, because when they Google their business it is showing up on page 1 or page 2 of the results. What looks to be a great result isn’t always what it seems.

Is Your website really number 1

Why’s My Website on Page 1 Only Sometimes?

Google manipulates results on your browsing history returning what it thinks you are mostly interested in. It doesn’t matter if you are signed in to Google or not these results are manipulated for you. Sounds a bit ‘big brother’, well maybe yes but it’s only trying to help. By learning what you search for it will tailor the results to what Google thinks is most relevant to you. So naturally you are interested in your own business, we have all done it, and should do it, we try to Google our business to see where we are in Google land. We might try a number of permutations to see how we are fairing and when it pops up we can’t resist clicking on our weblink just to make sure it all works fine. But the more we do this the more Google thinks this is what you want to see and so adds it to your Google Web History and places it on page 1 for next time you search for your Business or keywords to do with your business.

Is Your Website Really On Page One?

To see the true ranking of your webpage you need to do one of two things;
You can clear your browsing history (this will depend on the browser you are using) but for Google see this article on clearing web browsing history.
The easiest way and the way I would recommend is to go incognito or open private viewing tab and search the term again. You will probably be surprised or even horrified at the results, you might be a lot lower ranking than you thought.

So Why Am I Not Ranking Higher?

Your true web rankings are down to good SEO (search Engine Optimisation), there are over 100 things to get right to impress Google and get high rankings and these are constantly changing. For a health check on your websites SEO and to receive an in depth report contact Mick Kenyon tel:07738 255499

Micro Moments for Your Accommodation Business

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Micro Moments for Your Accommodation Business

What are micro moments and how does it affect marketing particularly within the accommodation business?
Welcome to the new buzz term ‘micro moments’, this is when you are waiting for something like queuing up for a bus or train or waiting in a clothes shop for your loved one to finish trying on all the dresses in a store (okay that’s probably a bit longer than a micro moment!) and you get out your mobile phone and browse.

Great potential for accommodation providers to tap into micro-moments

Google have announced that 69% of these micro moments are spent looking at travel ideas, that’s a massive potential for travel industry to tap into a market, particularly when you consider over 30% then go on to book.

How to make the most out of Micro Moments for Your Accommodation Business.

Make sure your website is mobile friendly, all these micro moments are performed using a mobile device (people are unlikely to carry around the PC for micro moments).
Make sure your website also has a secure online booking facility, there are free ones out there that can pretty easily be added to your website.
Great photos help sell the product, make them unique and great quality so they make you stand out from the crowd. Also make sure they look good on a mobile, not all photos do, you usually find those images that fill the screen look best.
SEO (search engine optimisation), the accommodation business is very competative and non more so than on search engines, keywords are often around £5.00 each on add words so getting your SEO is key.
Use Social media to also increase your visibility, not forgetting making sure your Google+ business page is fully set up and optimised.

For further information on Website Design and SEO for your accommodation in the Yorkshire Dales, Lake District and Lancashire call Mick 07738 255499

The article on micro moments from Google can be read here

How to Blog

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How to Blog– To create that perfect blog firstly the content should be unique and interesting and you will need a photo or two to help. But thats only the start, you will want to layout the page so people searching on the internet can also find the subject you are writing the blog about. So in this example, I am using the term or phrase ‘How to Blog’ to show you ‘how to blog’!

Include an infographic or image in your blog

How to Blog

The page name also known as the URL needs to include the subject so an example might be :
“http://mickkenyon.com/blog/how-to-blog” words should be separated using hyphens ‘-‘. There is a great article by Moz here on URL’s

# You will also want to use the ‘H tags” these are headline tags and can be used as you would titles in a book H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 tags. The chapter-title is a H1 tag. All the subchapters have an H2 tag. If these subchapters have another sub-area then this would be marked up with an H3 tag and so on. you define a H tags in HTML by adding <h1>How To Blog</h1> Please don’t feel you have to use all the H tags, but a minimum should be at least 1 x H1 tag and 1x H2 tag. more information can be found here on H -tags
# The next thing is to do is ensure that the phrase you are blogging about is included in the first sentence of your blog.
# I like to add a photograph or infographic after the first paragraph, search engines can’t read photographs so you need to tell them about the photograph. When adding photos, name the photograph something that is meaningful ( e.g in my case ‘blog’) make sure you also add an ‘alt tag’, you might want to use your blog title as the Alt tag. If you can, also add the description fields into the metadata of the photograph or infographic.

This shows a wordpress illustration for showing how to add the metadata to your blog images

Before your publish your blog also add a meta-description, this is what the search engines will display next to a link to your post on search engine result pages. Make it descriptive about your post in less than 156 characters.

Once published don’t forget to shout about it, use social media to link to your posts, facebook, Google+ and twitter are all good for doing this.

Blog Page Layout Example

Ideally get the key phrase into your blog about six times. Try not to repeat it much more than this as it might be deemed as ‘keyword stuffing’, and this usually results in a less well optimised page. The post should have a minimum of about 300 words, and not much more than 500 words. It is also a good idea to reference other sources of information and include links to trustworthy sources of information websites.

The perfectly search engine optimised page for ‘How to Blog’ might look like

Page URL = http://mickkenyon.com/blog/how-to-blog
Page title = How to Blog – Mick Kenyon
H1 tag = How to Blog

H1 = How to blog ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ how to blog. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ blog ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________how to blog.
IMAGE name = “how-to-blog.jpeg

____________________________ blog _____________________________________ how to blog _____________________________________

H2 = Blog Page Layout

_______________________ blog page layout ________________________________________________ blog___________________page layout ________________________________

Image name = ‘Page Layout’

______________________blog page layout

Please visit my page on SEO

How To Get Your Website Noticed

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How to get your Website noticed.

If you were to ask this question to a lot of experts they would probably say get good SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Well they are not wrong but I would also add you need to increase your visibility which is far more broad reaching than just SEO for your website. So lets have a look at what I mean by broadening your visibility on the web, leaving the subject of traditional SEO until last.

How do you increase visibility on the web?

Well to get your website noticed you need to create interest and this comes in many forms.

Its not all about SEO

Social Media

There are loads of social media websites (facebook, twitter, pinterest, linkdin etc etc.) but before you go and sign up to them all just take a minute to think about it. Your website is possible aimed at certain interest groups, these might be targeted by age and location as well as interests. Have a think about what type of social media tool your customers may use (example teens probably like snapchat – older customers probably have never heard of it!), use the same tools as your customers. Use tools that you can target your audience (facebook campaigns and twitter advanced search are pretty good at this). Don’t overdo signing up to all social media sites, you just wont keep up to them all, instead pick 2 or 3 and make sure you keep active on them.

Google+

This one gets a special mention even though it is technically a social media site, it is also a very important social media site as it helps your visibility on search! Once you have a Google+ account consider setting up a Google my Business account, get this verified and make sure you get a 100% complete profile. Google takes this information and populates Google Local searches with it (opening hours, telephone numbers, website address etc.) plus once you get your head around it, it isn’t as bad as some people might say, and it has some pretty great tools!

Screenshot of how Google picks up information from your Google+ page

Blogs

Blog about a subject that you are an expert in and then share a link to it from the social media account you have just set up! The idea here is that people will like what you are writing and want to share it. This is sometimes known as citations, people saying check this great blog out by you. Consider adding a blog into your website, wordpress can usually be embedded quite easily particularly if your website has cpanel.

SEO

Well this is the big one, it’s all about getting things right on your website. The easiest way to understand SEO is to think what you would like to see from a website. The answer is probably content rich, good advice that can be trusted. My big tip here is Google likes honesty, it likes to know it can trust your website for good content and a current information. So don’t start thinking about how to trick Google (you will get into their bad books) think instead how you can prove to them that you are a good website that can be trusted. Keep it honest, interesting and keep it up to date

Simplicity

Simple URL’s (keep them short and only use keywords). Make sure the URL describes in one word (or two) what your page is about. If you are using two words separate the words with’-‘ Make the navigation buttons and menu buttons big enough to see and select. Add relevant ‘titles’ to your content to explain the following paragraphs. Keep the content useful and concise and add links to other articles that maybe of use. Add good quality images, use description and meta- tags to describe them. Make sure it can easily be used on all viewing devices

Honesty

Don’t copy someone else’s work, keep it unique and good quality. Don’t try to trick google by getting other sites to add links to your website from poor quality websites. Allow comments and respond (even to bad comments). Show your real, demonstrate by showing videos and photos of you and your business. Encourage customers to leave feedback on quality review sites(google+, tripadvisor etc. ) and keep being interactive on your website and social media.

Directory Links

If you needed a business in the area where would you search? Probably some sort of directory, get your business added to the good quality ones (Yell, Thompson, Scoot, etc.) often these sites will add links to your website, make sure the directory has a good ranking. Don’t ever be tempted to subscribe to bulk link websites (those that sell 1000 ‘quality website links for £5). they are tosh and can damage your rankings!

For more information and help on improving the visibility of your website call Mick on 07738 255499 or visit http://mickkenyon.com/seo.html

Website design for accommodation in the Lake District.

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Website design for accommodation in the Lake District.

Lake District Accomodation Website Design

Make sure photos show your accommodation rather than stock photography to build up customer confidence

To maximise your booking potential of an accommodation website you will need a great looking website with secure on-line booking. Being in the Lake District you will also need an eye catching website design with great photographs tailored to your accommodation whether it be self catering, bed and breakfast, guesthouse, hotel or a country inn. Accommodation websites should be strong on their visual element, they should show the beauty and what the Lake District has to offer along with the features you accommodation offers. A tip here is to target your type of customer, are your main core of customers sightseers, active couples, families etc? Tailor the feel and the look of your web site to the customers you attract, this will also help on SEO.

Mick Kenyon website design and photography for the complete website design package tailored to your accommodation business .. tel 07738 255499 for your your Free no obligation quote.

Websites now need to be mobile friendly, this is particularly important for accommodation web sites as research and many bookings are made direct from smart phones. Since 21 April 2015 Google changed the ranking system and so mobile friendly websites now fair a lot better in showing up on search results if they adhere to the Google mobile friendly guidelines. There are hundreds if not thousands of accommodation websites in the Lake District so any advantage should be exploited. You can check on whether a web site is mobile friendly here

Getting your Accommodation Website Discovered

Great SEO is the next step to get your web site noticed, with so much competition in the lake district you need to box clever. If you target just accommodation you are competing with lots of other lake district accommodation sites so you are more likely to have success by targeting specific customer groups. e.g ‘fishing holidays in the lake district’ will be easier to get higher search rankings than ‘lake district holidays’.

Once the customer has discovered your accommodation website you literally have seconds to make an impression or the customer or they will leave and look elsewhere. Photographs sell the dream to your customers and build confidence, try to avoid stock photography as these can reduce the customer confidence. Photographs on your website are one of your biggest asset to enticing customers to book with you, make them relevant to your type of customer and accommodation. Photographs should be of your property and your local area in the Lake District. The other big ‘must’ is on-line booking, people like to see availability immediately and expect to be able to book immediately.

Include photographs of bedrooms

Photography tips for Accommodation Web Sites

Self catering accommodation should show the facilities at there best, if you have a fire or log burning stove this should be lit when photographs are taken. Beds should be made and tables set. Its always a nice touch to add flowers and a bottle of wine. Photographs should be well focused, shallow depth of field can be used on features to make them stand out. If possible avoid using flash, this can be achieved using the manual settings (try using bracketed exposures), if flash is used diffuse it to stop flares in the picture to give natural light feeling.
Guesthouses and B&Bs should have pictures of the rooms well laid out, fresh clean towels should be present on the bed and add a splash of colour to the rooms such as flowers and vibrant art. Avoid pictures of the loo unless it is extra special, it’s better to have a hint, maybe an ensuite sign.
Hotels should show the room and the best features from around the hotel, such as the bar area, restaurants and leisure facilities. Add to these photographs of art etc.

You should also add photos to the website aimed at your type of clientele, for the active types you may include photos of walking boots, mountain bikes etc. if it is aimed at romantic breaks photos of roses and wine bottles and for families include teddies, and kid friendly features.

For a website tailored to your requirements including photography and on-line booking contact Mick Kenyon on 07738 255499.

4 Ways to Increase your Accommodation Bookings

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Here are 4 Ways on how to increase accommodation bookings at your B&B, Guesthouse, Hotel or self catering property. There are a number of ways to increase your presence and get more visible on the web which will lead to more interest and booking for your B&B, Guesthouse, Hotel or self catering accommodation.

4 Ways to increase your bookings

Make sure your B&B, Guesthouse, Hotel or Self Catering Accommodation website looks good, has easy navigation and eye catching quality photographs.
Secure online booking, if you don’t have a booking system people will go elsewhere finding accommodation that can be booked direct online
Is it a mobile friendly website? This is getting more important than ever with new changes being introduced by Google.
Registered it on Google+ and make sure your Google + page is complete. Ensure you include a phone number so people can call your B&B, Guesthouse, Hotel or self catering accommodation straight from their mobile.

Make sure good quality images are used on your website, avoid stock photographs.

Your website should invite people into your B&B, Guesthouse, Hotel or Self Catering Accommodation. People viewing it need to feel they can trust your business. It is important to have original photography of your accommodation, make sure it is great quality and avoid using stock photography which people just don’t trust. Colours of your website are really important, don’t use too bold colours, blue is often seen the colour as the colour that people most trust. Make sure the font is big enough and links can easily be found to help navigation around the website.

People like to be able to see if the accommodation is available straight away for B&B, Guesthouse, Hotel or self catering accommodation. In general they don’t like to phone to check on availability, they want to see it straight away online, whats more they also want to book it straight away. The best way to do this is to include an online booking service on your website, there are many out there, some charge commission and some don’t such as Freetobook. Make sure you embed the booking service into your website and clearly show it on your website.

More and more people are turning to there friend in the pocket for help on finding that perfect B&B, Guesthouse, Hotel or self catering property to stop. In fact sixty five percent of people who book a hotel room within 24 hours of their stay do so from a mobile device. From April 21st 2015 Google change the search rankings for mobile devices, if your website is not a responsive layout or has a dedicated mobile design platform you will not be as visible on Google as those that do (your competitors). You can check to see if your website is mobile friendly by clicking on the link here for the Google Mobile Friendly Test. If your not mobile friendly you can check out advice on being mobile friendly.

The final tip is to get your business registered on Google+ (Google plus). By having a verified business your B&B, Guesthouse, Hotel or self catering property is more likely to be shown on the first page of search results and included in the panel of 7. You can register your business on GMB (Google my Business) for free and it could be he best investment of an hours work you will make.

For further information or if you want a FREE quote for a website design including photography please call Mick on 07738 255499. Based in Ingleton, North Yorkshire I am within easy reach of The Yorkshire Dales and the Lake District National Parks. Including the towns of Skipton, Settle, Hawes, Ingleton, Sedburgh, Kirkby Lonsdale, Kendal, Windermere, Ambleside, Grange.

Mobile Friendly

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Mobile Friendly Rankings – what it means to you.

Google have announced that from the 21st April 2015 they will reward websites that are Mobile Friendly. Google have used some carefully chosen wording, announcing mobile friendly designed websites will be rewarded in mobile search, rather than saying websites that are not mobile friendly will be penalised. So what does this mean? The long and short of it is that the only changes will be made to searches performed on mobile devices, search results returned on desktop computers should stop the same (for now).

Mobile Friendly Websites Rewarded

What this means is that if your website design is mobile friendly it will have a better search ranking than those websites that are not mobile friendly. We are also only talking talking mobile phones for the time being (not tablet). In essence if your website design is mobile friendly it is more likely to be returned in search results if someone is searching using a mobile phone. This is probably more important than you realise with mobile usage on the rise and many users only having mobile devices to access the web. For the the time being desktop search results will not be affected by the Google changes being introduced, it will only affect mobile search results.

Website Designs will need to be mobile friendly from the 21 April 2015 to maximise your reach

What Makes a Website Mobile Friendly?

There are a number of factors that Google are looking for when deciding if a website is mobile friendly, the main ones being.

Links should not be too close together (this includes the navigation buttons)
Font Size – this should be clearly read-able on a mobile device
Playable Content – making sure that non supported content are not used (e.g flash)
Scaleable – make sure you can zoom in and out on content)

Google have said the mobile changes are not arbitrary, but they will affect mobile search rankings, and they may scale rankings due to the amount the website is mobile friendly. Google have said that although the changes will take place from 21 April 2015 it maybe a few days (even a week) before the changes are fully seen. Google said that the changes have been made as they recognise more people are accessing websites through mobiles than ever before and they want to reflect the user experience in the rankings. Googles preferred way of getting mobile friendly sites is for ‘responsive design websites’ although they recognise this may not suit all website designs and so as long as it is mobile friendly this will not affect the rankings. Googles last bit of advice to websmasters was not to concentrate on the new algorithm but to concentrate on getting good mobile friendly designed websites.

Test your website to see if it is mobile friendly.

How to Check if Your Website is Mobile Friendly?

There are three ways to check
#1 search for your website on your mobile phone – in the serach results next to your website in the description snippet it will indicate ‘mobile friendly websites’
#2 Use the Google mobile friendly tool here and enter your website address
#3 Check in the websmaster tools to see if your site is mobile friendly.

What Happens if Website is not Mobile Friendly?

The results in the tool or webmaster tool will tell you what is wrong, you should either fix the errors yourself or inform your webmaster or webdesigner.

Mick Kenyon Website Designer, based in Ingleton, covering North Yorkshire, Cumbria and Lancashire for affordable mobile friendly websites. Call 07738 255499