Long time, no blog!

Well, for the first time in a long time, I've found myself with enough time to actually write a blog post!

It's a bit ironic how poorly maintained this blog is, seeing as I'm such an advocate of our clients using blogs regularly for their promotion. I can thoroughly appreciate it when they come back to me saying that they don't have enough time to write original articles on a regular basis! Bearing that in mind, I've come up with some suggestions for how to keep your blog fresh, with minimal effort, using examples from some of our clients:

1. Comment on news or media

A great example of this was our client Sorcit who are product design consultants based in Nottingham. To keep their blog up to date we suggested commenting on Dragon's Den and Starck's Design For Life, the day after they aired on BBC. This proved extremely easy for them and very interesting for those of us with an interest/background in design.

2. Keep it short
Don't worry about writing a 500 word completely original piece about your industry or area of interest, often shorter, more focussed blog posts are more effective. They're also easier to read and digest for busy people on the move. Check out Globus's Learn Russian blog for short sharp, easily written posts

3. Busy doing nothing

If Twitter has done nothing else, it has suggested that there is beauty in mundanity! If you've got nothing exciting to say, just comment on what you're currently up to - you'd be surprised how often this can turn into something interesting.

4. Serialise
If it suits you better, write a longer article but rather than post it as a single article, break it down into smaller chunks and then post these once a week or every few days. You can create interest if you present these as a series and promote each one through your Twitter etc account as you post the latest part. Newson Gale's static electricity blog demonstrates this.

5. Retweet

If you've got nothing new to say but have read something interesting on Twitter or another blog, just share this link with your readers with a bit of an introduction. It's good to share! See our accommodation blog which rounds up news across our leisure sector clients.

So I hope that there is something there that might help you to keep your blogs fresh and up to date without compromising your day-to-day business or adding more pressure to your life!

If you've got any more suggestions of how to make blogging quick and efficient, please let me know.

Rich

Page Rank Sculpting - To sculpt or not to sculpt?

Page Rank Sculpting is something that I've not actively practised but have heard many other professional SEO practitioners swear by, so I was very interested when I came across this article by the inimitable Matt Cutts.

Page Rank Sculpting is the practice of manipulating links within your website to try to ensure that important pages have a higher Page Rank than less important pages. Matt uses this diagram to demonstrate the perceived wisdom of how Page Rank cascades down through a website:

This can be controlled by using the "nofollow" tag to exclude less important pages from this PR distribution, therefore distributing that precious PR to the key pages only. In theory this sounds great and although Matt makes it clear that it's not quite as simple as that, should we not all be doing this? Here's his advice - should you Page Rank Sculpt?:

I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

This really reinforces my own personal approach to SEO. There are lots of little tips and techniques out there to help improve a site's ranking but at the end of the day it comes down to the fact that the most important things are building the site in the most logical, search engine-friendly way possible and writing original, high quality content that people will want to read and link to.

Damn, that's not very catchy is it? Perhaps I need a quirky 2 word phrase to describe it... any ideas?

Website Translation

Metafocus has spent the past year or so developing it's offering into international markets focussing on multilingual SEO, internal internet marketing and now into website translation.

As our portfolio increases with every Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian website that we've built and optimised, we've realised more and more that having accurate translation by native speakers of each language really is key. Subsequently, we're now offering ourselves as a website translation agency specialising in translating and interpreting text from both a marketing and search engine optimisation perspective using native speakers.

This service comes into play when performing keyword research too as it's vital that the right words are chosen. For example Metal Improvement Company offer a service called "shot peening" which is a specific term in english but has 6 or 7 interpretations in Chinese! By working with our native translators and the client's Chinese distributor we were able to choose the right word and optimise the site accordingly.

If you're looking for quality website translation from native speakers, give us a call on 0115 9470011 or visit the Metafocus Gloabl Website.

How long does it take to rank in Google?

Ah, the million dollar question!

Many people aren't aware that a new website is unlikely to appear in Google's results pages straight away on launch. There is no official quarantine period from Google and no official word why websites aren't publiched immediately but the common consensus is that they wait for a site to somehow prove itself by receiving links from other established websites over a period of time before appearing in the listings.

But how long does this take?

Typically we say that it takes between 3 and 6 months before a site becomes listed, based on our experience which appears to be backed up by a recent survey described here: http://www.creativemindsearchmarketing.com/rank-well-on-google.

oF over 200 respondants, 35% agreed with the 3-6 month timescale whilst 19% experience a 6-9 month delay before a new site appears. Over at Metafocus we'd be very disappointed if a site took over 6 months to rank for any of it's keywords. Obviously this would be dependant on the competitiveness of tHe keywords and the content on the site itself but the 3-6 month bracket seems much more realistic.

If you're interested in learning more about search engine optimisation visit the Metafocus SEO Nottingham website.

And for the next challenge!

One of the things that I like about my job is the fact that it is different day-to-day, week-to-week working on our range of clients. As I look back on the Bank Holiday and having a short break, what have I got coming up this week?

1. Get a site ranked in Google UK
So why is this speeding offence website for a local motoring solicitor not being seen by Google as a UK site?

2. Rebuild a Chinese Website
After some, ahem, problems with our client I've got to rebuild this chemical suppliers' site... again!

3. International Link Building
An exceptional opportunity to quote for some truly international work, but how do you accurately quote for multilingual link building? By link? By time? Hmmm...

And on top of that we've got a new team member joining, senior staff away and umpteen projects to finish off... It's gonna be a busy week!!

Why I hate the new Nottingham City Council Website

Nottingham City Council recently relaunched its website after much local advertising and promotion - but is it any good? Here are my thoughts:

1. Web 2.0 = Wow!
I can imagine the brief now: "Everyone likes MySpace and Facebook, let's make a website like that! In fact just copy the BBC website, that'll do!"
It really smacks of a generic "Web 2.0" template where the content takes a back seat to widgets letting you link to your Facebook or Gmail. People visit a Council website to get local information not to be a portal for their email etc - know your place NCC!

2. Supporting Local Business
So what was the reasoning for using a company in Plymouth to build this? There are many, many established and successful web companies in Nottingham that could've built this travesty - whatever happened to using local businesses eh? Not really "On our side" are you?

3. Adsense!!??
"I know, let's make some money out of this website - these Google ads look great!".
No, no, no, no....

4. Lack of Direction
The site seems to have lost track of what information that people want to see. Don't worry about making a cool Web 2.0 site, get the information in an accessible format that people can quickly find. Too many different navigation items and distractions, not to mention the Google Ads - keep it simple please.

But, it is a LOT better than the previous site which was truly terrible! And fairplay to NCC for trying but I think it's missed the target somewhat.

What do you think?

Metal Improvement Company

We started working with Metal Improvement Company back in December 2008 and designed and built them a suite of new websites for the UK and Chinese markets to sit alongside the established .com website.

Beginning with a completely fresh visual design that takes the brand in a new direction to its previous online presence, we've designed everything with SEO and online marketing in mind. For this particular company, it was felt that their visitors would find and browse the site through two main routes:

- by market sector e.g. aerospace, automotive, medical etc
- by service e.g. shot peening, laser peening, engineered coatings

This is reflected by the template layout which has clear navigation by market sector on the left of the screen beside a flash movie illustrating some key areas of their work. Beneath this is a list of the main services offered along with a brief description of each.


We've also created a Wordpress blog to act as news module. This feeds content on the UK site and the two Chinese websites (Chinese and English language), using categories to filter news to each site.

We've been working on the SEO for a couple of months now and the site is beginning to rank for some of it's chosen keywords which, considering it's a brand new domain, is very pleasing. I fully expect there to be a big jump in rankings very soon as teh site becomes indexed to a greater degree.