promoting website

[Yorkshireman]

SEO search engine optimisation ... meta tags, on and of page enhancements, etc

 

type in Seo and your home town into google someone will be doing it ... but it aint cheap

[Paul Smith]

Spike, Don't do Yell.com or anything to do with it! It's crap! Save your money and do pay per click. Once your site gets established it will soon be seen in the organic free listings! SEO is another load of pony! It might work today but google change the goal post when ever they want and that can be weekly!

[Steve Bullman]

Spike, Don't do Yell.com or anything to do with it! It's crap! Save your money and do pay per click. Once your site gets established it will soon be seen in the organic free listings! SEO is another load of pony! It might work today but google change the goal post when ever they want and that can be weekly!

 

True to a point. its not a waste of time though, just depends how much 'time' you have to spend on it. By far the best seo is simply having new content constantly. Easiest way to do this for a small business site such as yours is to add a blog to it and try to update it as often as possible.

[Paul Smith]

That's sound advice Steve.

[arbogrunt]

thanks Steve..I've got plenty of time this week..work is lean and pricing is very, very keen here at the moment....hence kick-starting the website !

[truncator]

Sort your business out with a google plus account and get a business page this will help you for local searches. Don't be fooled by yell they are dead on their feet.

[JamesMio]

Ho'kaay...

 

I might be able to give you a few pointers on this one (fair-play disclaimer:- I do web stuff for a living but not trying to sell you anything. Ok? Great - let's go!)

 

Bad news, sorry to be the one that breaks this to you but your current site appears to be built almost entirely in Flash. Flash is bad for search engines, and most mobile users (although I do see you've got a mobile stylesheet in place that does work on iPhones etc - nice job for that). The problem with flash is search engines really struggle to read it, and rely heavily on good old, simple text to decipher what a page or site is all about.

 

My advice (and yes, I know this may not be the news you want to hear) is to get your site converted into something that search engines can actually read properly. There's a load of very good open source (normally free) content management systems out there that would do this, Joomla and Drupal are both good, my personal choice (and the one we use a lot at work) would be Wordpress.

 

So, before you waste (and I use that word deliberately) any money with Yell etc, the first thing you should be looking at doing is sorting out your existing site and making it search engine friendly.

 

To give you an idea of what that might/should cost - we do retrofitting - i.e converting your existing site's style, design and layout etc into Wordpress for anything between £400-£1000 - depending on the amount of content, layouts etc needing done.

 

That's not me pitching (honest - although obviously we'd be more than happy to give you a hand), just trying to give you something to compare to.

 

Regardless who you use, that would be money well spent - it'll set your site up far better long-term than relying on an old and outgoing (thankfully - because it's a pain in the ass) technology.

 

You COULD throw money at SEO (which typically means someone will spend time building up links to point at your site), which - IF DONE PROPERLY - can help your rankings.

 

You could also look at buying some traffic (PPC) with Google AdWords, but again - until your site's sorted I really wouldn't.

 

Hope this helps - sorry it's not perhaps the good news you were hoping for, but better to be blunt and honest?!

Edited April 19, 2013 by JamesMio

[Greg]

 

Bad news, sorry to be the one that breaks this to you but your current site appears to be built almost entirely in Flash. Flash is bad for search engines, and most mobile users (although I do see you've got a mobile stylesheet in place that does work on iPhones etc - nice job for that). The problem with flash is search engines really struggle to read it, and rely heavily on good old, simple text to decipher what a page or site is all about.

 

My advice (and yes, I know this may not be the news you want to hear) is to get your site converted into something that search engines can actually read properly. There's a load of very good open source (normally free) content management systems out there that would do this, Joomla and Drupal are both good, my personal choice (and the one we use a lot at work) would be Wordpress.

 

So, before you waste (and I use that word deliberately) any money with Yell etc, the first thing you should be looking at doing is sorting out your existing site and making it search engine friendly.

 

My site is built in Flash and is ranked 1st on Google for quite a few of my search terms. Although the the site is shown in Flash it has HTML built underneath it to help search engines find and rank it.

 

The Opening Poster's site will be automatically converted to HTML5 by the end of June, as will mine so they will be displayed correctly on iPads and other mobile devices

 

Agree with everything else you say though

Edited April 19, 2013 by Greg
Spelling

[JamesMio]

Unless it's for a specific use - i.e. to animate something that you can't do in static images or video, flash is a hateful technology that is finally on it's way out and really should be avoided. NONE of the big players on the web use Flash for their main site content these days, and for good reason.

 

With your site - if you check out the source code (view-source:Tree Surgeons in Cheshire - TreeWorks UK) there is at least SOME text in there for the likes of Google to get it's teeth into and decipher. That probably explains your rankings (I bet you'll see an improvement once you shift to HTML though).

 

With OP's - (view-source:Home - hunterandsonstreeservices.co.uk), there's just lines and lines of flash code and nothing about the company.

 

For what it's worth - I think the design and layout is great, but the technology behind it is holding it back.

 

As always, just my tuppence worth - this advice is worth exactly what you've paid for it but kicking sites into shape is what I do for a living.

[Greg]

James - Yes, I can't wait for the speedy page load times in HTML5.

 

To help the OP, he needs to log into his website account and edit his site description, page titles, page descriptions etc. Make sure photo's have "Alt Titles". Enter Meta tags for each page (I know Google say they don't pick these up anymore but it won't do any harm and other search engines still look for them). This should be considered just a start, plenty of other stuff to do.

Edited April 19, 2013 by Greg