TnT Unleashed 1pic4twenty Blog

 

Four days ago, (15 August 2009), we decided to check how we were doing on Google.co.za for the search phrase “web design.”

And there we were, at no.3!
We checked again the next day and we’d moved up to
no.1! Out of over 300 million results!

We’re not sure when last we checked, probably at least a month ago, when we weren’t even on the first ten pages.

A month ago or so, we were there for other search terms, on page one, but longer ones such as “web design photography writing” – or see which others too, on our blog post Reasons why leaving a comment on our blog might be good for you, but not just for two words being two words we’ve been striving to be found for!

We’re really pleased! But also a little worried…

We can’t quite pinpoint what it was that we did to get there, and, of course, we also keep checking that we’re still there, as know it can change at any moment.

We’re also afraid of doing anything wrong, without us being aware that it’s “wrong”, that will make us drop down again.

We’ve tried to think about what we’ve done differently lately, that we didn’t do before:

About three months ago, maybe longer, we changed our home page slightly, to have more keywords near the top of the page, we wrote some new content, basically splitting the three main business services we do, on the home page – to give viewers an immediate overview of what our business is about – we also included my oDesk badges and some information about oDesk.

We also made sure our meta tagging title, description, and keywords in our coding were all relevant to the content on the home page of 1pic4twenty

Although we had some time back previously submitted our site to Search Engines, we did it again after making the changes to the page and coding.

We go to similar trouble for our web design clients whose sites aren’t doing badly either, without them needing any expensive specialised SEO services. At the moment all the extras we do for our clients are still included in our R200 per page web design price. (Our prices are going up 1 March 2010.)

Other activities we’ve recently been involved in that may have helped our 1pic4twenty site be found more easily are: joining Blog Catalog, after having started this blog, hosted on our website server, on 2 July 2009, and trying to find the time to be a little active on Blog Catalog, as in making the effort to leave fairly decent and lengthy comments on other people’s blogs, and posting as many new articles on this blog, our own blog, as we can find the time for.

We presume that by commenting on some blogs, and leaving a link back on them to our own blog, we’ve picked up some decent backlinks.

We’ve had our website live for 12 months now, and were always pleased that one of our very first articles on our website about the benefits of comfrey cream was found on page one of Google.co.za within just three weeks of posting it, especially when we’d had no correct meta tagging in the coding of the page for it, or any robot crawl instructions. No backlinks to it either, other than on Vottle free classifieds, and on Xomba. We deduced that all those people out there who declare that “content is king” are correct.

Looking through all of the above, it is our opinion that to have your site or certain pages found more easily on Google you should:

Have great meta tagging coding for your title, description,and keywords;

Include robot crawl instructions in your coding;

Submit your site to Search Engines once a month;

Get a blog in addition to your website;

Leave quality comments on other people’s blogs to get quality backlinks to your own.

Oh yes, we also don’t use flash, or have pages with too many images and little or no text content, so try include a decent amount of text content on all your pages.

It’s been quite a long process, getting my web design business up and running, from home, after having started it in February 2008, and I am grateful to my boyfriend Tony who has taught me so much, when just three years ago, I wasn’t even sure how to put a computer on, tell the difference between files and folders, or even copy and paste or send an email.

There isn’t always time to spend on getting my website looking and being great, so please excuse how it looks – I’m working on it!

Why has there not been much time? I’m not charging much for my web design work while still growing my portfolio, and it’s hard to only just manage monthly living expenses, and I also do freelance writing work for oDesk, and try to be the best parent I can be to my two sons, while still needing to learn so much more about web design, SEO, the Internet and everything that goes with it – meaning there’s not much time to spend on perfecting my website and blog, or on the SEO of them, but many of you out there may have a little more time on your hands than I do, and I do advise that if your site is not yet easily found, to not only try my tips, but to hang in there, be patient, and not give up. Success will come. Good luck!

You might also want to read some of our other blog posts:

For which phrases searched for on Google is this blog easily found?

Google.co.za search results of webs designed by us

Rough idea of the email we send to people who enquire about our web design service

© Teresa Schultz 2009