Hello,
I have a little family run website design company in Essex. Until a few months ago I had really good rankings and was even number 1 for a while when searching under "web page design essex" or "Ecommerce Design UK" but all of a sudden I disappeared from the listings altogether.

I really want to learn to understand this, so that any sites we build in the future will be more Search Engine Friendly and so I can keep us as near the top as possible. We use Google Adwords and Espotting.com at the moment, but it is not paying for itself.

Please could you give us sound SEO direction and point out what I am doing wrong. (I do not profess to know anything, it is all guesswork on my part so far)
We will be very grateful for any advice you can offer,
Joseph
http://www.DesignsOnline.co.uk

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Essex & London Website Design & Ecommerce Solutions UK
Bespoke shopping cart sites built to your requirements

I think there needs to be a little more text on the page than there is at the moment. You only have a couple of sentences on which google can base your rankings. I may well be wrong, but I've worked on the assumption there should always be at least 200 words of text on the page so that google has something meaty on which to base its rankings. As all of your pages seem to be in Flash, it might be worth having a non-flash version, which I understand the search engines find easier to index.

Hi there,
thanks for your advice, is this right? Do I need to pile 200 words on the page to be a sucess in the search engines?

If so I would have to have them open at the bottom of the page which I would really rather avoid if posible as I hate index pages which you have to scroll.

Are there any other ways round this?

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Essex & London Website Design & Ecommerce Solutions UK
Bespoke shopping cart sites built to your requirements

The site looks good to me but the spider view is close to nothing.
I just looked at your site home page then ran it through a search engine simulater: http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool...ine-viewer.htm
Have a look for yourself, unfortunately the results are not good!
It's a shame flash sites suffer in search engine ranking.
If it makes you feel any better I have over 600 words on each of my pages on one of my sites and I have been dropped.
They keep moving the goal posts!
Good luck

Whats Going On

First, most people don't want to "enter here" or "proceed to whatever"... they want to be "there" - that is the purpose of their visit..

2. you have absolutely no content.... in addition to needing content for the search engines, you need to tell your visitor/potential clients what you can do and, most especially, what benefit they will derive from using your service as opposed to using some other designer.

3. I am at a complete loss as to what the significance of the frog is. It certainly has nothing to do with your name... it seems to me that it is there only to showcase your flash skills...

4. every page in your site opens in a new window... is there a reason for this? you don't need to have new windows all over the place.... it only confuses your visitor (unless you apprise them of this fact before hand)

5. your quote form pages are entirely too large for 800x600 viewing. Even in this day and age, there are quite a number of people veiwing at that resolution. Since your site is to promote your design business, this sizing issue does not appear professional.

6. you have no physical information, such as address, phone number, etc. - having this information lends credibility to your site.

I realize that you only asked why you were not in Google.... content plays a significant part in that.. and you should have some backlinks... this will raise your PR and give you better shot at a good ranking.
Alhtough you have meta tags, no where can I find that you have used those keywords in the body of the text....while Google may not rely on meta tags (keywords), other search engines do... of course, it appears that except for your meta tags, there is nothing for the any search engine to spider.

Hope this helps....Good luck with your venture.

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Mary Ann
Affordable Websites Designed - www.m-goret.com

Hello,
I built the index page because I learned that flash sites are ignored by the search engines.

The purpose of that index page is purely to give me something in the search engines. I wanted a fairly clean looking html page that was indexable and would then let people proceed to my main site.

I was doing pretty well with this page until fairly recently when I just dropped out of the listings altogether!

How much text content do I need to have on the first page to get it indexed and standing a fair chance?

I want to keep it to a minimum if possible, as I do really want people to view the flash site.

Yes the frog is just a company mascot (sort of) he is on all our printed advertising (Yellow Pages Directory etc...) although lots of our customers do really like it.

As for the opening new windows, I was advised a while ago that if the links open in new pages, then the customer still has your window open underneith, and if he navigates away from it. Sooner or later he is going to see your site again in an old window and be reminded of your services. (Kind of like pop unders)

You are right we have not advertised our address on the website, but this was deliberate. However our phone number and email address are available on the site.

It is Google help I am desperatly seeking, would adding text at the foot of the index page help?

Thanks for your time

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Essex & London Website Design & Ecommerce Solutions UK
Bespoke shopping cart sites built to your requirements