Happy April fools from Google:

Designing a new blog or website from scratch gives you the perfect opportunity to implement some basic on page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tricks. Despite the fact that most on page SEO changes are relatively easy to do, I frequently see sites that fail to do so so here are three easy to implement, high impact SEO changes you should make sure you take into consideration when designing a blog.

1. Titles. Making sure that your targeted keywords appear in the titles of each page is essential. The search engines will not only display this title in the search results, but they use it as a key factor in determining the content of your site. Using a CMS like WordPress makes this light work as it largely does it for you. You can also extend this functionality by adding a plugin such as All in one Seo, which allows you to add keyword or your site title into the title of every page.
2. Meta Tags. These don’t have the same impact they use to years ago, and arguably the meta keywords are next to useless, but ensuring that you have a good meta description is still important as its this that will likely appear in the search results. This is easy to edit simply using <META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Your description goes here.”> in the head section of the site or if you use a plugin like AIOSEO then you can simply use that, which will also dynamically generate meta keywords for you.
3. Friendly Urls. This basically means that instead of having a page title like this www.example.com/?pgid=7172 , you have a nice readable title such as www.example.com/example-page . This allows the search engines to get a further indication of what your page is about, and allows for a much more readable title for humans.  Using WordPress it is very easy to set your URLS to do this, simply by changing the Permalinks settings to something like /%postname%/ rather than the default.
4. Header Tags. Simply put, the most important words on the page should be between <H1> tags, then <H2> etc… This tells the search engines that whatever is between those tags is probably what the content is generally about. You can adjust the size of the H1 tag by using CSS to make the page look nice, but don’t overuse them. As a general rule of thumb, the Title of the page/post should be a H1 tag, and then any subtitle can be a H2 then leave it at that. Remember, try and get your keywords into the titles and between those header tags!

There are obviously many more factors that you can implement, but these are a good starting point. If your blog doesn’t follow the four SEO rules above then I recommend you make some changes quickly as you are probably missing out on a lot of traffic!

James

I finally got around to updating the site, hope you like it! If you do then a link back will always be greatly appreciated

Many people think that a blog is something just for writers and that a blog cannot serve the same purpose as a website. They couldnt me more wrong.

For a start blogs captivate and entice people back. So often businesses create websites that remain static and devout of fresh content. This not only puts off customers but the search engines as well.

A professionally made blog can look like a website as well, just as this one does. Serving all the needs of a small business while maintaining its readers and the search engine ranking alike.Even just a few posts a month will keep your website alive, dominating your competitors with dusty old websites that no one looks at. On top of that, all blogs by Blog Design Services are incredibly easy to edit, meaning anyone in your organisation can easily have their own account set up so they can post as freely as you wish.

Why should you have a blog? What’s the difference between a blog and a website?

Well for a start, a blog is a website. It stands for weblog, and it’s focus is on regular updates and new information as oppossed to a static web site that sits around and doesn’t do much.

For me, the main advantage of a blog over a standard website is that the fresh content not only encourages readers to come back and visit, but it is also loved by search engines such as Google.

Now the advantages of this are massive. If you rank well in Google, then people will see your blog, thus promoting either your business or providing you with a valuable advertising space on which to capitalize.

Another major advantage of using a blog as opposed to a standard website is that it is a lot easier for non-technical users to have an input. No special software or knowledge is needed to write a blog post and you can set any number of user accounts up. Publishing a blog post is as easy as changing your status on Facebook!