1 – The ‘honeymoon’ effect. New websites can rise rapidly in searches, but if you do not continue to add new content or solve any issues that Google finds, the ranking will drop within a few months  to the natural position for the website. Again point is you need to continue to work on your SEO, or you will go backwards.

2 – You have been penalised by Google. Google has found things it doesn’t like. There are many things Google can penalise you for, e.g. the canonical issue, broken links within your website, duplicate content etc. It is imperative to monitor, through a variety of online tools, what Google thinks of your website, it’s coding, structure and content.

3 – Inaccessible content. It is important to make sure you have a sitemap of all the pages on your website and tell Google about it. You also need to generate a robot.txt file that tells Google which content it should (and should not!) access and list in searches. Google may well find all the pages on your site, but telling them makes sure of it and allows them to flag up any issues that can then be solved.

4 – Slow page load time. All hosting is not equal. A lot of shared hosting is on poor specification and overloaded servers and therefore the sites load slowly. If visitors wait more than a few seconds for pages to load the leave (known as the ‘bounce rate’). This is obviously bad in terms of client engagement and user experience, but Google also now considers the load time in it’s rankings

5 – Google has changed it’s algorithm. They do it regularly. The web does not stand still and nor do they and nor should you!

And here is the big one:

6 - You are not making enough effort. Obviously people only want their sites to move up in online searches, but of course for every site that goes up, one must go down. So the first and most obvious reason is your competitiors have made more effort than you to improve their SEO. There are lots of things you can do to improve what Google thinks of you. Add new content, create a YouTube channel and make a video, then put it on the website, preferably the homepage etc.

Her’s a video that explains how Google actually does a search:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs

We were approached to create a custom template, for use with the Joomla CMS, from supplied design work. AMC Exhibitions specialises in offering exhibition solutions for businesses at events all over the world, and their website required a large amount of custom functionality to show the full range of their services, and page layouts to show the different aspects of their work. Joomla is a highly flexible framework that is highly customisable.

Following the success of sites like Groupon, websites to promote time-limited deals, with large reductions, are becoming very popular. A local business asked us to create one for them, that allows visitors to sign-up for daily emails highlighting daily deals in product categories of interest to them. We used WordPress, with a custom plugin to allow loading of the feeds and an extender plugin of the popular Subscribe2 to create the daily emails.

A local design and branding agency asked us to create for them a WordPress CMS website from their designs. This we did using custom fonts to recreate their design for the web, image fader on the homepage and a portfolio section. All of which is editable from the admin section, giving them full control over their content.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z9TTBxarbs

Mark Ballett, an experienced business coach, asked us to create a blog-based website for him to demonstrate his business knowledge and provide advice and updates to his clients and subscribers. we chose our favourite content management system, WordPress, as the perfect choice for these requirements. The website allows people to subscribe to his newsletter and receive a free e-book. We will be working with Mark to improve his web presence over the coming months.

A local artist in St Albans asked us to create a WordPress website to promote her art. She specialises in wall murals, oil paintings and watercolours. The website presents the work as large images in specific categories, so it is easy to navigate. The clean design does not detract from the bright and stiking art work.

The Google Caffeine update first started to consider page load time as a factor for organic search rankings and there are now many tools available to allow you to measure your page load time, such as Google webmaster tools or web page analyser. So what factors will impact the load time?

1 – Large images that are not optimised for the web

2 – Excessive use of background images in website design. Good practice now is to use css3 and html5 to create gradients, rounded corners etc within the browser.

3 – Poor coding standards – for example numerous database queries or browser load requests.

4 – Low quality shared hosting – many large hosting companies overload their servers, leading to slow response times and therefore slow page loads.

So if your website is loading slowly ask us or another web professional to review the situation for you. You could be losing business!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbaU-p2UnkA

A local building services company approached Verulam Web Design to redesign and code a search-engine friendly website to promote their domestic and commercial building services. We used WordPress, because of its SEO friendly coding, structure and range of plugins. The website has a clean design, with quality images and concise copy.

We have provided project management and design and development services for an exciting new business referral and interactive directory website – WottleDo. This project has taken 18 months from initial brainstorming and wireframes to launch, requiring a large team with graphic design, website design, software development, copywriting, testing and user experience skillsets. Verulam Web Design have coordinated the whole project and delivered the finished website.