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wpclean

Website help
« on: June 05, 2010, 01:08:59 am »
I have a free website provided by google promoting small businesses and it is doing well in the rankings .
My problem is it looks a little plain !
Does anyone know how to edit these sites ? I am willing to pay  ;D
Thanks .

chris@c.m.s

  • Posts: 1556
Re: Website help
« Reply #1 on: June 05, 2010, 01:56:14 am »
There are a few on here who may offer their services it may help though if you post a link to your site for feedback.   
Sussex by the sea

wpclean

Re: Website help
« Reply #2 on: June 05, 2010, 02:44:24 pm »
The only problem with the free site is you can only do so much with the editing , if you know what I mean !

Nathanael Jones

  • Posts: 5596
Re: Website help
« Reply #3 on: June 05, 2010, 02:55:05 pm »
What is your website address Wpclean?

wpclean

Re: Website help New
« Reply #4 on: June 05, 2010, 03:15:12 pm »
k

Nathanael Jones

  • Posts: 5596
Re: Website help
« Reply #5 on: June 05, 2010, 03:35:46 pm »
Do you get much work from it at the moment?

wpclean

Re: Website help
« Reply #6 on: June 05, 2010, 09:03:30 pm »
Do you get much work from it at the moment?
No thats the point !  It comes high on google rankings , but not a sniff of a response lol .

Nathanael Jones

  • Posts: 5596
Re: Website help
« Reply #7 on: June 05, 2010, 10:00:09 pm »
To be honest, I doubt I could fix it and still leave it in the Google hosting. Like you said, with that interface there is only so much you can do. A complete re-build is what I'd recommend, and a bit of a re-branding as well.
I'll get told off for advertising if I go on too much, but if you're interested in a website send me an e-mail.

Moderator David@stives

  • Posts: 8829
Re: Website help
« Reply #8 on: June 05, 2010, 10:04:27 pm »
Tut tut tut

Moderator David@stives

  • Posts: 8829
Re: Website help
« Reply #9 on: June 05, 2010, 10:05:56 pm »
Nat

I have seen some of the advertising options and they might suit you, I think thinks have changed recently, and there is some cheap options.

Just tell them Dave sent you lol.


Nathanael Jones

  • Posts: 5596
Re: Website help
« Reply #10 on: June 05, 2010, 10:13:30 pm »
Just e-mailed admin to ask about prices,... :)

Moderator David@stives

  • Posts: 8829
Re: Website help
« Reply #11 on: June 05, 2010, 10:43:31 pm »
could be good for business,

Quick question, what do you think of mine and do you think i could improve it ?

Nathanael Jones

  • Posts: 5596
Re: Website help
« Reply #12 on: June 06, 2010, 08:40:23 am »
could be good for business,

Quick question, what do you think of mine and do you think i could improve it ?
Technically your website isn't bad at all Dave, a few Meta keywords may help but even these are becoming less and less important in search engine optimisation so I'd guess you already get a good bit of traffic through it.

If I was to recommend any changes it would be about streamlining the content & making it more obvious for those viewers who are just glancing at the site,.. draw them in & make them customers! For example, you have both a "Home" page & an "about us" page",... that's an extra page in between their original landing point and selling your services! I'd combine the 2, and strip back superfluous info leaving a brief intro and going straight into the services you offer. Benefits of choosing you over other contractors (Health & safety, Scheduling system etc etc) should be in bullet point lists that catch the eye & can be read in a matter of seconds,.. this way its hard for a viewer not to read it & the vital info is always conveyed.

I'd also recommend having a page for residential services & one for commercial. Make it clear that you service all sectors & you won't have home owners navigating away from your site under the impression that you only clean commercial & vice versa.

The home page pics could do with a re-think too. The vans look good, but does it get the message across you want on the hoe page? Something instantly recognisable that gets the message across without the viewer thinking about it might serve better. A photo of you smiling at the camera would subconsciously help inspire confidence in your viewers,... and photo's of guys cleaning windows would make sure everyone instantly knew what you were on about even if they can't read!

Your list of towns on the homepage is a very good idea, & one that many guys miss,.. but it actually seems more extensive than the list on your "Area's Covered" page?!

Lastly,... you've posted some very impressive pics here over the years,.. but have very few images on your site? A picture tells 1000 words, so a gallery page with 20 or 30 pics can be a huge selling tool,... add a pretty "Lightbox" effect like this gallery and it can look real impressive: http://www.archescleaning.co.uk/index-4.html (its dead easy to do, just go here for the download: http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/ )

Don't think I'm knocking your site Dave, its already very good,.. but these are just some small area's where it could be improved!

Moderator David@stives

  • Posts: 8829
Re: Website help
« Reply #13 on: June 06, 2010, 08:57:40 am »
Hi Nat

Thanks for taking time out to answer, it has taken me over 12 months to get it to the stage it is at.

I started a 10 week courses 2 weeks ago, so i am learning to tweek things all the time. I think my biggest trouble is that I dont have an artistic eye.

Although we do clean domestics, i dont want to shout about it on my website, maybe I should have a "domestic customers click here" box to take them to a specific page.

I do need to get to grips with the pics, thats one area I do struggle with, need to learn more about the resizing etc.

Dave

Nathanael Jones

  • Posts: 5596
Re: Website help
« Reply #14 on: June 06, 2010, 09:05:48 am »
Some guys I know have 2 websites, one for attracting residential work & one for commercial work. It seems that rumours that Google will penalise your ranking for having the same contact details on 2 sites are completely untrue as it seems to work brilliantly for all I know that do it. www.davethewindowcleaner.co.uk is available!

I'm planning a big re-design of my web presence shortly & I'll be launching a 2nd site for this purpose.

As for the pics, its probably easier for you than most if you work in teams,.. just give one of your lads a cheap digital camera (Even the cheapest these days are plenty good enough for website quality) and tell them to go crazy. After a month you'll have 1000 odd photo's,.. and prob 50 of them will be really good. If you download a trial of adobe fireworks you'll see a very handy "batch process" feature which can re-size & optimise all your images in one go saving hours of work!

Window Washers

  • Posts: 9036
Re: Website help
« Reply #15 on: June 06, 2010, 03:45:17 pm »
website is www.hswindowcleaning.co.uk
all contact details on each page, make sure you have an email link (not just an email address) can you set up a domain name email instead of free hotmail email as it looks poor penny pinching (this leads to what type of work will be done thoughts)

I would be changing every pages title description ect.

traffic means nothing if it is the wrong traffic, targeted traffic is what makes you money/leads seems way to many people on here forget this basic rule. (just to clarify weas not aimed at anyone that has posted on the topic, seo is not just copying what others have on there site, if it was that easy everyone would be doing it, little like window cleaning really.


My best advice would be to get your own website then link it and host it with a proper (not free) hosting provider, get a proper email address info@yourdomain. larlar looks better than a hotmail account get the seo sorted out. Depends on what you want to spent on it depends what you get.

I do this as does Nat

I have a pagerank of 3 on google so must be doing something right.

If your not willing to learn, No one can help you, If you are determined to learn, No one can stop you ;)

Sean Dyer

  • Posts: 2947
Re: Website help
« Reply #16 on: June 06, 2010, 05:08:53 pm »
do you get page rank from being listed on google, my page does well for targetted keywords but cant work out what page rank it has if any, i think the latter unfortunately :(

Window Washers

  • Posts: 9036
Re: Website help
« Reply #17 on: June 06, 2010, 06:30:22 pm »
do you get page rank from being listed on google, my page does well for targetted keywords but cant work out what page rank it has if any, i think the latter unfortunately :(
How is PageRank calculated?
To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That's the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren't telling us what it is. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough.

In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

We can think of it in a simpler way:-

a page's PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

"share" = the linking page's PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.

A page "votes" an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it.

If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2,.....PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar. If so, it means that it takes a lot more additional PageRank for a page to move up to the next PageRank level that it did to move up from the previous PageRank level. The result is that it reverses the previous conclusion, so that a link from a PR8 page that has lots of outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR4 page that has only a few outbound links.

Whichever scale Google uses, we can be sure of one thing. A link from another site increases our site's PageRank. Just remember to avoid links from link farms.

Note that when a page votes its PageRank value to other pages, its own PageRank is not reduced by the value that it is voting. The page doing the voting doesn't give away its PageRank and end up with nothing. It isn't a transfer of PageRank. It is simply a vote according to the page's PageRank value. It's like a shareholders meeting where each shareholder votes according to the number of shares held, but the shares themselves aren't given away. Even so, pages do lose some PageRank indirectly, as we'll see later.

Ok so far? Good. Now we'll look at how the calculations are actually done.

For a page's calculation, its existing PageRank (if it has any) is abandoned completely and a fresh calculation is done where the page relies solely on the PageRank "voted" for it by its current inbound links, which may have changed since the last time the page's PageRank was calculated.

The equation shows clearly how a page's PageRank is arrived at. But what isn't immediately obvious is that it can't work if the calculation is done just once. Suppose we have 2 pages, A and B, which link to each other, and neither have any other links of any kind. This is what happens:-

Step 1: Calculate page A's PageRank from the value of its inbound links

Page A now has a new PageRank value. The calculation used the value of the inbound link from page B. But page B has an inbound link (from page A) and its new PageRank value hasn't been worked out yet, so page A's new PageRank value is based on inaccurate data and can't be accurate.

Step 2: Calculate page B's PageRank from the value of its inbound links

Page B now has a new PageRank value, but it can't be accurate because the calculation used the new PageRank value of the inbound link from page A, which is inaccurate.

It's a Catch 22 situation. We can't work out A's PageRank until we know B's PageRank, and we can't work out B's PageRank until we know A's PageRank.

Now that both pages have newly calculated PageRank values, can't we just run the calculations again to arrive at accurate values? No. We can run the calculations again using the new values and the results will be more accurate, but we will always be using inaccurate values for the calculations, so the results will always be inaccurate.

The problem is overcome by repeating the calculations many times. Each time produces slightly more accurate values. In fact, total accuracy can never be achieved because the calculations are always based on inaccurate values. 40 to 50 iterations are sufficient to reach a point where any further iterations wouldn't produce enough of a change to the values to matter. This is precisiely what Google does at each update, and it's the reason why the updates take so long.

One thing to bear in mind is that the results we get from the calculations are proportions. The figures must then be set against a scale (known only to Google) to arrive at each page's actual PageRank. Even so, we can use the calculations to channel the PageRank within a site around its pages so that certain pages receive a higher proportion of it than others.

Sean read the above: google boogles minds and changes things regular, seo and page rank are a nightmare field. people thinking make there own website, put it online and it will be great from them are clearly in need of medical help. Things that cost money usually do for good reason, getting money hits from google, yahoo, bing ect are not easy they take time and money.

Someone are very lucky if they get rank 1 page 1 google asap, I know I have dont it loads of times, the problem is keeping it there and maintaining it on the first page. I am rank 3 page 1 google and have been for years (not blowing my trumpet, just being honest I was ranked 4 page 1 but I added a well known person on this site to mine and got taken down 1 rank :)

I stopped offering this service to people as I got asked way to many questions and people wanted it free of charge.

Nat is finding out now what I mean or should have learnt by now, as he started to do the same thing as me about a year ago.  ;D

I just offer pages on my site now as this helps people with there ranking, I dont need the hassle of the rest  ;)

Ian

p.s I need to speak with you shortly
If your not willing to learn, No one can help you, If you are determined to learn, No one can stop you ;)

Sean Dyer

  • Posts: 2947
Re: Website help
« Reply #18 on: June 06, 2010, 06:47:24 pm »
no worries mate

you gonna email or phone

my numbers on websites are currently wrong so i will email my number
 sean

ps. i still dont know what page rank is or more accurately how to get page ranked by google

Window Washers

  • Posts: 9036
Re: Website help
« Reply #19 on: June 06, 2010, 06:52:35 pm »
no worries mate

you gonna email or phone

my numbers on websites are currently wrong so i will email my number
 sean

ps. i still dont know what page rank is or more accurately how to get page ranked by google
it means in simple terms , is your site any value.

to check what pr you are, google page rank checker
If your not willing to learn, No one can help you, If you are determined to learn, No one can stop you ;)