One of the most infuriating things a web designer has to deal with is the constant questions about how much money a website will make and how long it will take for it to be number one on Google. It’s become so bad now that every question like this just phases me out and all I hear is a slight buzzing noise at the back of my head.

Seriously, please shut up.

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I love the Internet to bits. Just when you think you’ve pretty much got every avenue covered, someone drops in a little gem of information that makes you sit up and think “D’oh, why didn’t I think about that?!”

Gregor Spowart has just blogged about something that you should be aware of that had completely slipped my mind, simply because I hadn’t realised it still went on. Namely, the “we’ll submit your website to hundreds of search engines” nonsense being spouted by lots of web firms.

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Google are at it again!

They’re not content with just offering up search results that they think you’ll be interested in, they are now giving you the choice of altering the results, saving them and remembering your favourites so they can serve you better in the future.

For example, if you searched for ‘Sandwich Shop’ and you weren’t happy with the results, you could promote the results you preferred above the ones you didn’t. Sounds odd, here’s it in action:

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Many people dismiss web marketing as a fad or something just for geeks and nerds. If we’re in a meeting with a marketing or managing director discussing their web presence, when the conversation moves on to the search engine aspect of promotion, a quick phone call is then made to the IT department and a ‘translator’ is summoned to the room.

I.T. strikes fear into the souls of many people. It’s seen as an impenetrable fortress of acronyms, thick manuals and buzzwords created solely to ensure ‘normal’ people will never really understand it. In some cases, rightly so. Accountants spend an awful lot of time learning their trade so you don’t have to do your own books, IT people spend an awful lot of time learning their trade so you don’t have to bother with computers. But why is search engine marketing tarred with the same brush?

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In our last newsletter I explained how using our DIY SEO book principles I’d managed to get a completely new website on to the first page of Google within a couple of weeks. Well, it seems that if you type ‘Birmingham Laundry’ into Google, the website I created is actually at number one!

Want to do this for your site?

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We get some odd phone calls y’know, usually from people with some very strange ideas about what Google does and how it indexes your website. It’s not their fault, obviously, us techie types have spent the best part of our lives trying to make anything computer related as impenetrable as possible to the layman.

We’ve done such a good job that anyone who does understand what we’re talking about is usually labeled a ‘geek’ or a ‘nerd’. Well, at the risk of embarrassing a few people who read this blog, I’m going to tell you about some of the bizarre things we’ve been told about SEO and then I’ll explain how it should be done.

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