July 2012 - Neil Walker Digital

Evolution of the web – helping it move forward

Over the past 15 years the World Wide Web as we know it has come a long way. Websites, designers and developers, and web based technologies have all evolved and aided in making the online experience into what it is today. Websites are no longer just pages of information. They are interactive visual experiences that are as fundamental to our everyday lives as cars or phones.
As new web technologies are created and introduced, old methods for creating things become redundant, and eventually die out. This is evolution, and this is how the web, and the world moves forward.

Removal of Google Penalty through Un-Natural Link Building

How to Remove a Google Penalty
Seen your website rankings disappear? Has your website traffic dramatically dropped? Your not alone!
Tens of thousands of websites have suffered with the recent Google Penguin algorithm updates, thousands of websites have been penalised by Google. In most cases penalties are incurred due to having low quality backlinks pointing to your website, duplicate content or very spammy low quality text content.

Does Your Website Warrant a Mobile Version

As mobile devices advance and become a bigger part of everyday life, we get clients who ask when does my business need a mobile version of the website?
Well…
Over the past few years mobile and tablet devices have become so easy to use. They have forced users to use them instead of using a desktop or a laptop. This evolution has seen an increase in mobile traffic.

5 things you need for a user friendly website

1. Get rid of as many errors as you can.
A website with loads of errors is on par with sitting next to someone on the bus who hasn’t showered for ages* – it doesn’t make for a pleasant experience. Try to resolve as many errors as possible to make it easier and smoother for the user to visit your website.
2. An attractive homepage.
This seems an obvious thing, but some websites forget that this is the first thing a user will see. There is nothing worse than a flat, boring site with little thought put into the design or usability. See the homepage as the’ front cover’ of your website – this is the page where the user will decide whether or not they want to look through the rest of the site. Making the homepage attractive means having a good design and keeping the user stimulated. Imagine you were buying a new phone, would you buy a phone that only does what it needs to, has a basic design and function and is not really kept up to date? Or would you buy a phone that has a great design, brilliant functionality, is constantly being updated to make it better and has interesting features? You’d prefer the latter.

A man walked into a bar and said: "Is content really that important?"

If your intention for your website is to receive no revenue, sales or visits, then feel free to click onto something else. If not…
It’s a well established fact that content is vital when embarking on an optimisation and/or marketing strategy. It really is. But, a less debated concern is what type of content is king? Or, in other words, how good does that blog post have to be, after all, a link is a link is a link, is it not? Does it have to be good at all?

High quality content can help save you from the dreaded penguin

April 24th was a significant day within the world of SEO. It was the day of the penguin. Normally cuddly, cute little creatures, beloved by all, this was a penguin on a mission. A penguin on the warpath. He was dispatched with one intention: obliterate anyone in his path that utilised ‘black hat’ SEO techniques.
There were significant casualties. A huge number of sites. You may have awoken on the morning of the 25th to find a site that sat on high at #1 in the google rankings for your main keywords now languishing on the 7th page of google. Sites were blown out of the water over night.