More and more high street stores are closing in the UK, towns seem to have taken the brunt of economic downturn, with high street brands clinging to their prestigious city locations. The shocking news of the closure of one of the UK’s most prestigious high street stores, Woolworths, has left the retail sector quaking in the aftershock of administration of this retail giant. Is anyone safe?

We welcomed the large high street brands into our lives over the last 25 years, the high street has changed dramatically and put out of business 100,000 of traditional family run specialist stores. Most of which had been managed generation after generation by the same families. But in retrospect was this such a good idea? Was progress worth the cost of a retail institution?

But now there is a new trading revolution. The internet has levelled the playing field allowing small, individual traders and family run businesses to compete at a national level up against the big brands. No longer is it necessary for a small business to suffer the financial burdens of a high street location in order reach a large potential customer audience. The internet has liberated the individual trader allowing them to compete at a national level and reach their targeted audience. A customer searching for a product from a big brand can easily search for the same product in hundreds of smaller stores. This is all thanks to a well designed and simple to use websites, search engine optimisation and search engine marketing.

UK Search engine optimisation is a massively growing industry; it’s the process of allowing a business to appear within search engine results under keywords and search terms which describe the company’s business, products and services. It allows a business web site to be seen by potential customers. So why is this so important? Search engines offer a massive amount of exposure to any online business, an online store can be visited more often than any traditional high street location could provide in foot fall. Online stores are visited more frequently, products are easier to find and pricing is more competitive as overheads are extremely low. The future of shopping is the internet but there are still a few bugs to iron out.

The process of making sure your site can be found within search engines by potential customers requires the assistance of a Search Engine Marketing Specialist. But if you consider the costs and overheads of an online store against a high street location, the saving is massive and the liability and risk are hugely reduced. The cost of using a professional UK search engine optimisation service will be minimal and the returns will be high. Search Engine Optimisation is an essential marketing tool and forms the very backbone of any online marketing campaign. The internet is a growing market place; with the onset of a recession companies need to maximise your their exposure, can you afford not to trade online?

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When moving from an old to a new website it is extremely important to consider the old sites existing organic search engine position. If the correct strategy is not undertaken then the old sites position in the search marketplace could be dramatically compromised. We spen a lot of time during the Search Engine Optimisation process, why lose all of the work and time that has been invested. It’s important to gain an understanding of two specific areas of the old site before undertaking a strategy:

1) The existing listing saturation: This is the number of pages which have been listed, cached and indexed within each of the major search engines. Each page listing will be producing a level of visitor traffic, each associated to different groups of keywords and search terms. It’s essential to make sure existing page URL’s remain the same or old URL’s are directly mapped to the new site. Making sure that every page directly maps to its new version.

2) The existing link popularity: This is the number of pages which form one way links back to the old site or where the old site has been directly referenced by another website using a hyperlink. These include 3^rd party websites, directories, social media sites, articles, news and review websites etc. The Links form the basis of the sites popularity, and page rank. It’s essential to make sure that all links remain live and point to the same active page weather new or old.

Both of these areas are directly related to the old sites existing search engine presence and performance. If a strategy for moving and maintaining these links is not put in place before the DNS is transferred to the new site, it is possible that the new site will receive a massive drop in Page Rank, Trust Rank and listing saturation. It can take up to 6 months to recover from this type of situation and unfortunately there would be a percentage of links to the site which will be lost forever.

There are two main strategies which can be used to prevent this from happening and to maintain the sites online presence:

1) To use all existing URL strings, page titles and meta data in the formation of the new site and its pages. The content, page titles and meta data can be improved or adjusted but the relevance of each page will need to be maintained. With the creation of most new site upgrades, this is the most practical way forward and is more time efficient. As the site and its pages will appear the same to the search engines but just upgraded (i.e. the page URL is identical, but the page content and files sizes will be different.), page rank, link popularity and link saturation will be maintained and transferred to the new site. The search engines will notice a difference in page size, files sizes and file names etc. This should improve search engine interest, as they will believe that the content has been updated, as this is across the entire site it will increase robot visits and should lead to the site listings being updated. This should mean that any new pages will be picked up and indexed fairly rapidly.

2) All of the old websites pages are indexed and mapped to their counterpart pages on the new website using a 301 redirect (permanent redirect) and Mod-Rewrite. In most cases each page will have its associate page rank transferred to the new mapped page, but this is not always the case and it will take some time. Quite often search engine listings will initially drop in rank, as all of the site will appear new and then start to increase once the page rank is transferred. Some pages lose their page rank and popularity and it’s difficult to predict the reason behind this. Inbound links from 3^rd party websites will be mapped to the new pages of the website using this strategy. Associated page rank will be transferred to the page but this will not be immediate and may take some time, anything from 1-3 months, depending on the linking sites importance. If possible it would be worth contacting link partners and directory sites in order to change the associated URLS. This can be a difficult and time consuming process and as a result it is sometimes more time and cost efficient to continue the sites ongoing search marketing strategy using the new URLS.

In order to help promote the indexing of new pages it will be essential to create regular XML sitemaps (Monthly or when the site has new content added.) and to submit them directly to the search engines, giving them a complete guide of the entire sites page structure.

For more information on Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing please feel free to view the authors website www.Creative-SEO.co.uk

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Building a new website from scratch is difficult enough. By identifying the aims of the site and following our 5 simple tips in your planning process. Your site will be search engine friendly and ready to start driving traffic to your website.

1) Find out what keywords are important to your business

The starting point for any successful search engine optimisation campaign is to start right at the beginning. Look at your marketplace and find out what your customers are searching for and which search engines are important to your business. Google, Yahoo and MSN are all essential considerations. Use the search engines to firstly find your competitors, secondly to look at the keywords and search terms they are organically marketing, and finally to use this information to create a list of keywords and search terms which are appropriate to your business. Once you have assembled a list the next stage is to find out if your keywords will perform at a high level. Each search engine offers tools which will help you to find out how popular a search term is. Use this information to create a definitive list, removing, adding and editing to maximise your keywords potential traffic levels.

2) Build your site navigation to maximise your exposure

The next stage of the Search engine optimisation process is to create a website category tree using your keyword list. Simply categorise your keyword list into groups and to split the groups into pages. Each category and page should have approximately 4-6 keywords associated to it. Use the category tree to build the navigation of your website.

3) Target the content of your site to your market

This simple stage makes complete sense. Content is the most important part of any successful Search engine optimisation campaign. By targeting your content to include the appropriate page and category keywords and search terms, you are enabling each of the search engines to view your sites content, understand subject matter, and list and index the page correctly under important keywords and search terms. By following this process, you will be in control of where and how your site appears within Google, Yahoo and MSN. This will help to maximise your sites exposure.

4) Write descriptive, keyword rich, page titles and meta data

To help maximise page search engine marketing and indexing it is essential to make sure your page titles and descriptions contain your on page keywords and search terms and are descriptive, selling the page to the user. Don’t forget traditional marketing, good content with a clear sales message will increase your conversion rates.

5) Make every page unique

Finally the more pages you have the more opportunities you have to appear under more keywords and search terms. Keep adding new pages to your site, target the pages to new markets, and make every page unique. Don’t duplicate content.

The next stage to maximising your site organic, search engine optimisation conversion will be to commence a link building campaign. This will need to be a combination of social media marketing, one way link building, article submission, directory submission and social media bookmarking.

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