We have just launched the all-new instrument comparison website Instrumania.

Originally the website focused on the larger music instrument retailers but now it has been re-developed and re-launched to fit in with both small and large musical instrument retailers. The focus of the website is to provide it's users with great deals and compare the prices of musical instruments from a wide range of UK based retailers.

Whilst the focus of the site is musical instrument comparison, it also contains useful instrument reviews and music industry news. If you are looking to purchase a musical instrument then take a look at Instrumania.

When asking the question, ‘how large a part does domain age play in website SEO?’ the answer you will receive, irrespective of who you ask, will be ambiguous at best. Even Matt Cutts, the most outspoken member of Google’s Search Quality team, remains unusually vague when put on the spot. When asked that very question just recently, Matt replied: “My short answer is not to worry about that very much, not very much at all in fact.”

Most people know that when it comes to performing website SEO, domain age does have an effect, and as far as we are concerned there are two distinct reasons why:

• Older domain names are usually associated with better known, more established sites. On the whole, sites with older domain names are regarded as more relevant and trusted resources, thus boosting the website SEO.
• Spammers are not usually interested in developing the website SEO of a site for a period of over three or four years as traditionally they quickly move onto different projects. For this reason, new domain names are more associated with spam.

It’s safe to say that most website SEO specialists will agree that domain age does have some bearing on search engine rankings; it is just the extent that they find impossible to agree on.

To overplay the affect of domain age on your website SEO strategy is, in the opinion of our SEO team here at Designer Websites, probably a mistake. It is important to acknowledge it as a factor, but not to consider it to be in anyway critical to your website SEO strategy, and below, in our view, are the reasons why:

• Domains can sometimes lie dormant for years
• Established and well known companies are acquiring new domain names all the time, often using a 301 redirect from a more established domain
• Just because a domain is old it does not mean it has been subject to whitehat website SEO techniques.

Some companies will only look at buying old domains due to the importance they place on domain age. However, this is far from a fool-proof approach, as you cannot always cater for the website SEO strategy of previous owners. There may well be some goblins in the system that pose real problems for the success of your website SEO campaign.  

To conclude, we all know how hard it can be during the first six months of any website SEO campaign when working on a new domain, however, stick with it and build your link profile naturally and the results will come. Have a little faith and don’t panic!

With a question that has no definitive answer, experience counts for a lot. This is one reason why the website SEO team here at Designer Websites are the first port of call for so many companies looking to further their online presence.

Hopefully we’ve all seen social sharing buttons before; to be frank you’d have done well to miss them. But just why are they becoming so prevalent and how do they contribute to your website SEO?

Some of the most popular social share buttons are those for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, email and ShareThis. These social buttons can play an important part in the promotion of content you add to your site. The addition of social share buttons essentially allows the visitors to your site to do a lot of the website SEO work for you. However, although there seems to be no downside to such a strategy, recent research shows that about half of the largest 10,000 sites do not display any kind of social sharing link or buttons at all. However, doesn’t this oversight mean such websites are missing out on valuable website SEO opportunities, given that:

•    Social signals are becoming increasingly important in search engine algorithms

Over the past few years the search engines have openly admitted that social signals are becoming increasingly influential factors in rankings. This means that the more time an article or blog is shared using a social button, the greater the impact on your website SEO. By neglecting to include social share buttons on your site, your website SEO will not receive an extra push which might make all the difference.

•    You’re not reaching as wide an audience as you might

The internet is an extremely crowded resource, so anything you can add to your website which increases the size of your slice of the pie should be seriously considered. Social share buttons are an excellent method of increasing your exposure in circles outside of your existing network of visitors. This helps to attract fresh traffic to your website creating new opportunities.

•    User friendly content is more likely to be read

One of the main benefits of social share buttons is the fact that users do not have to leave your site to post your content. With the short attention spans of today’s internet user, keeping them on your site is tricky enough anyway without giving them a good reason to leave; by making your website as user friendly as possible, visitors will stay with you for longer, increasing the chances of a conversion.

If you’re interested in making the most of your website SEO, the team here at Designer Websites have the experience and know-how to help your website climb towards the top of the search engine rankings. For further information call our dedicated website SEO team on 0845 272 6813.

One crucial factor in successful website optimisation is the quality of the code itself. Many small businesses that employ website developers judge the site on appearance, without giving a minutes thought to how things look behind the scenes. The fact of the matter is, without clean code your search engine rankings are likely to suffer.

It is often the case that smaller companies, eager to save money wherever they can, will opt for a cheaper website from a team of website developers who do not possess the required technical ability, and over compensate with a lot of unnecessary code.

Many of the sites website developers design for start-up companies have been made fool proof so they can be easily administered by business owners who are not particularly internet savvy. However, this fool proofing will often take the form of a large amount of unnecessary code, damaging the potential rankings of the new site, even if all other website optimisation factors are accounted for.

The importance of clean code becomes clear when considering the importance of page load times on search engine rankings. Google recently announced that page load times are going to become a bigger factor in how they decide as website’s rankings, and have even provided some tools in Webmaster tools so that site owners can measure their page load times and take steps to improve them. Although, it is important to consider, many of the do-it-yourself- website platforms which are becoming quite popular at the moment will offer you little or no control over these factors.

The best way to ensure a website which benefits from clean code is to hire the services of an experienced and technically aware team of website developers, who can ensure your site not only looks attractive to visitors, it is also neat and tidy behind the scenes. This will go a long way to ensuring the visibility of your website on the search engines.

If you are looking for a website which not only looks good, but which is also not held back by unnecessary code, contact Designer Websites. Our expert team of website developers have many years of experience producing ecommerce sites and websites for small businesses. Give us a call today! 

We have recently finished a redesign for the TimberTech website. We have worked with TimberTech for a number of years and they recently asked us to design a totally new look for their composite decking website, which we of course were happy to do.

When we completed the design concepts for the new website TimberTech were absolutely delighted with our proposed layout/design. Based on these new concepts we developed a new, more modern, more responsive website, which also contains some clever tracking functionality and a very good level of search engine optimisation.

Take a look at TimberTech - Composite Decking Website and see what you think.