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.

We have recently launched a new website for the leading training company Olive Strachan. Olive Strachan are a global training company with headquarters in Manchester; they have a wealth of experience in management training, leadership training, customer services training and other similar business centric disciplines.

We first worked with Olive Strachan back in 2006 when we developed a site called Training Manchester (Training Manchester)for them. This site is still useful if a little dated, but now Olive Strachan wanted something a little more up to date and more in tune with their current business model, particularly as it has changed over the past 5 years. We designed a new website for them and it can be found at Olive Strachan.

We have just launched a new website for Inklusive who are a specialist ink cartridge replacement company. If you are looking for a ink cartridge replacement then we thoroughly recommend taking a look at this website.