We have just designed and developed a new website for South Wales UPVC Ltd. The company based in Taffs Well, South Wales had commissioned us to create a new optimised website for their upvc windows and doors business. The website, as you would guess, contains lots of information on upvc windows and doors, as well as information about the company themselves. The company supply and fit a wide range of upvc products, including windows, doors, conservatories, orangeries, roofline products and commercial fittings.

During the development of this website some of us at Designer Websites used South Wales UPVC to supply and fit windows and doors on our homes, and I must say the cost was MUCH lower than any other company we spoke to and the jobs themselves were done quickly and easily, with no fuss and no mess. I would highly recommend these guys for windows and doors, not only because they are a client but because the jobs they completed for us were very professional and outstanding quality.

Anyway take a look at the website and see what they do.. UPVC Windows and Doors Company

We developed the computer recruiter website for the Cardiff based specialist recruitment agency sometime ago now, however it was felt recently that it would benefit from a minor facelift, so our website designers created a new image for the site and plugged that into the existing bespoke website and CMS. The whole thing took a couple of days to complete, from design through to development. The result is a more modern and crisp website, aimed entirely at the computer jobs market in the Cardiff and South Wales area.

We think the site looks good and is appropriately targeted at IT professionals, but more importantly our client is very happy with the result.

Take a peek and see what you think, the website is.. IT Jobs Website

We developed a pair of pre-designed websites for The Smile Dentist and Perfect Lips. The websites themselves we designed by a third party and we were then approached to develop the designs into optimised websites. The Smile Dentists site was completed first and is aimed at cosmetic surgery for individuals who want the perfect smile, that website is located here.. The Perfect Smile

The second site was the Perfect Lips site and this site is aimed at ladies who want the perfect lips or who require other botox procedures, the website is here.. Perfect Lips

So if you want the perfect smile AND the perfect lips, well look no further!

Ask any SEO professional and they will tell you JavaScript can be a double edged sword when it comes to website development, specifically in terms of design over SEO. Why? Well let’s take a look.

First things first, search engines don’t crawl JavaScript, so any keywords present within the script will be ignored, which is not good for SEO. You might think that this is not so important but actually one of the most important aspects of a website is the navigation and many websites utilise JavaScript for the menu or primary navigation. Many sites appear to use comments within JavaScript in an attempt to alleviate this problem; however the search engine robots will ignore any comments within script tags, so this will not help.

Another problem which arises with the use of JavaScript in website design is the search engines may see it as an attempt to mislead their bots because this has been a black hat method used by some poor SEO companies to display different information to bots than that which is displayed to the website visitors.

These issues are especially prevalent in navigational links where unscrupulous coders will hide redirects to different URL’s through JavaScript coding. This can actually result in search engines not indexing an entire section of your site as they ignore your top level navigation. Best practise would be to remove JavaScript from navigational links altogether and rely on HTML links instead.

If you’re website design does rely on drop down menus or other dynamic navigation then our advice would be to scrap it and adopt the use of CSS instead, you can get fantastic effects and probably the same appearance by using CSS.

Loading time is another issue affected by JavaScript. The overuse of JavaScript can slow down your website’s load time which not only affects the visitor experience, but also has an impact on your SEO. Load time is just one of many factors search engines use to rank your website.

How can JavaScript be used positively in Website Design?

JavaScript is best used to provide quick user interaction and help make the website more attractive to the end user, so using it to draw attention to call-to-action boxes, speeding up form submission and generally improving the visitor experience will help the website seem less static and more engaging for the user. This can be done without compromising the SEO by ensuring that the JavaScript is used on non-structural and navigational sections of the website.

So if you are going to use JavaScript, here are some tips to reduce the SEO negatives:

• Stick to HTML links where possible
• Do not use JavaScript for menus or indeed any primary navigational elements
• If using JavaScript with images or video make sure you use <alt> and <noscript> tags to offer a text alternative which is placed in the HTML markup
• Move your JavaScript to an external .JS file
• Place the actual script at the bottom of the page code i.e. just before the end body tag

If you are worried about making such changes to your website yourself then it’s probably time to call on the services of dedicated website developers.  Designer Websites provide high quality search engine optimised websites for businesses. Contact us today to discuss your website needs.

It’s difficult enough to say, let alone understand - but getting your head around canonical tags in SEO is a must if you want your website to achieve the results you're looking for. Today we're going to take a look at what canonical tags are and why you should care about them.

So, what are Canonical Tags? 

In SEO and website design terms, Canonicalization means you have more than one URL address on the same page. For instance:

designer-websites.co.uk
www.designer-websites.co.uk
www.design-websites.co.uk/home

All three of these URLs will be pointing to your homepage, but the search engines will view these as different pages, indexing each page and allowing them to compete against one another. What’s the issue you might say, well the problem is that this generates duplicate content in the Google search engine results (SERP’s), which Google heavily penalises. This, in turn, means that your pages will likely be pulled from the search engine results, or will be pushed back in the SERP’s, leaving your site out in the cold.

This is where the canonical tag becomes important. Canonical tags are a piece of code you add on certain pages of your website to tell search engines which page is the prefered content. So, in this circumstance, you should choose one of these URLs to add a rel=canonical tag and add appropriate 301 redirects to the other pages. We recommend using both of these methods. 

Why is duplicate content bad for SEO?

Search engines aim to provide the most relevant content to a search query, so when they come across two pages which are exactly the same they are forced to choose one over the other, as displaying both would represent a flaw in their service. Google typically ignores the duplicate content to avoid the SERPs looking clutted with the same content on similar URLs. Sometimes choosing one is not realistic or possible and so a penalty is placed on the website or page in question. This is obviously an issue for SEO as duplicate content will inevitably lead to some of your pages disappearing from the index.

Make sure you define your canonical URL

The canonical tag (rel=canonical) allows you to dictate which URL the search engines should consider the ‘master copy’, the one you wish all SEO benefits to revert to. This canonical tag is placed in the HTML header text similar to the meta description and meta keywords tags:

<meta name="description" content="Site Description/>
<meta name="keywords" content="Site Keywords" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.designer-websites.co.uk/" />

It is important to understand that this simply informs the search engine bots of your preference, but it does not actually redirect the content, thus a human will be able to see the content via the canonical URLs if you do not force a redirect. This can sometimes lead to links being developed to URLs that you do not want to be indexed.

What is a 301 redirect?

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, allowing you to move one URL to another automatically. So, for example, if you try going to http://designer-websites.co.uk it will automatically redirect you to the proper url which is http://www.designer-websites.co.uk.

A 301 redirect should be done from the webserver and not in code. Setting up a redirect is relatively easy but often done incorrectly.  It is imperative that the ‘status code’ sent to the search engine bots upon redirection is a 301, not a 302 or any other code. 

Can I still just use a 301 redirect?

Yes, you can. In fact, the safest way to deal with the canonical issue is to have appropriate 301 redirects in place for your website.

However, the reason we recommend having both is because some search engine bots will actually look for the canonical tag, so having it there deals with the issue quickly and in the exact way the bots are looking for. If a search engine does not look for the canonical tag then at least you have the redirect to fall back on. Most importantly if you 301 redirect properly then no one will be able to see your content under any other URL than the one you choose.

It's important to understand that there are many search engines on the Internet and not all are as sophisticated as Google, so it is safe to assume that not all search engines are sophisticated enough to work with canonical tag, so by not 301 redirecting your URLs properly you run the risk of other search engines issuing duplicate content penalties and the like.

This and many other website optimisation factors are essential for successful websites. At Designer Websites, we will ensure your new website is properly 301 redirected and contains the appropriate canonical tags, as well as dealing with many other technical SEO factors. For examples of our work just click here.