Website Advice

We provide website advice for individual sites through our help desk and two common themes emerge. Around 60% of questions are at least partly site specific, while the other 40% relate to website development in general. These are very welcome and ideally, need a more widely available response. The Surrey Web Support section has been created to offer core advice, with articles written by professional developers, covering areas common to many websites. Early days yet and the first few articles target broad subjects, with an emphasis on search engine indexing, a theme of many help desk enquiries. Full articles to date are listed in the side column, we also added a couple of mini website help articles here, in response to several similar questions.

A frequent query is how to get a new website in Google's index. There is a submit URL facility, although this is often not needed, or successful by itself. Google's indexing ability and algorithm have developed over the years but they still rely a fair amount on links from other websites. Whilst all such links should ideally be freely given editorial recommendations, helping the process along is useful in the initial stages. Avoid easy links, such as directories, or forums if possible, try to find sites that are relevant and of good quality. How about suppliers, or others you contract with, perhaps local community sites. Avoid the temptation to create an enormous number of poor quality links, a couple in the right places will help more. You can also submit a .xml sitemap which will give search engine robots a guide to your website. Take a little time to ensure both links and a sitemap are in place and not being indexed would be very unusual.

A business owner who returned from Spain contacted us recently. He wished to continue his website based business in the UK but despite much effort, was seeing little success in Google UK, with a .com website still hosted in Spain. Search engines take a logical view on geographical location, a non specific domain, on a Spanish server, will find life difficult in UK searches. They see the physical location of a website as a highly relevant factor, we would not even recommend hosting a .co.uk site overseas, a country specific domain is helpful but better to tie the two together. Google does now offer the opportunity to set geographical location in Webmaster Tools, although evidence to date suggests this is not as effective as a home location, neither is the facility available to country specific domains. The small saving from using overseas hosting is generally a false economy, if you target UK search, use a host in the UK.

We hope the notes above helped, by all means have a look through the longer articles listed at the top of this page. If you have specific questions regarding your website, by all means contact website support, all contact is confidential and will be handled by an experienced developer.

We hope you enjoy the articles below, which are intended to be of value in offering website help on a wider basis:

• Search Friendly HTML
• Good Website Coding
• Creating Web Content
• Search Engine Tools
• Link Building Ideas

The best judges of value are readers. If you have comments on our help articles, or wish to suggest subjects you feel should be covered, we would be pleased to hear from you.

Over time, the articles in this section should build on the depth of advice offered. We equally appreciate that your concerns could extend beyond one or two aspects of your website.

Should you feel that a more in depth look at your site would help, take a look at our website report options and see if these may help. Outline reports are free and concentrate on suggestions to positively develop your website.