Minimalist Web Design Oxfordshire Tips

Far too many websites nowadays suffer from clutter. There is just far too much information on the website, whether it’s long text, too many images, confusing links or pop ups. Our Web Design Oxfordshire team recommend spending time and focusing on your websites purpose and ensuring your content is aiding and not hindering your websites purpose.

If your website is already cluttered it can be hard to see what the sites purpose is, therefore without looking at your site finish the following sentence “My site needs to ________”. If it’s an eCommerce website then it’s likely the main purpose is to sell products, if it’s a website that talks about your business its purpose is to raise awareness and get visitors to get in touch. Our Web Designers Oxford will be able to provide insight into what main purpose your site should have if you struggle to identify one.

With your sites purpose now clearly in mind you can take a look at your existing Web Design and see if this purpose is met, look at your sites inner pages and decide are these helping towards my sites purpose or just distracting for visitors. Many clients come to our Web Design team with dozens of pages on their site and dozens of links on their homepage, having too many links will confuse visitors as they will not know where to click, get confused and most likely click the back button. Update: Now with the Google Penguin update having too many site wide internal links can hinder SEO so only link to your most important pages. It’s not only good for design but also for SEO.

Having lots of pages that aren’t reinforcing your sites purpose will be a distraction. Our Web Design Oxford team recommend putting your most important links prominently in the header of your website so they’re easy for visitors to see and click. Less important pages should be removed from the homepage and placed in the footer or removed completely.

Don’t be scared to have some parts of white space on your website, just because there is space on your site doesn’t mean it has to be filled with something. If your sites main purpose is for visitors to fill in a form to get a free quote then don’t put lots of content around the form so it’s not easily visible, instead allow space to be around the form and use bold colours for the form so it stands out.

With minimalist design aligning becomes more important, if something is just one or two pixels out it will stand out more than one a busy, cluttered homepage. This is why it’s important to use professional designers, such as our Website Design Oxfordshire team.

It’s important to use hierarchy with minimalist web design, use bolder, larger copy for important headlines and for less important copy make it smaller. People skim read websites so ensure your main points are easy to read, long chunks of text are off putting.

Some Web Design  agencies can take minimalistic web design too far and sacrifice the sites usability by putting minimalist buttons and navigation. This shouldn’t be the case though, buttons should be clear to visitors, ensure from every subpage there is an obvious link to return home, do not disable the back button and highlight to the visitor which page they’re on by using colours.

If you’re looking for a professionally designed, minimalistic website contact our Web Design Oxfordshire team, we provide a free consultation and quote. Click here to receive your free consultation.

Graphic Design Oxford Tips For Banner Stands

A well designed banner stand can have a great effect for businesses that are exhibiting at exhibitions and networking events. Our Graphic Design Oxford team have come up with some top tips to ensure that your banner stands out from the crowd, drives interest to your stand and leads to more enquiries and customers.

The first step to creating a great banner stand is identifying the key points you wish to communicate to passers-by at exhibitions, which points about your business/product are going to stand out to walkers by and encourage them to visit your stand. It may be you have just one key point you wish to communicate or several points. At our Design Agency Oxford we will sit down and ensure we identify the key points that are to be focused on for your banner stand.

After you know the key points you wish to communicate it is then time to sit down with a member of our Graphic Design Oxford team and talk about what colours you wish to use, images and font type. It may be you already have clear branding and so your font and colours are sorted, if so then it’s just a matter of selecting images and positioning the content in a way which makes your banner stand out.

All of our banner stand packages include 3 x designs, this allows you to choose which you think works best and then provide any amends you may have. For each project you will have a specially assigned member of our Graphic Design team who you can contact regarding design amends. Some of the best banner stands are quite simple; you don’t want to cram lots of information onto the stand, instead as mentioned before one clear message will work better than trying to tell people every detail about your business because people won’t spend time reading large chunks of text.

If you’re exhibition stand area is large you may require more than one banner stand. Our Design Agency Oxford often get asked to design 2-3 banner stands, each banner stand will talk about a different area of the business so passers-by can easily identify your stand and having more than one banner stand increases the likelihood passers-by will notice your stand.

A top tip is to have your business logo at the top, if your company is already known in your industry people at the exhibit can see your logo from further away if it’s placed at the top. Contact details should be towards the bottom, this is because it’s not likely people will be able to read them from far away so once they get near your banner stand they can then read them, rather than having your contact details in the way of your logo at the top of the stand.

After you are happy with the designs it’s then time to have them printed. Our Graphic Design Oxford team work closely with printing companies in Oxfordshire; we will recommend a printing package to suit you. We recommend to not always select the cheapest, this is because some prints can turn out blurry if they’re not high resolution.

Also cheap printing packages may not laminate your banner or make it scratch proof; this means if you catch your banner it can easily tear. The plus point of paying extra for a high quality banner is that it can be used at lots of exhibitions, so in the long run you pay less because you can pay for it to be printed only one rather than paying for multiple cheap prints which will add up!

If you’re interested in having a professionally design banner stand for your business get in touch with a member of our Graphic Design Oxford team. Visit our Graphic Design page for more information on our free consultation.

New Domain SEO Oxford Tips

When you first purchase a domain and register it with Google and other search engines they have no data to gage the authority of your website. There are factors that will help determine the topic of your website that search engines pick up on search as web content, title etc. SEO Oxford recommend putting as much content on your site as possible before submitting it to Google, ensure your web copy is to a high standard, you sites loading time is good, web images are of a high quality and you have no broken links on your website.

Before our SEO team even think about a backlinking campaign there are certain on page SEO factors that need to be addressed. The first is the domain, it’s recommended to have a domain that relates to the keywords you’re likely to target, for example here at Marketing Oxford we have the domain MarketingOxford.com this domain relates to our business and the keyword we target.

It’s also important that your websites navigation system is simple; a user should be able to reach any page within clicks. Having to click 4 plus links to reach a certain web page isn’t user friendly and Google and other search engines pick up on this. After you have your web copy make sure it’s optimised, our Oxford SEO team use SEO WordPress plugins to ensure the keywords appear on every web pages header, title and description. If this information is missing when you submit your site to Google it can hinder your rankings at first.

Doing thorough research is vital for success with the search engines. Fail to do it right and you’re likely to either target a keywords that’s far too competitive and thus within your budget our SEO Oxford team are not likely to be able to rank you on the first page, or you will target a keyword with low or 0 monthly searches meaning even if you rank number 1 for a term it will not result in lots of visitors for your site.

For every Oxford SEO project, our team will provide a free keyword research and analysis report. This enabled you to sit down with our team and look at your budget, keywords relating to your business, search volume and from there pick the keywords that will be targeted.

For local business keywords, it’s not necessary that your keywords have 50,000+ searches a month, a keyword that has 300 searches will result in 5-10 very targeted visitors each day, this can result in 1 lead or client each day which will be very beneficial for your business.

After your website has been optimised for search engines it’s then time to start a backlinking project. It’s very important to start with high quality links from sites the search engines trust. Our SEO Oxford team start off posting to high quality sites such as HubPages, Squidoo, Blogger, YouTube and more. If right from the outset your site has poor quality links it won’t give your site a good impression with the search engines. After a couple of months though it’s then time to increase the number of backlinks to a site and the number of domains that point towards your site. Our SEO packages include different levels of backlinking.

Contact a member of our team today to discuss your SEO project. View our SEO Packages.

5 Reasons Small Businesses Don’t Trust SEO Oxford Services

Nowadays small businesses need online marketing such as SEO, Web Design, PPC and Social Media, more so than larger corporate companies who can afford to test their multi million pound budgets on various forms of marketing.

Small business owners who have been around for many years are often reluctant to move to online marketing services such as SEO Oxford. Marketing used to be simpler before the internet, local businesses would take an ad in the yellow pages and other local directories, then invest in some local paper and radio ads to raise awareness and that would ensure they received customers. Now though because some business owners don’t understand online marketing Oxford services they are reluctant to use them or hire a Marketing Agency.

The internet is ever growing and changing and the way in which you market online can change. However the SEO processes have always been the same, build and optimise a site for specific keywords and then do effective backlink building to rank a website highly on Google. Last year saw the first major change in the history of Google when it comes to SEO but in truth these changes mainly affected spam sites and not local business sites. Update: In April 2012 there was a Google Penguin update targeted to remove web spam from the internet. Read more from our blog posts.

ROI can be difficult when it comes to online marketing, however our Oxford SEO team will be able to determine depending on which SEO Package you choose were you’re likely to rank and the number of increased visitors to your site that will lead to. Then it’s best to play conservative and base ROI on a 1% conversion rate from your website, however in some niches the conversion rate can in fact be a lot higher.

For some business owners that have read up on SEO they are worried about being on Google’s blacklist. Our SEO Oxford team have never and  never will be on Google’s blacklist, the reason is simple, we optimise websites the way Google suggests. The websites who are on Google’s blacklist use spam and black hat SEO techniques and are deservedly banned from Google and other search engines.

Some businesses just don’t believe that SEO works, the main reason they believe this is because they have never ranked highly on Google before and don’t believe it’s as easy as putting your website in front of targeted visitors which results in leads/clients. However the fact is that’s exactly how SEO works. Our SEO Oxford team will research and analyse the exact terms your clients are entering into search engines to find your business or products.

From there we can analyse the competition for those keywords and determine which SEO Package will suit you. If you rank on the first page of Google for a keyword that’s directly related to your business/product every day potential clients will be finding out more about your business. Your website if designed correctly should easily provide the visitor with the key information about your business and lead a visitor to get in touch or purchase.

If you’re looking for SEO Oxford services from an Oxford Marketing agency with a proven track record in SEO contact a member of our team today. We provide a free consultation and keyword research for everybody; this allows you to better understand the keywords you should target with your SEO Oxfordshire project. Receive our FREE SEO Consultation.

Top SEO Oxford Myths

There a lots of SEO techniques out there nowadays, mainly down to the reason Google and other search engines look at over 200 factors when deciding where to rank a website. This is probably the reason there are quite a lot of SEO Oxford myths nowadays, from people claiming to be SEO experts who give away free ‘tips’ to people looking for advice on SEO.

One myth is that the higher keyword density of your website the higher it will rank in the search engines. This is of course not true because if it were a website with 100% keyword density would rank at the top, meaning the page would consist of “keyword”, “keyword” over and over again and provide no actual information to the visitor. Update: Google Penguin is now penalizing websites who over optimise keywords, using over 50% anchor text and cramming pages with keywords. Stick to 1-2% keyword density for effective SEO.

Before Google Panda a keyword density of 3-5% was recommended, now though it’s around 1-2%. A tip is to always target more than one keyword so you can target 3-5 with your copy and SEO Oxford project.

Another misconception is that by including your keywords in your meta tags you’ll rank very highly in the search engines, this at one point was true to an extent but spammers abused this and stuffed their meta tags with keywords. Now search engines don’t place too much emphasis, if any on whether your keywords are in your meta tags or not. Instead our SEO Oxfordshire team recommend including your keywords in your URL and header tags where possible.

Targeting just one keyword for a site means you’ll rank better is another myth. It used to be the case before Google Panda that keyword domains targeting just one keyword did rank OK, however now though Google wants to see a website with lots of quality content relating to one topic. It’s much better to target more than one keyword as you can get more traffic to your site and have more content on your site. Our Oxford SEO team write articles and blog posts relating to a sites topic/keywords, if you have less than 25 good quality pages on your site it will hinder your ranking.

Perhaps the most common myth is that SEO work needs to be done only once, some sites can stay ranking highly for a long time, sometimes years without any work done but it’s likely if you don’t update your site and continue to link to it from other sites your sites position will fall. Easy things like blogging weekly can really help to maintain your websites ranking, our SEO Oxfordshire team provide article and blog writing services for businesses that don’t have the time to do it themselves.

“I just need to focus on my homepage for SEO”. This is a totally incorrect statement; if you have the best quality homepage ever but all of your subpages are low in quality it will massively hinder your position in the search engines. Search engines now crawl your whole website and the Google Panda update has meant websites with thousands of low quality content pages have seen their web traffic massively cut. Every page on your website should be good quality, unique and serve a purpose. This is why SEO Oxford has a team of professional copywriters to ensure all of your sites page copy and blog posts are to a high standard.

If you’re looking for a reliable and driven SEO Oxford team get in touch. We would love to talk to you about your SEO requirements and will provide free keyword research. Our SEO Services include; keyword research, keyword analysis, on page optimisation and link building.

eCommerce Web Design Oxfordshire Tips

eCommerce has radically changed the way business happens on a daily basis and is what has lead to economists forecasting “the death of the high street!”. Every day millions of pounds worth of transactions occure online, if your business sells products you should take on board these eCommerce Web Design Oxford tips!

An eCommerce site should follow a normal Website Design Oxfordshire brief, which is to focus on a good and easy to use layout. If a visitor doesn’t find the site easy to use and find the product they are looking for they will leave your site which means you lose out on a sale.

Poorly designed websites also do not envoke trust with a visitor. Whether you buy a product in a store or online a person has to trust the merchant they are purchasing the product from. If they do not trust the merchant they will not buy. Using poor quality images of your products will also put off visitors, people need to see exactly what they are going to purchase, if the image is low quality it doesn’t give a good impression of a company.

In a store or supermarket the ways the products are laid out have been thought about thoroughly, the case has to be the same with an eCommerce Web Design Oxfordshire project. Thought has to go in about what products to promote on the homepage and in which order. If your business has a product that’s consistently popular with customers make sure this is displayed in a prominent position on your websites homepage.

In one to two clicks your visitor should find the product they are looking for, this is achieved by putting products into relevant categories. A technique our web design team use is to use menus and sub menus to easily categorise products. That way a visitor can click on a relevant product category and from there visit a sub menu of products within that category.

Ensuring your key information is visible to the visitor is key with eCommerce websites as it is with any website. Our team of Web Designers Oxford recommend putting a menu or links to key products on the middle left hand side as this is where a visitors eyes are automatically drawn to. Thus ensuring your key products/links are visible to the visitor right away.

As well as the design of a layout thought has to go into optimising it for google. Say for example your business sold garden spades, having a keyword targeted URL for example www.website.com/garden-spades will help to rank that sub page for keywords relating to garden spades. Then a user will search for garden spades and find a page on your website selling garden page, this ensures that they see the product they are looking to purchase within 2 clicks.

As with any transaction, other products should be promoted to the buyer. This can be done showing products that are similar to or normally bought with the product the visitor is about to purchase. Our Web Design Oxfordshire team use this technique and it’s used by Amazon, eBay and other major online stores.

To ensure your eCommerce website is a success talk to a member of our Website Design Team, we are the chosen agency for many businesses looking for Web Design in Oxford. We are happy to provide a free consultation and answer any questions. Request your free website consultation now.

SEO Oxford Explain Importance of Google Panda Update

Back in early 2011 Google announced a change to its algorithm that affected hundreds of thousands of websites rankings and turned the SEO world upside down. Our SEO Oxford team were keeping up to date with the Google Panda changes on a daily basis, analysing campaigns and tweaking websites and projects where necessary. The Google Panda was the first big algorithm change in the history of Google.

Was Google Panda needed? At Marketing Oxford, our SEO team think so. Before Panda it was too easy for poor quality, poorly designed and spam sites to rank highly in Google for large volume search keywords. These sites would often make money via selling advertising space, now selling advertising space isn’t a bad thing but it is when a site just has adverts and provides no benefits to the user. For example if you searched for “how to get rid of acne”, before the Panda update chances are you would visit a site like www.howtogetridofacne.com and that site would be full of acne cream adverts. The website would not actually answer or go near to answering the users query. The reason for SEO campaigns is for websites to appear highly in Google that provide what the user is searching for.

These websites whose sole purpose was to make money via advertising or selling affiliate programs were rankings for hundreds of thousands of keywords. Also prior to Panda it was very easy for sites subpages to rank for keywords without the main site having anything to do with that subject. For example, say there was a website www.dogtraining.com and that site had PR6, thousands of indexed pages and tens of thousands of backlinks. The site owner or an SEO agency could create a subpage such as www.dogtraining.com/how-to-beat-acne and more than likely rank on the first page of Google for ‘how to beat acne’. Even though the sites content, backlinks and information had nothing to do with acne because the Oxford SEO agency ensured the subpage had the keyword in the URL, some content on the subpage and was from an authority site it would out rank sites dedicated to providing info about beating acne.

The way in which sites were built before Panda took no consideration into user experience. Poor quality images, content and lots of ads were acceptable before. However, now Google’s algorithm can detect poorly designed sites from good quality sites, it rewards websites with good content, design and layout. SEO Oxford ensure their websites are built to provide a good user experience, using a simple to use layout, high quality images, content and importantly answer the visitors query.

Before Panda websites were rewarded for having thousands of pages, even if these subpages only had 50-100 words of content they could rank for keywords. Now though, our Search Engine Optimisation team recommends each subpage to have 500 words of unique content or at least 300. Big authority sites have lost rankings for hundreds to thousands of keywords because their subpages only have 50-100 words of poor content. At Marketing Oxford, our SEO Team use professional article writers to ensure the website copy is of a very high standard.

Our team is now using the Google Panda update to benefit our client’s websites, now there’s less focus on PR and back linking from Google but more emphasis on high quality websites with good quality content. Our SEO Services Oxford include looking at a websites bounce rate and making that a low as possible, this highlights to Google visitors of a site click elsewhere and so must be interested in the content. If you’re interested in our SEO Oxford services contact us, we provide a free consultation and keyword research.

SEO Oxford Explain the Importance of Thorough Keyword Research

Marketing Oxford provide free keyword research and competition analysis for every SEO Oxford project they take on. However, not every SEO Agency provide this service, this article will explain why this is not good enough and why keyword research is absolutely vital for SEO.

First let’s start with what happens if you or your SEO agency doesn’t do keyword research. You will have no idea of what keywords to target, the search volume for the keywords you may be targeting, the level of competition for each keyword and have nothing to measure results on. Not identifying keywords to target you know you’re likely to rank on the first page of Google for is like walking up a blind path.

You will be investing time and money into an Oxford SEO project without knowing if you’re likely to rank on the first page of Google and if you do how many visitors per month that will bring to your website. This is exactly why Marketing Oxford provides keyword research and analysis for every SEO project!

Keyword research isn’t actually that difficult, there is a great free tool you can use which is the Google Keyword Tool. You simply select your country and enter the keyword and then Google will tell you the average searches per month for that keyword. Important tip: Select exact phrase match, not broad or phrase match for the most accurate results! Our SEO Oxford team will spend time looking at the keywords you have in mind and similar, relevant keywords that can also be targeted.

After you or our SEO agency has found keywords that relate to your business and have a good search volume it’s then time to analyse the current competition for those keywords, Marketing Oxford use an analytical tool called Market Samurai, this is a paid tool but is vital for the SEO work they carry out! Using Market Samurai you can enter a keyword and analyse the SEO competition for that, looking at your competitors page rank, backlinks, on page optimisation and more! This allows us to be able to predict how much SEO work will need to go into ensuring our client’s website ranks on the first page and if the client wishes top 3 results for that keyword. We can pick an SEO Oxfordshire package that suits our client’s budget and will ensure their site ranks highly.

With a clear list of keywords to target, time frame set in which to rank for the keywords it allows us and our client to have a clear set of goals in which to work towards. Our SEO Services Oxford includes fortnightly ranking and link reports detailing the work we’ve done and the progress so far. By keeping in touch with our client throughout the SEO contract it assures the client that the SEO project is going as planned.

Knowing the importance of keyword research and analysis it amazes Marketing Oxford that not every SEO Oxford Agency provides this for free. However, we’re proud to do so, if you’re looking to improve your websites rankings on Google and hire a reliable SEO Agency based in Oxfordshire please get in touch. We provide a free consultation in which we can discuss your targets and go through the keywords and competition.

Why Use WordPress For Web Design Oxfordshire Projects

Marketing Oxford use WordPress for nearly every Web Design Oxfordshire project they do. WordPress is a content management system (CMS). A common misconception is that WordPress is only used for blogs, however it can be used for corporate websites, ecommerce websites and much, much more! This is because WordPress is highly customizable, allowing our Website Design Oxfordshire team to create beautfiul, custom designed websites or to use a theme as a basis for a website and tailor it accordingly to promote their clients business.

A major advantage of using WordPress for websites is that clients can easily update simple things such as; web copy, contact details and more. This saves business owners having to pay for a Web Design agency to update small things on their website. Another user benefit of WordPress is if you want to change your header for example, with HTML websites you would have to update every web page with the new header which is very time consuming. However, with WordPress you can easily update the header and apply that to each web page.

WordPress is also very good for SEO. For SEO Oxford projects Marketing Oxford install plugins that easily allow keywords and descriptive text to be entered for every post and page. This allows keywords to be entered on each page which emphasises to Google what your sites content is about. There are also plugins that allow XML sitemaps to be generated which can be submitted to Google Webmaster Tools. This is essential for ensuring that Google knows about all of your websites pages and crawls them. Having lots of web pages with relevant content gives more credit to your website.

If you ever feel like changing your Website design you can easily change the theme of your website so a different styled website. Your content such as images, articles and posts will remain on the site. Then our Web Designers Oxford can go about making sure your old content fits within the new theme, this may take some work but a lot less than a total website redesign.

Perhaps the best thing about WordPress is the thousands of plugins you can install or Web Designers can install for you. For example if you want to display a Google map of your businesses location on your website you can do this within 2 minutes by downloading a plugin that does exactly that. You can add plugins that allow you to accept payments on your website, plugins that allow your site to have an online booking system and plugins that create easy to use contact forms. No matter what feature you require on your website it’s likely there’s a plugin for it that’s either free or available at a small cost.

Already it’s been mentioned that most people think of WordPress as a blogging system. Even though it’s not just for that this aspect is a great benefit. If you have a website that’s been custom designed you can still easily install a blog onto that site. Uploading articles, images, videos etc to blog posts takes 2 minutes and posting a blog post is very easy. Having lots of blog posts is good for SEO. At Marketing Oxford our Web Design Oxfordshire team will teach you how to add new blog posts and manage your blog.

Overall then WordPress has many advantages over having an HTML website. If you would like a free web design quote please contact us or visit our prices page. Click here to view our web design portfolio and get in touch!

Avoid Black Hat SEO Oxford Techniques

If you’re new to SEO you might not have heard about Black hat and White hat SEO techniques before. However, if you’re looking to hire an SEO Oxford agency it’s important you do because you need to ensure the SEO Agency you hire use solely white hat SEO techniques.

White hat SEO techniques are ways to optimise your website which are approved by search engines and are ethical. These techniques include creating unique content and putting that on relevant websites which link back to your website. Most white hat SEO techniques are done manually, such as creating unique content and doing manual link building, there are some cases where software can help with the submission process by submitting one article to more than one article directory but these are not black hat techniques.

Black hat SEO techniques are where you try and trick or manipulate the search engines. These techniques can work for a short while but in the end the search engines such as Google will penalize your site, they constantly update their system every day and invest millions to ensure black hat SEO techniques do not aid websites rankings. This is why it’s important your SEO Oxford Company do not do any of the following black hat techniques.

Hidden text on a website is a technique your Oxford SEO company should not use. This technique often includes putting text the same colour as the background so it’s not visible to the human eye and stuffing keywords on a website. With the new Google Panda update it’s also not often to have too high a keyword density. Instead your website copy and content should be unique and of good quality. Marketing Oxford use professional copywriters to do their clients web copy.

Paid links are another SEO technique to avoid. Link farms are where you purchase links to your website. These do not work as Google’s robots constantly search for link farms and shut them down and penalize the sites who paid for links. If you pay for SEO Services Oxford you should be receiving links that aren’t paid for. Instead you create accounts at relevant blogs, forums etc and create unique content with a link back to your website. This is how we go about creating links.

Having pages with only or predominantly adverts is not recommended. The Google Panda update is all about increasing the visitor’s user experience. Surveys have shown that people visiting websites made up predominantly of adverts do not trust the website and click away. You do not want to pay for SEO Oxford services and rank for a high traffic keyword to then be penalized for having too many adverts and having your websites position hindered.

If you really want to succeed in ranking on the first page of Google, extensive keyword research and competitor analysis is required, this is why Marketing Oxford provide this for free with every SEO project. From the outset the website can be designed and built to target the keywords and all content and links created will relate to the keywords.

Having a well-designed website with good on page optimisation, good content and good quality back links is what leads to first page Google rankings and leads to a website ranking on the first page for a long while, rather than using black hat techniques and having short lived rankings on Google. If you’re looking for SEO Services in Oxford contact a member of our SEO team.