Robin and Marion Jones, Croque-en-Bouche, Underdown - Grooms Cottage, Gloucester
Road, Ledbury, Herefordshire HR8 2JE. UK
t. +44 (0)1531 636400 f. +44 (0) 870 7066282 mail@croque.co.uk Site
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I rent my dedicated webspace from NamesCo. The company has a very good reputation,
and also supplies quality broadband.
If you are interested, use this link. Need advice?
Ask me. I’ll get an affilliate fee, and will credit your account with me, to the
value of £20 plus VAT. Domain names are best renewed through me, as I get 50% discount.
I only charge you the cost price to me for domain registration and renewal anyway.
Face it! 80% of your web traffic will come via the search engines. Google is the
major player, and with Yahoo, MSN, and Excite, cover 95% of searches. The other 1000’s
of engines don’t figure. Believe me.
Since it’s a search engine game, from the start your site should be constructed to
be as attractive as possible. A perfect SE homepage, would be all text (about 300
words) plus a small graphic, and boring text links. Note some text on sites - the
fancier stuff - is actually a graphic. Check. Put the mouse over this text. A vertical
line shows it is ‘proper text’. Put it over the logo text at the top and you’ll see
it’s a graphic. See a graphic-based homepage done for this site. It was mostly invisible
to Google, and only saved by the text at the bottom. Style costs.
Using our site as an example, say ‘restaurant’ and website’ are some of my chosen
popular SE words. I should put those keywords in the text as much as possible. Within
reason - do not over-stuff!
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a black art. A bit like Michelin; no one actually
knows what it takes to get stars, but everyone has a theory.
SEO does attract scamsters, so beware! Generally don’t go there. The search engines
are also great at ‘moving the goal posts’, viz. Google sitemaps. Every time I revise
your site I submit special files to Google for indexing.

Remembering that ‘web site’ too should be in there as an alternative spelling. Also,
the page names, titles, headings, description, alt and title tags should basically
be full of ‘website, design, web site’. Not over-stuffed or the SE folk will smell
a rat.
The search engines run programs called ‘spiders’ who race from link to link, from
site to site, around the net looking and checking. They do like you better if other
sites - preferably big quality sites - link to yours. But that takes considerable
time - talk to people you do business with, tourist boards, etc. And an automatic
delay of about six months for SE listing, seems built in. That also, helps them sell
you ‘sponsored links’ which Google calls ‘Adwords’. You set a max. amount you pay
and if you don’t get outbid, will appear either at the side of page one results,
or best, at the top. When a punter clicks your link you pay. Simple, and very cost
effective. I reckon it is essential! Usually about £40 to set up.