To keep everyone up to date with how things are progressing at the new office, we have created a gallery of images to help show where we are at the moment. We will keep updating our gallery as the build continues.

We recently mentioned that we are going to be moving to our new office location in Sandside so we thought that we would take the opportunity to give a progress report on how things are shaping up.

When we first got our hands on the building it was little more than an empty shell but this did give us the scope to make it exactly how we wanted to be without any constraints from previous designs.

The first thing that was decided on was that a mezzanine floor should be factored in to the new design as this would better utilise the buildings height and provide a large open space for all the staff to sit and work together. This will be invaluable for collaborations on projects and allow information and knowledge to be shared much more easily.

Downstairs will provide a reception area, meeting room, office and staff area too. The offices will have a thoroughly modern feel to it that helps to reflect our professional work ethics. The meeting rooms give added space to entertain clients should they wish to visit the new office.

Work has commenced on the office and at the moment, much of the groundwork has been completed meaning that it should not be too long before the building is ready for us to begin the move. We will keep updating the news section in order to keep everyone up to speed with the progress. Here are a few images of how things are presently.

Web design and hosting company, BF Internet are soon to be moving to their brand new offices in Sandside.

Located only a mile away from the existing office in Milthorpe, these new offices at Shoreline Business Park not only provide more space for the expanding needs of the company but will also have a new, professional interior for the programming and design teams.

The interior of the new building is being designed from scratch and will provide better laid out office space as well as reception and meeting areas for clients if required.

Managing Director, Rob Holden commented;

“We have been at our current location in Milnthorpe now for many enjoyable years but the time has come for us to move somewhere that is going to allow us to grow further. The new premises at Sandside, will give us everything we need including a better working environment, while still being close to the main roads and motorway.”

The company was formed in 1996 and began designing and hosting websites for clients across the UK. Today, BF Internet boasts a large portfolio consisting of small, medium and large clients and can cope with a diverse range of needs.

Company Information

BF Internet is a UK web design company based in Milnthorpe, Cumbria.

For further information please get in touch via telephone or email.

Back in the early days of search engine optimisation it was more a case of everyone for themselves since search engine algorithms were nowhere near as complicated and sophisticated as they are today.  There were many tactics that were commonplace to help improve websites rankings that are now frowned upon by the search engines and SEO’s alike.

Like in any industry, there are always some people who want to try and cheat the system or fast track their website to the top of the rankings.  Short term they may achieve good results but eventually these techniques will always be found out by the major search engines and it is then that your site may start to suffer.  ‘Black Hat’ search engine optimisation as it is known should be avoided so let’s take a look at what to watch out for when considering online marketing.

Keyword stuffing

This was certainly one of the favourite techniques used by website optimisers in the early days of SEO. Stuffing lots of keywords into every page of a website was commonplace and often, the font would be the same colour of the background. This meant that unless you clicked over it with your mouse, it would be hidden from the user. The same thing could also be done behind the scences in the back end of the website where the META data, heading tags, etc could be filled with keywords.

These are still practised today with optimisers coming up with increasingly sophisticated ways of accomplishing them. This can make it difficult to spot these kinds of underhand methods except by someone who knows what they are looking for.

Gateway/Doorway pages

Put simply, these are pages that are not designed to be seen by the web user because they redirect very quickly to the main website. They are web pages that have been stuffed full of keywords that wouldn’t actually make any sense to the casual observer.  This excessive use of keywords is just one example of a practice known as spamming.  This is highly frowned upon by the major search engines as it is seen as trying to cheat the system.

Link Farming

This is where your website is submitted to large numbers of websites whose sole purpose is to list links to as many different sites as possible, whether they are relevant to your business or not.  This will not result in your website gaining any extra traffic and ultimately will likelyend up with your site being penalised.  The only real way to build good quality links to your website is through the writing and distribution of quality copy and submission to relevant directories.

These are just three examples as there are many other ways that ‘Black Hat’ optimisers can try to cut corners in order to achieve quick short term results to justify their existence and make themselves look good. It is very important to remember that online marketing should be seen as a long term project and not just a quick fix.

Ultimately, if you use an SEO company who are open and upfront about how they go about your online marketing and explain the associated processes that go with running a solid campaign then the chances are that they are not going to employ ‘Black Hat’ techniques. However, if you are promised the earth by a company but they are unwilling to discuss how they are going to go about it then perhaps you need to start asking them a few more questions.

What you need to be mindful of however is the fact that your website will have been crawled by search engine robots and its pages indexed accordingly. These pages will have a rank in the search engine results and could well be driving quality traffic and visitors to your site. Providing these visitors find what they are looking for then a conversion will be made and you will make money.

Moving these pages without planning ahead will likely result in one of two scenarios:

1. Your website may still show up in the search engine rankings but when viewed, return a 404 page not found error (because you have moved the page and it can no longer be found).
2. Your rankings for those pages may disappear completely from the search engines, which means potentially missing out on business.

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Although turbulence within the results is inevitable, to help cause minimal disruption to your website rankings, planning ahead can make all the difference. Here are our tips on what to do before moving that page…

301 Redirects

• Ensure that a 301 redirect is issued for any page/section that is going to be moved. This means that should a visitor arrive at the old page, they will be automatically taken to the new version.

Custom 404s

• If it is not possible to issue 301s for every page that has been moved then creating a custom 404 page that gives the visitor an option to find the correct page may be an alternative.

Inbound Links

• Other external websites may have placed links to pages that you are preparing to move. In these situations, it is best wherever possible to contact those websites and ask them to update their links accordingly.

Internal Links

• Similarly, any internal links within your site that point to pages being moved should also be updated to minimise the issuing of a 404 page. Creating an up to date sitemap may also help ensure that the newly organised pages are indexed correctly.

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If you are considering re-ordering the pages of your website why not get in touch. We can discuss what steps to take, how to take them and can even do the hard work for you. Give us a call on 015295 64580 and find out how we can help.

Many of you will already know (or at least have an idea) about what Search Engine Optimisation is but for those of you that are not sure, this section aims to outline exactly what it is.

So, what exactly is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? Well, essentially, it is the process of increasing the amount of quality traffic to your website by improving your organic rankings in the search engines and overall online presence. By organic rankings, we mean the natural listings as oppose to the sponsored listings that can be seen beside search engine results.

Anyone who has their own website wants it to be able to be found by friends, peers or in the case of a business, potential customers. When it comes to potential customers being able to find you on their favourite search engine, many of them will put more trust in the organic listings over the sponsored ones because quite simply, organic listings appear more trustworthy and relevant. This is largely because sponsored listings have to be paid for where the organic ones do not.

It is also a fact that the majority of people do not venture past the first few pages of the search engines results making it imperative to get the best rankings possible. This is where SEO will help. A website that has been correctly optimised is much more likely to rank significantly higher than one that has not.

How is this achieved? SEO can be a lengthy process and should never be seen as a quick fix. It can take over twelve months to see the full effects of any optimisation work and should always be seen as an ongoing process. Should you need results in the short term, get in touch to discuss Pay Per Click options.

It has also been suggested that of those Internet users, around 80% use search engines to find what they are looking for. This is why it is imperative to ensure that your website ranks well within them because not doing so could result in you missing a lot of traffic. To help you achieve better traffic, SEO will provide the answer.

There is no escaping the fact that we are experiencing a credit crunch presently and people are nervous about how much money they are spending on their marketing strategies.  It has been suggested by various sources that online marketing techniques such as SEO are the most cost effective methods of marketing available at the moment.

Top Rank conducted a study, where they asked around  400 businesses what methods of online marketing techniques they were looking to implement.  A whopping 36% of them said Search Engine Optimisation and another 33% said the use of blogs.

Speaking recently, David Teague, managing director of Prospects & Profits Business consultants commented that any business that did not have an online presence and could be found easily, would be at a distinct disadvantage. He added, “If your customers can’t find you within a minute on the internet, your business is going to languish on the sidelines, whilst your competitors gain the edge”.

It has also been predicted by PricewaterhouseCoopers that by 2013, a third of all advertising spending would be used online. The Government too, is set to encourage more Britons to get online and is spending £12 million to help achieve it.

This can be seen in the US as well, where in a survey by Reardon Smith Whittaker; it was shown that 9% said they were spending significantly more on online marketing in 2009. 23% stated that their spend was going to be somewhat higher.

When it comes to offering SEO services, we at Big Fish understand that no two customers are the same. This is why we offer a bespoke service that caters for each client individually. One of the very first things we do when we start working with a client on a search engine optimisation project is perform a head to toe site analysis. In fact, more often than not, we won’t actually even quote a price for SEO unless we’ve already done an analysis.

The reasons for that are three-fold. First, every website is different. Second, we have no idea what we’re dealing with just by glancing at a site and its competition. Lastly, and most importantly, we spend a large amount of time performing the analysis because it’s such an important part of putting together a plan for a site’s SEO project.

Once completed we will be able to target any specific areas that need attention and help to build your website into one that performs better and ranks higher within the search engines. Some of the services we offer includes:

• Providing recommendations on your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript/Flash
• On and offsite content development and syndication
• Managing online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• Link building
• Meta Tag creation/optimisation

We also offer telephone and email support to provide answers to any queries and we will provide advice, ranking reports and traffic analysis as applicable. Our SEO services are available on both 6 and 12 monthly schemes, although we recommend that any project spans a 12 month period since it can take this long to see the true benefit of any SEO work.

We will be happy to discuss how we can help to improve your website visibility online. If you would like to learn more about the SEO services we offer, get in touch now.