Wedding Singer Sisters - Website Design

Recently completed Sisters in Song. Features include the fantastic j player which is great for cross browser compatibility including I phones and Ipad.

Quite a nice looking jquery gallery help complete the look.



Sisters in Song are a professional and versatile female singing duo committed to making your special day memorable and remarkable with outstanding live vocals.

Sisters Tracey and Maria specialise in singing at weddings and corporate entertainment events in the North West of England covering the Greater Manchester and Cheshire regions.

Sisters in Song have a built up a vast repertoire of songs which allows you to create a playlist that is personal to you.

Tracey and Maria sing everything from classic love songs and well known tunes from West End shows to modern pop hits. Popular songs which are sure to appeal to your audience and ensure your entertainment event is a resounding success.

Sisters in Song offer superb value for money so call today to secure these sensational singers for your special day.

Golfing Holidays in Scotland

We've successfully launched the new Golf Vacation Scotland website. As well as creating a new website using the old url we have launched a sister site on the new golftourpro url. To avoid duplication we will gradually merge the two sites making Golf Tour Pro the driving force moving forward.

Initially having created sitemaps for both sites nearly all the pages have been indexed for GVS and only a few appear to be indexed for GTP.

This is the difference between a brand new domain and a domain which has been round for years. Our challenge is rebranding the business without losing this value. There is a third PR3 website for golf which we intend to merge using 301 redirects. This may prove to be the best solution for GVS also but we would prefer a situation where all the sites pages are indexed before taking this step.

Golf Tour Pro - New website!

PickSEO are delighted to announce the launch of a new website for Golf Tour Pro using url www.golfvacationscotland.com

A very interesting project in that the company St Andrews Associates had several domain names and had tried to create a different image for each url. Although the keyword rich urls are effective for a particular phrase they fell down with any variation on that phrase.



Our primary goal was to create a new brand identity, we sourced a new url name including the creation of a new logo and brought the old websites into the 21st Century with a complete redesign. Now compatible with I phones and I pads and full of useful information the new website is well on track to transform their visitor numbers and enquiries.

Our intention is to run both Golftourpro.com and Golfvacationscotland.com to establish the dominant domain name.

So for Golf Vacations and Golfing holidays in Scotland take a look at the Golf Tour Pro website.

We will be working on their SEO over the coming months to ensure they hit a wider range of keyphrases relating to golf tourism

Commercial property to let - Scotland

We are pleased to have agreed a contract with Uphall Estates a company specialising in commercial property in Scotland to manage their gold seo package. We will be working closely with them to improve their rankings on a number of search engines including Google.




With FTP access and admin level access we will be able to do all we need to do to get this site created by another company using a varaition on a wordpress template ranking highly on google and other search engines.

We have already created their google places listings and have started modifying meta tags and body text to optimise their online presence.

Biomass Heating Specialists

PickSEO are delighted to have agreed a contract with Scot Heating Company Ltd to develop their website profile using our gold seo package.





As a company specialising in Biomass Boilers and renewable energy their installations can be of great benefit to commercial operations looking to reduce the carbon footprint of their heating systems. As an ESCO (Energy saving company) grants are available to cover the costs of installation.

Using wood pellet burners these highly efficient heating systems make use of waste wood material and burn material easily available as a renewable resource.

We look forward to working with them to improve their google rankings and promote their green energy solutions.

Garden Office competitors - Article Madness

Competition remains high for Cabin Living in the top 10 spaces for the search term garden offices

Looking through the competitors the proliferation of article submissions for inbound links is very clear. Disappointing really as we cant help but feel the quality of content is never in any great detail and therefore often lacks value for the reader.

But when you are faced with the fact that competitors have hundreds more links than your sites it seems there is little alternative than to start submitting article after article with slight modifications. It would be great to have the time to create 200 different articles all with their own valued content but the reality is few companies have the time to devote to this activity especially as the results may take months or years to pay any dividend.

The question is then how long before the google algorithm picks up on almost duplicate articles to clean up the web and starts dropping sites with no value making the whole exercise redundant?

Only time will tell. In the meantime we would advise where possible keep your articles unique , consider you customer each time and try where possible to provide content which is enlightening and informative. This is bound to win the confidence of both your customers and google.

Google page rank

What is google page rank?

Many confuse this with a websites position in natural search results. This is not necessarily the case.

It is google's opinion of the value or importance of the content of the site. That is not to say page rank and results positions are unrelated and clearly sites with a higher page rank are probably likely to appear higher in the search results. The two go hand in hand.

It had appeared that page rank was something websites built up over time possibly taking years to generate a rank of 2 or 3. Infact in the past year or two we were beginning to wonder whether google was going to bother ranking sites with a pagerank at all. Many web designers were trying to make a fast buck out of any blog, or website, selling them due to their pagerank rather than any inherent value and we got the impression that perhaps google wanted to discourage this.

Recent developments with one of our clients Toy Design Lab specialising in everything relating to toys has made us change our minds.

To our genuine surprise in the course of less than a year both their main website and blog (with blogger) have reached a pagerank of 3. Not 1 not 2 but straight in at PR3.

Suddenly getting Toydesignlab reciprocal links from the bigger names in toy design, manufacturing and retailing should not be so difficult.

You can add google's page rank tool to most browsers i.e. internet explorer, google chrome etc simply google for it!

It should only take a few seconds to add it to your browser and then you can monitor googles value of the importance of potential link partners who want to link to you.

Link building is a key part of any succesful SEO campaign.

Links from high ranked websites are great. But don't get us wrong we think there are lots of good sites out there still struggling to get any pagerank at all which could still make potentially good link partners. We work on the principle of good quality content sites first and pagerank second when we are looking for new link partners.

Graphic Design Rochdale update

A quick update for Graphic designers 4PD based in Rochdale, looking to compete for the search phrase Graphic Design Rochdale

A competitive market for graphic designers anywhere but it seems particularly so in the Manchester area. We have recently established a position bottom of page 2 (20th) for this search phrase and will be continuing our efforts to push them up to page one when traffic and enquiries will really start to take off. We would anticipate at least a fivefold increase in traffic when page 1 is achieved.

Porsche Specialists head for Page 1

As our campaign continues with SP Autobahn their rise through the rankings continues. Now firmly on page 2 for the search phrase Porsche specialist in position 14th as we write this. We are still confident we will hit page 1 before the end of August.

Porsche Specialists Scotland - SP Autobahn

Working with SP Autobahn, Porsche and German marque specialists in servicing and repair in Scotland, we are aiming to achieve a page 1 ranking for "Porsche specialist"



Although we have not built the site which uses the zoomla template format we have been able to alter the meta tags, add analytics code and google verification for sitemap upload. CMS sites can be difficult to manage as a third party but with the co-operation of the designer we can get access to achieve what we need to make search engine optimisation a success.

Cuurently we have added SP autobahn to google places in an optimised listing, so they now come top for "porsche specialist Scotland" and obviously "porsche specialist Stirling" where they are based.

But clearly our long term target is "Porsche Specilaist" which gains a significant amount of traffic each month.

We anticipate page one for this phrase by September.

Garden Offices

Following an extensive campaign of SEO for Cabin Living we have secured page 1 for "Garden office" a position they have not held for three years. They appeared briefly in this position as a "new website" but since then google clearly devalued the website compared to older established content and has only just started to value what is a very informative site with in excess of 500 pages. Natural link building has helped to secure its value in google but it has taken a lot of hard work from both our team and the the Cabin Living team to secure its current position.

Graphic design Rochdale - 4PD

Outstanding graphic designers at 4PD contacted us to get higher listings for the search phrase "Graphic design Rochdale". So from not being in the top 100 a few days ago they are currently listed 26th following our recent changes to their website. As our link building process continues we expect them to enter the first page within the next two months.

Coxwell Court - Holiday Cottage in Cirencester

The holiday let and holiday cottage business is a very competitive market depending mainly on your geographical location. The emphasis here has to be on the effective use of your google places listings which we can optimise for best performance.

In the case of www.coxwellcourt.co.uk as well as doing our usual on-site optimisation we focus on getting the listings to appear highly in the places results. Our challenge at the moment is to get Coxwell court appearing highly for "holiday cottage Cirencester" and "holiday let Cirencester". This can be achieved through optimising google places then concentrating efforts on the traditional seo skills of keyword density on site and link building through articles and reciprocal link building with related websites.

What links do your competitors have for top google positions?

A good tool for checking links is Yahoo's site explorer. Once you've done the basic groundwork ie regular blog entries, a nicely designed website, keyword optimised content on every page, optimised meta titles and descriptions then its time to focus on links.

Ofcourse we specialise in link building services but if you are looking to add links yourself this is a good first step.

If your starting out looking for links chances are your competitors have a lot more.
But who exactly? and would the same sites link to you? If your competitors content is deemed valuable enough to get a link then quite possibly so will yours.

First step visit site explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/



Then select the inlinks tab and see who exactly has links to this site according to yahoo.

Some may be internal or clearly linked (sister) sites but if you spot any good third party links contact them yourself and see if they'll reciprocate links.

Happy link building!

Toy design lab page one!

The toy design labe website is now doing very well in natural search results on google.

9th for "toy design"
1st for "toy designers"
4th for "toy designer"
1st for "toy design consultantts"

Ahead of most of the competition this toy design consultancy with its experience working with leading toy manufacturers is bound to go from strength to strength thanks to PickSEO

Toy design company - seo strategies

Toy design lab continue to rise through the rankings for the phrases "toy design" and "toy designers". Currently showing 19th for "toy design" and 4th for "toy designers"

Toy designers

Recently, following the advice of the PickSEO team, Toy design lab have started their own blog which will help by producing relevant content with embedded links back to their main site.

Visit the Toy design lab blog

Toy Design lab 21st for "toy design"

Our toy design campaign for toy design lab is starting to pay dividends having previously not shown in the top 100 they can now be found top of page 3 on Google for the search term toy design

Toy design lab have now set up their own blog to cover various aspects of toy design and this should help to promote their main site over the next few weeks.

Toy Designers TDL rise through the rankings

Toy design lab, UK based toy design consultants are using our services to gain a greater percentage of web traffic and potential customers with focussed seo campaigns on a variety of keyphrases. Having achieved position 1 for "toy design consultant" on Google UK the sights are now set on "toy design" and "toy designer" which will generate over 3000 combined searches a month if they are in the top 3.

Toy design

4PD Graphic Design Manchester

Recently created Graphic design consultants 4PD are currently struggling to compete with a series of postcode results and Channel 4 on demand for the top slot in search results for "4PD". Interesting as Google is clearly rating this search as a typo by putting the much more searched 4OD top!

Certainly difficult to compete with the traffic and link numbers that such a famous site must generate but with a bit of hard work and continued development of the 4PD site one would hope Google will recognise that 4PD is a valuable entity in its own right and that it is in fact 4PD people are searching for.

The first step is to add analytics and an xml sitemap to 4PD to show it is valued and the next steps are a combined process of external link building and building the online content of the site directly to show it has value.

We will chart the progress and see how long it takes for Google to recognise 4PD Graphic Design is worthy of the top position.

SEO Scotland Challenge continues

As expected the last few places in the rise of PickSEO for the search term "SEO Scotland" are proving a tougher challenge. Currently 14th in the rankings it is now at the stage where the longer term process of link building comes into its own. The more websites we can get to link to us with anchor text including "seo scotland" or similar the better but this is a slow and time consuming process.

It takes time to find suitable websites to link to, time to get sites to link back and time for search engines to trawl and find the links supporting your site.

This is where seo companies really start to earn their money!

Web Design Scotland - PickSEO rankings

Another key aspect of our work at PickSEO is website design. We have a team of graphic designers to create the concept and then develop unique website designs that are designed for easy access by both your customers and search engines.

Google "Web design Scotland" and at the time of writing this PickSEO cannot be found in the top 100 results.

Therefore another SEO challenge is to improve this situation. It may be possible to optimise the index page again which if you are following these entries you will know it is being optimised for "SEO Scotland" but to avoid conflict in keyword density we have chosen to optimise http://www.pickseo.co.uk/website_design.shtml which is the overview page for website design.

Two possible difficulties could be 1) this is not he main index page and therefore not regarded as significant by the search engines and 2) there is less body text than any of our competitors in the top 10 results for this phrase.

Ofcourse there are factors such as age where we start with a disadvantage.

I have seen one SEO company claiming the old age of a site could be a problem which they could fix. This is nonsense, the older your site the better, the challenge is for completely new sites where the keywords aren't in the url.

A challenge isn't a challenge without a few difficulties. Stay tuned for progress reports and chart our rise for the search phrase "web design Scotland"

Google page 2 for SEO Scotland

6 days since our last entry and now PickSEO is on the second page of results for the search phrase "SEO Scotland" an impressive rise through the rankings in such a short space of time. Hopefully the rise will continue. It is without doubt harder to get the last few places up the rankings as the competition gets stronger but we expect to make further progress up the ranks soon with a goal of reaching the Top 5 on google for SEO Scotland

Our continued rise for "SEO Scotland"

On Friday we noted a 20+ rise in the rankings for the search term "SEO Scotland" and now only three days later we can be found a further 20+ places higher at position 46 in the google results for the UK. Pleasing progress after only a single weekend! Ofcourse there are many tactics available to improve your SEO ranking with google.

The link above is in fact a very good example of a simple off site task which will continue to improve our google ranking as SEO experts in Scotland, England and Wales.

SEO Scotland search results

A few days into the PickSEO website optimisation process for SEO Scotland and we are 20+ places higher currently ranking 69th in google.

Still not exactly a position to get too excited about but it is a signficant change in just a few days and bodes well for the future.

Our optimisation process is on-going so we should continue to see improvements over the next few weeks and will report back here as and when things improve.

SEO Scotland

The search terms relating to SEO create a huge number of results demonstrating just how competitive the business of selling search engine optimisation services can be. So as with any other company at PickSEO we are faced with the problem of getting noticed. As with most businesses we do benefit from word of mouth but ultimately we can generate far more visitors and far more business by appearing highly for popular search results.

So here at PickSEO we have a big challenge. One such target phrase would be "SEO Scotland". Currently if you are prepared to trawl through the results you would find us top of page 10 ie 91st position. Hardly likely to get the phone ringing off the hook!

This is a promising keyphrase however as it generates a significant number of enquiries (always worth checking with the google adwords tool ) and yet the competition in terms of number of possible results is nowhere near the more general phrase "seo". Ofcourse being top for seo would be great but this would take an extremely long time to achieve and there has to be sense of realism in your objectives.

Roughly if the results exceed 10 million you are looking at a potential 2 year plus project. If the results are close to 1 million it may take less tah a year to get first page.

Seo Scotland generates 24 million results a big challenge but 10 times easier than getting page 1 for "seo"



SEO generates 320 million results so this is a tall challenge!



Maybe 91st position for SEO Scotland isn't so bad after all!
We'll track the progress of our seo work over the next few weeks.

Jonathan Bowker hits the Top 3

For a few days now Jonathan Bowker has been in the top 3 on Google. Considering there is very little online content for google to trawl this is a surprisingly good result. Our advice if the goal was to secure no.1 position would be to add more content to the landing page and engage in an on-going link building programme.

Cuurently jut a landing page this could easily be modified into a one page website

However purely from an experimental point of view this has demonstrated the value of PickSEO's low cost search engine optimisation package

Copythorne garage - New Website

Close to completion a revamped Copythorne garage website to reflect the Art Deco architecture of the workshop.




Particularly fond of the history photos which reinforce the style of the web design.

Seo services for Copythorne are on-going even though they are no.1 on Google Places for Copythorne Garage. There are more searches to cover to hit more local search results.

The garage owner, already very busy with work, hopes to continue to benefit from an improved website rather than relying on expensive ad campaigns with the yellow pages.

Website design and SEO services for companies in Hampshire

Jonathan Bowker rises into the top 5 on page1

Well less than 48 hours into the challenge and Jonathan Bowker's Photography landing page hits No.4 on googles first page. Not sure if we can get higher without more content but we will keep you posted!

Jonathan has commented this morning "That is brilliant!"

Web marketing by PickSEO

Jonathan Bowker Update

Well 12 hours in to the challenge we have at least some news on Jonathan Bowkers photgraphy site.

First of all, last night Jonathan checked the first 46 pages of google and he was not found. Some 460 results a search even the most dedicated of web surferss would have trouble justifying.

The site sitemap for what it is has been submitted and the site url submission is in as well as validation of ownership in webmaster tools and a few links have been created. Results?? Well the site now is indexed and shows if you google the full domain.

The interesting point will obviously be when it appears in the first few pages for the search phrase "jonathan bowker".

We will keep you posted. View Jonathan Bowker's Photography landing page

Jonathan Bowker - Photographer

Every SEO challenge is different but this one is an interesting experiment without doubt.

If you buy a domain with the exact phrase you want to search for and the search isnt all that common. Just how long would it take us to get Jonathan Bowker to NO.1 on google.

The competition is mostly linked in, pehaps facebook and the like but how much of an advantage is the url.

Well there is one fun way of finding out. The work starts here.

Jonathan Bowker approached us with the request for a landing page or online business card as we call it. He was surprised that even though he had the domain it did not immediately rank with google and asked us to see what we could do.

So here we are the 1st of February 2011 7.30pm UK time. Lets get started!


Jonathan Bowker - Photography