One of the darker sides of web development is down time. The site owners don’t want it, the site developers don’t want it and most importantly the site users don’t want it. Unfortunately, however, it will happen. This is not a defeatist view or an excuse, it’s realistic.

An experienced software development team will know this and rather than bury their heads in the sand, they will be well prepared to deal with the consequences. It’s all about having the problem solving skills, tools and the right approach to solving the root cause of the problem.

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The majority of the web industry had, over time, come to the consensus that the keywords meta tag is not used by Google in ranking web search results. However, we’d never heard it from Google itself; that is until now.

Recently on the official Google blog they posted an article on just this issue and clearly stated that they do not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

It’s worth pointing out that while this is only Google and other search engines may well use the meta keyword tags, it only serves to enforce our own approach to search engine optimisation that meaningful content is key.

Strange how our SEO blog post that achieved number one in Google for that very search term has now dropped completely off the search results.

Certainly we’re not within the first 6 pages returned. It makes us wonder if the article has somehow been blacklisted for that particular term.

Even more strange is that we are number one for the term “number 1 in Google” – we didn’t even try to optimise for that search term. View screenshot.

Update (12/10/09)

It would appear that our article has been re-instated at the number one position. Amusingly above a new website that has appeared since I first wrote the original article with the domain name ‘numberoneingoogle.co.uk’

Location based searching is a hot topic at the moment with ‘location-aware’ browsing now implemented in Firefox and safari on the iPhone.

Whilst our old residence was beautifully hidden amongst the Surrey hills surrounding Cranleigh, it certainly wasn’t the most obvious place for potential clients to go looking for a cutting edge web agency. Even if it did proudly claim to be “England’s largest village”.

Now that Kyan has relocated to the busy town centre of Guildford we are up against a lot stiffer competition, with numerous other agencies now immediately surrounding us all competing to be top of the listing for terms like “Web design Guildford” and “Web development Guildford”.

Obviously we’re new in town so there’s a lot of work to be done, but a great place to start for any business that wants to show up in location based results is the free Google Local Business Centre (LBC).

Entry into Google’s LBC means that your business listing will show up in search results on google maps.

With the increasing popularity of location-aware mobile devices and desktop browsers utlising Google’s Location Services, optimising for local searches is more important than ever.

Our article about optimising websites for search engines has now achieved number one status in Google for the term “Number one in Google” (View screenshot).

Read all about our SEO approach.

Good listings across multiple search engines can make or break a website, at Kyan we believe there are no real secrets to search engine optimisation (SEO).

Transparency with our clients is key, we don’t keep our techniques behind lock and key as we believe SEO is not just the responsibility of the web developers, but also of the content creators & writers.

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