For a while there I had Logo Design Love on the first page for “logo design” but I’ve since slipped a little (2nd or 3rd page). That term is incredibly difficult to rank for. I believe there’s a lot of black hat SEO going on within certain top results.

It is incredible that you’re listed among the first 6 – 7 for the term “graphic designer”. I will be continuing to follow your sage SEO advice!

FYI, when one types “graphic design, edinburgh” (no quotation marks), your listing (as of 10/28) is neither on the first or second page, but second down on the third (I didn’t check Yahoo).

Perhaps a few graphic designers in the Edinburgh area took your advice, resulting in your displacement? Otherwise, I have no idea as to why this would happen.

Sorry to learn your SEO efforts didn’t bear any fruit. Personally, things have been great for me (although the more I make statements like that, the less time it’ll take before I have another run-in with Google).

My advice is to publish a blog and to discuss issues important to the business you’re in.

All the best.

Wow – you guys make it sound easy to rank your sites, provided you stick at it and constantly maintain the content. This makes it difficult in real terms get any actual profitable work done!

Over 18 months ago and with no budget I used weebly to make my business site and listed it under as many free online directories as I could. I have consistantly received between 20 and 40 hits per day – but little real business.

I have concluded that it is now less effort to physically hand deliver business cards, press packs and even flyers directly to businesses I want to appeal to and therefore use google as a business name directory and not an advertising tool.

I fear as more and more sites appear search engines will become victims of their own success with the first three pages of any keywords typed belonging solely to T*sco!!

Yours jadely,

dave@upmcr.com

I suppose I don’t submit to local directories because my business rarely comes from my locality, but instead from overseas. Besides, had I submitted to Edinburgh, I’m unsure how a change of location would affect rankings, given that I no longer live there.

Out of curiosity; I did a search for “graphic design edinburgh” to see how your site ranks today for local search. You show up in the #7 spot (although I live in the U.S., so my search results will most likely differ from yours). I notice your site doesn’t show up in the local business directory section. Is there a reason you haven’t added your site to google’s local business?

One of my friends won’t submit his site to the google/yahoo local directories, because he is worried that the search engines will try localizing his website. I doubt that’s the case, but it does make me wonder if it’s possible.

Funny you should mention linking to Wikipedia. I actually add the ‘nofollow’ tag to all mentions of that site, really because their outgoing links are all ‘nofollow’ too, and I’d prefer to pass more benefit onto other websites I mention on the same page.

I’ve not mentioned SEO here a while, but I’ll certainly keep your suggestion in mind should I do so in the near future. Thanks for that.