St John’s is an independent specialist school and college, working with learners who have complex learning disabilities including those who are having difficulty learning as a result of behavioural, emotional and social difficulties (BESD), Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Asperger’s Syndrome and PDA.

The appointment builds on the long standing successes achieved by Webscape for another education and charity client, Treloar’s School and College for physically disabled children in Hampshire.

You can find out more about St John’s at www.st-johns.co.uk.

The latest evidence from fellow SEO experts is proving that social signals are definitely having an impact upon search rankings with websites being mentioned and shared on social media performing better in search results. This crossover between social and search can be leveraged particularly well if your website is mentioned by more active social media profiles. Links from these higher value social accounts seem to have more value for SEO.

This makes it even more important to work with an SEO agency that understands social media and which can manage your social media interaction and engagement for you – in other words an agency like Webscape!

There was a huge response from LinkedIn users so we thought we would put them all in one list – then we thought it would be really cool to share our findings with everyone else in a blog post!

So here is the current list of Kent graphic designers who took the effort to get in touch or who were recommended by other LinkedIn users, listed alphabetically out of fairness:

Chloe Ainsley
Freelance graphic designer in Medway area.
http://www.fusiondesign-studio.co.uk/

Chris Caryer
Freelance design and print, based in Faversham.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/chris-caryer/15/543/5bb

Colour Balance
Sue Weitzel is a freelancer who works on branding, packaging and literature.
http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/susan-weitzel/22/43b/107

Deeson Creative
Kent-based creative agency, branding, print, design.
http://www.deeson-creative.co.uk/

Design Advantage
Branding, graphic design or website design, based near Canterbury.
http://www.designadvantage.co.uk/

Digital Aspirations
Specialise in digital design solutions, websites, animation.
http://www.digitalaspirations.co.uk/

Fred Graphic Design
Agency offering graphic design for corporate ID, advertising, POS, broichures and more.
http://www.graphic-design.uk.com/

Girl Friday Graphics
Tunbridge Wells based Graphic Designer Rosie Harris.
http://www.girlfridaygraphics.co.uk/

Go Vicinity
Canterbury graphic design agency run by Rob Parker.
http://www.govicinity.com/

Frewin Design Consultancy
Graphic Design, Advertising, Brand Design, Web Design. Based on Kent/Sussex border.
http://www.frewindesign.co.uk/

Fuelled by Design
Complete design and print management service, based in Sandgate and Aylesford.
http://www.fuelledbydesign.com/

MPJ Design
Award winning web and graphic design, French and English spoken.
http://www.mpjdesign.ltd.uk/

PatrickGeorge
Illustration, book publishing and local graphic design projects, based Ramsgate.
http://www.patrickgeorge.biz/

Paul Cartwright Branding
20 years’ design experience including retail brand identity design and packaging graphics.
http://www.paulcartwrightbranding.co.uk/

Pebbleshores
Graphic design, marketing and branding agency in Folkestone.
http://www.pebbleshores.co.uk/

Pomegranate
Creative media and marketing, corporate identity, branding. Based Margate.
http://www.pomegranate.biz/

RK Graphics
Graphics Design, Artwork, Photography, Printing, Sign Making
http://www.rkgraphics.co.uk/

RedRed Design
Creative graphic design solutions and marketing in Ashford.
http://www.redreddesign.co.uk/

P.S. By giving you this list we are not vouching for the quality of work or service provided by these designers, instead these are all companies who were recommended or who made the effort to get in touch which is in a way a promising sign. 

Anything which encourages more businesses to promote themselves online is good for us of course but also more importantly it’s good for the local economy. There are small but growing number of digital businesses in Folkestone and all are growing, expanding and hiring new staff. This is creating employment and bringing more people into the area who then spend money with local businesses.

So we’d like to thank local MP Damian Collins for recognising the importance of our sector and getting Google to come visiting. And if anyone comes to see them don’t forget our office is literally just opposite – come and say hello!

Although this was quite an unusual request we set to analysing which parts of their website content were being indexed by Google and made some key changes in the right places.

The result – in less than a week the client now has a prominent listing for brand and company name searches with their phone number slap bang in the middle of the screen! (see below). We are now working hrough optimising the rest of the site to achieve rankings for products and services.

Hannah is a recent graduate with an MA in Multimedia Journalism so should be well equipped to work on writing quality content such as blog posts, articles, press releases, articles and guides for us to use in SEO backlinking campaigns as well as developing engaging content to use in social media marketing.

From what we’ve seen we think she’ll be a great addition to the team – not least because of her shared loves of good coffee, cheese and sushi (but not all at the same time!).

“it’s no longer enough to have a website; small companies must also have a social media presence.”

There’s also a handy infographic, see below, which gives an overview of how best to use 6 different social media platforms. Find out more at BusinessZone.

For example, we are delighted to welcome back Fudge Kitchen as a client, who we are supporting by helping to manage their impressive social media following including nearly 4,000 Facebook followers, manage seasonal promotions and handle regular email marketing campaigns.

We’ve known the lovely people at Fudge Kitchen since about 2004 so it’s great to be working with them again – not least for the product samples (if you haven’t tried Fudge Kitchen before, we urge you to try it – it’s fudge but not like you’ve ever tried before!)

In the episode dated January 9th the guys reveiwed the online highlights of 2011 with author Stephan Spencer and then looked forward to some of key SEO trends of 2012.

Just some of the fascinating topics discussed included Stephan’s belief that ‘nofollow’ links shouldn’t be automatically dismissed from your backlinking campaign (something we’ve been advocating for years). He feels that even though a site owner may tell search engines they feel the link should not be indexed, doesn’t mean search engines will always follow this request. For example a nofollow link on a high authority and well curated site like Wikipedia can still have a lot of value for SEO.

The discussion also turned to the growing importance of ‘social signals’ in 2012. In a world where backlink profiles can be artifically created and manipulated through SEO, search engines will increasingly turn to social media for evidence of a website’s popularity in the form of likes, shares and posts about it.

If this prediction is true what might it mean for SEO? Well we’ve already seen an increasing blurring of the lines between the Social Media Marketing and Backlinking Campaigns which we manage for our clients. We’d always created basic social media profiles as part of the simplest backlinking project but now there’s real value in actively encouraging social media exposure for a website. This can be done by:

• Creating useful and interesting content or offers for your social media profiles.
• Engaging with your target users to encourage sharing and following.
• Identifying, targeting and engaging with specific high value social media influencers for your market.

In short if you’ve got someone looking after your SEO, how much do they also know about social media? These days going social isn’t a luxury or an add on, it’s an integral part of your online strategy.

More recently though the “100 links” rule-of-thumb has become useful to webmasters once again. This is because Panda has changed Google’s search algorithm to place more emphasis on site usability than ever before. An ideal web site is easy to navigate between pages and has uniform levels of content throughout.

Properly formatted URL structure goes hand-in-hand with good internal linking. For example, if your web site has a blog, Google will be looking for a link called “Blog” on your homepage, and expecting that link to point to a particular URL within your site.

If you’re concerned about the link structure of your own web site, why not contact Webscape today for a comprehensive SEO audit?