Mobile website development and SEO – learning while doing

A mobile website development and SEO project for Team Yeah Can. Yorkshire.weddingvenue.info

Learning about mobile website development
As with everything in life nothing helps the learning process as well as when you actually get to do it. Nine months or so ago the Yeah Can team made the decision to move over to mobile website development, also known as responsive web design.

We went for this whole heartedly and with the specific focus of getting it right. This has been a steep learning curve but we are getting better and better at it. It’s also not something you can do a little. You either do mobile website development or you don’t. No half measures.

Learning about SEO
Our next learning task has been to get ourselves a little more up to speed in the SEO environment. And no SEO folk. You needn’t leave the country. We are not going to encroach on your turf. We just want to work out how it all fits together.

What better way to learn than to start a project. After all we have the web design and built already established as our core skills set. So why not try out SEO.

Copywriter Anja had to find a topic that she could write endless articles on without having to spend too much time on research. And the universe kindly sent a signal. Younger daughter got engaged and started talking about weddings. But more than that, younger daughter ended up as maid of honour to a close friend and we saw second hand what modern brides get up to.

There is definitely interest in weddings and the whole industry that surrounds this special event in people’s lives.

First SEO topic
We set up a website for Wedding Venue. And created a sub domain for Yorkshire.weddingvenue a county in the UK. The reason for picking the UK was that we just wanted to be able to speak and write in English. Spain didn’t quite make the cut on that requirement.

We did feel that weddings would be too huge a topic. Not that wedding venues isn’t already. Perhaps we should have picked a more definite niche such as outdoor wedding venues, or gay friendly wedding venues or even wedding venues for disabled people. Perhaps even wedding venues for Baby Boomers who are showing an interesting trend in divorce and remarriage statistics.

Still, we committed ourselves to wedding venues and now we soldier on.

A TLD mistake
One mistake we seem to have made is to believe that the UK would read the TLD (top-level domain) .info as being used in the UK and to denote a UK entity. Not so. We managed to get our website onto page one for search on google.com relatively quickly. In fact it took us about six week which is probably not a bad success rate.

But we are struggling hugely to achieve the same success with the google.co.uk search results. It’s definitely something we have learnt. In fact an SEO client informed us that he views .info domain names with suspicion as they tend to be spam. Cheaper to buy seems to make these domain name extensions suspect ones.

The future will tell
We soldier on keeping an eye on Google and trying to ensure that we don’t overstep any of Google’s lines drawn in the shifting sand of search engine optimisation. Let’s see how successful we can make our small learning project. Watch this space.