[Sean Dyer]

You need to register with company house groundhog. Then he will be trading under your name.!!!!

I like your thinking!!! 

Just be careful mate its not that simple, if you go ltd your accounts change and all sorts

I m not sure if you can log a name without going ltd but its a possibility?

[H S and Son]

I used these guys to register my business name.

http://www.madesimplegroup.com/

[H S and Son]

You need to register with company house groundhog. Then he will be trading under your name.!!!!

I like your thinking!!!  

Just be careful mate its not that simple, if you go ltd your accounts change and all sorts

I m not sure if you can log a name without going ltd but its a possibility?

Its easy to do that. You register the name of business you want (this is called incorportation). If you are doing it to simply reserve it and not trade as such under that name but own it then thats called dormancy.


http://www.companiesmadesimple.com/bronze-company-formation.html

[groundhog]

Thanks KCL and everyone for your offers of help with my website. I'm going to stick with my vistaprint site for now and see how it goes, it actually dosn't look too bad! I need to get some decent photos etc and improve some of the wording, but I'm fairly happy with it so far. I have listed with loads of different trade directories etc and I'm starting to get higher up the list on google. Ive had about 8 phone calls today from companys saying they can get me to the top of google searches, but I'm suspicious of them and I'm going to see how high I can get by tweeking my site etc.

Does anybody have any experience of google adwords? I have started an account with them, but I'm a bit unsure of what I'm doing and a bit worried I'm going to suddenly owe google lots of money!!

[H S and Son]

Ive used google adwords but found that it wasnt that effective. Google is a minefield IMO all round. Im sure they make it difficult on purpose. Talk about complicated.  Anyway, meta tags are a good start to get you to the top. There are something like 83 different criteria which influence how successful a site is in google. Meta tags being one of them, see even that is hard 

[Sean Dyer]

meta tags are worth getting right, but not as much anymore as good text with keywords balanced right and some good quality links

[groundhog]

Ive used google adwords but found that it wasnt that effective. Google is a minefield IMO all round. Im sure they make it difficult on purpose. Talk about complicated.  Anyway, meta tags are a good start to get you to the top. There are something like 83 different criteria which influence how successful a site is in google. Meta tags being one of them, see even that is hard 

Its all new to me Matt, but I'm learning fast! and I'm driving my wife mad as I'm spending every spare moment glued to the computer tweeking my site, and doing various searches to see if my site comes up.

[H S and Son]

Youre probably right Sean, in a way your post proves my point about google though. They keep changing what is relevant for search criteria and what and/or how it works. WHY? To keep you on your toes. Its silly really, why do they want you to be ever alert with your finger on the pulse continually updating your website, checking word relevance and the balance of meta tag references to those on the page.

If google had invented the motor car they wouldnt have included the wheel.

[H S and Son]

Ive used google adwords but found that it wasnt that effective. Google is a minefield IMO all round. Im sure they make it difficult on purpose. Talk about complicated.  Anyway, meta tags are a good start to get you to the top. There are something like 83 different criteria which influence how successful a site is in google. Meta tags being one of them, see even that is hard 

Its all new to me Matt, but I'm learning fast! and I'm driving my wife mad as I'm spending every spare moment glued to the computer tweeking my site, and doing various searches to see if my site comes up.

Your site wont come up until you first submit it to google

http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=/addurl

then it takes a few weeks for them to keep coming back and crawling it. Have you got a site map? How often are you planning on submitting this to google  you wont get google to acknowledge your site overnight by any stretch of the imagination, sorry mate.

[H S and Son]

And then there's Bing and Yahoo etc etc.

[H S and Son]

And DMOZ, very few commercial site webmasters have the patience to use DMOZ but its a damn good search engine to get registered with. Google refers to it when building its own algorithms I believe.

[Sean Dyer]

Youre probably right Sean, in a way your post proves my point about google though. They keep changing what is relevant for search criteria and what and/or how it works. WHY? To keep you on your toes. Its silly really, why do they want you to be ever alert with your finger on the pulse continually updating your website, checking word relevance and the balance of meta tag references to those on the page.

If google had invented the motor car they wouldnt have included the wheel.

Because certain webmasters once they find out the criteria will manipulate the search engines in a bad way , so for google to keep content good quality they keep changing to make it that good quality sites appear for the relevant keywords

For instance when in the past keywords and meta tags were everything some sites had white text on a white background and just spammed keywords, thats why now you need well blanced paragraphs and if google sniffs spamming of your keywords you will get knocked down on ranking ... Google is an art on its own , and seo companies/guys spend there life i work trying to keep up and no one really knows what it is but have a good idea, google keep it very secretive but overall, good content and a good clean html will always rise to the top, and links to good quality sites with a good page rank

[H S and Son]

I know, its just bloody annoying.

I could show you a window cleaning website that sits top of the page though with no backlinks and poope meta tags.

Whats that all about then?

[mci services]

just out of interest, I have managed to get mine top for window cleaning (my town)

but window cleaner(my town) not so well. it still comes up first for google company's but not the actual website, any pointers.

by the way my website is a freebie with no hosting costs and is pretty rubbish, but reading things like this got it there

[H S and Son]

I have the same for mine, any pointers ? 

[mci services]

I have the same for mine, any pointers ? 

I just checked your's matt and you are right

I have a few idea's I may try to freshen things up, if it works I may or may not share

[AJ]

just out of interest, I have managed to get mine top for window cleaning (my town)

but window cleaner(my town) not so well. it still comes up first for google company's but not the actual website, any pointers.

by the way my website is a freebie with no hosting costs and is pretty rubbish, but reading things like this got it there

Try using your chosen keyword ie window cleaners as your text in your backlinks. Making sure this keyword is used in <title> and <h1> etc.

[dazmond]

do you really get many jobs from your websites though?

[H S and Son]

I get plenty Daz. Picked up a £140 job on an 8 weekly a couple of months back. Most of my gutter cleaning comes from it.

[mci services]

do you really get many jobs from your websites though?

I get a steady flow of work from it and it is somewhere for them to pay online which helps.