SEO Rocks!

Brendon Short - Saturday, October 03, 2009
I have been inspired to share a recent Designko SEO project (Search Engine Optimisation) success. I wanted to take this opportunity to demonstrate how important SEO can be to a company and the impact it can have, by being proactive with your website you can achieve maximum online results, and make your company the most successful it can be.

The client is Little Kids Big Kids. We developed an online ecommerce website that sold jumping castles and after one month the client contacted us to discuss us managing their Google Adword campaign. They had been spending a significant amount on there campaign and weren’t achieving the results they were after. The client advised that some sharks in the field had approached them and they wanted to charge an arm and a leg quite literally to help them get the results they were after. The quotes were a joke and were selling nothing but confusion to people who didn’t have enough knowledge, and who were vulnerable because they wanted to achieve results they were not currently getting.

I suggested to our client to engage in an SEO campaign with Designko first to see if we can better the organic traffic to there website instead of paying tons of money for broad search terms that were targeting surfers and not potential buyers.

Client said; “yep do it!” and the fun had begun.

Firstly we had to use all our tools to analyse their website and see what traffic it was getting. We then had work closely with the client and determine what search terms we needed to target. After extensive research we established the main keywords and were ready to begin development.

We reconstructed their website around our targeted keywords and phrases and utilised all our tricks to make sure they had every chance of being found by all the major search engines. 2 weeks work and the website was ready to be launched. The website was launched and we advised the client it would take some time before we would see results as all the pages needed to be indexed first, we sat back, relaxed and waited.

It’s important at this stage to mention that our client’s website had no ranking what so ever for these key words and phrases prior to the work carried out.

Three weeks after Designko worked on the SEO with little kids big kids they made it to the bottom of the 1st page in Google for our targeted keywords and search phrases. One month later and they are number 4 on the front page and are now struggling to handle the influx of business and are selling jumping castles every week online.

Just a bit of time, effort and talking to an agency that has your best interests at heart could make all the difference.


Designko DJ Set

Craig Stewart - Friday, October 02, 2009

What music inspires you to do what you do? The DK office is home to a media server loaded with a respectable 40gb of great tunes. Just like finding the right wine to go with dinner, there is a bit of a science to getting the right music to go with each step of our work process.

Here are our highlights getting regular airtime in DK HQ.

Brendon's Back Catalogue

Brendo reckons it all comes down to what time in the day it is, how many coffees I have had and how many applications I am juggling at one time. First design of the day I have had one coffee, applications I have open are.... Entourage, Tweetdeck, Firefox and Illustrator. I am in a mellow mood and am probably branding a new business or working on a print design, the sounds would be....

  • Augie March – Moo you blady choir
  • Anything by Regina Spektor
  • Beck – Sea change
  • An oldie but a goodie – Arlo Guthrie

By Lunch time I have a few more apps open.... Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Snap and Drag, Indesign, Quark. I have also smashed another coffee by then or maybe 2. At this time of the day I like to ‘GET THE PARTY STARTED’ we will move onto something with a beat the ones that get your legs bouncing.....

  • Kings Of Leon
  • Modest Mouse
  • The Herd
  • Draght
  • J5

Come 3pm and now we really pumping I am juggling 12+ apps, had more coffee and am ready for some air guitar, so ‘FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK WE SALUTE YOU’.....

  • Anything by Muse but especially, Knights of Cydonia
  • Stone Sour
  • The Distillers
  • Queens of the Stoneage
  • Black Sabbath

If all went well a few logo designs would of been finished, a brochure design or 2, some web pages designed and worked on a catalogue. I probably also had to get through some quotes and 3000 phone calls. That’s it just another lazy day at the office...


Popular in the DK office... MUSE

Craig's Countdown

Site Architecture/HTML Framework

During this stage, we’re putting together the nuts and bolts of the site, and it’s like the heavy lifting/foundation building of the site, so I like to listen to something solid that I can get my teeth into. My top site set up bands are:

Customised Scripting/Web app development

This part of development can require something a bit more subdued and easy to listening. Preferable something that you can listen to that doesn’t make you want to get up and jump about the studio too often. My top picks here are:

Bug fixing/Cross browser testing

This is the ironing out of the little quirky bits of a site and getting it ready for a global audience. It can be a bit of a tiresome task chasing little snippets of code around the internet, especially getting that pesky IE6 to play nice, but time goes much more smoothly on the back of these little gems.

What music gets you through the day? First 5 people that leave us a comment will win some cool DK stickers.