About the site owner

Greetings, according to WordPress people like to know something about the person operating the site. Fair enough – I’m David Castle married to Leslie (her parents chose the Scottish use of the boys name) – we have been married for 37 years come October 2009. We live in the fens of Lincolnshire. When we moved here our garden was a meadow. Nothing but grass and weeds, here’s how it looks today. All our own work, we have two ponds both hand dug into solid clay and both are 5 feet deep, the one at the bottom of the garden is 25′ x 25′ and took us a whole summer to dig. It is now a duck pond – complete with resident mallards, toads, frogs, newts, over 100 fish and bloody water beetles that eat fish! The smaller pond has over 1000 tadpoles (29/05/09) and 50 fish. We get all sorts of wildlife, foxes, pheasants, moorhens,rabbits, hares,hedgehogs etc. Dragonflies and butterflies in droves. The pergola was built by us, well, Leslie did the bricklaying (yes really!) I did the carrying. It’s a great place to relax, there’s even an in house barbie.
This year we are growing all our own veg, potatoes, sweetcorn,runnerbeans,tomatoes,onions,lettuce,carrots etc etc. The trees are sufficient to keep us in firewood – twisted willows grow fast. I used to work as a forrester, so I have a chainsaw and a massive axe. Because early 2009 was so cold we bought in 4 tons of ringed oak – I did them with the good old axe.
Inside the cottage it’s oak beamed with a old fashioned Rayburn and log fires – great at Christmas. It’s pretty bleak during winter, but we have good neighbours so we all cooperate. We are surrounded by fields, just four cottages and a couple of farms. Pretty cool!
Here’s the garden taken from the sun roof over my office. I have 6 guitars in there!

The Garden

The Pergy Built by Leslie

Natural Search vs. Advertising

Getting onto page one or two on Google via natural search is every Company’s dream. The main reason is that from the searchers point of view Google sees your website as being what we call an ‘Authoritive Site’, almost as if Google is somehow recommending it! Getting on to page one takes time, it does not happen overnight. The more competitive your market then the more difficult it becomes to catch up with, or even to overtake your competitors. Google has rules – if a site is suddenly loaded with thousands of links then what we call the ‘googlebots’ will think that you are trying to beat the system. The site may indeed initially fly up the rankings only to plummet out of sight. We call this the ’sandbox’, once in it, then getting out will take twice the time of a site that uses the ’softly softly’ approach. If you have ever visited a Search Engine Optimisation forum (SEO) then you will see dozens of threads entitled ‘Black Hat or White Hat’. Black Hat basically means attempting to fool Google. White Hat is the softly softly approach. I am 100% White Hat.

Once I have hopefully got your site highly listed then you can stop paying for the service. I’ll still be here to help out if your rankings drop, we simply restart the contract.

Google is looking for links to your site that endorse your service. That means a linking strategy based on both outgoing and incoming links based on your keywords or products. We call this ‘anchor text’.

Each page on a website must have a heading that relates to what you are trying to promote.

The number of times that I have reviewed sites that are based on either a Company Name or an Individuals name is totally unbelievable. It runs into the thousands. It’s called ‘ego’ and I do not wish to offend – but if you are trying to sell ‘green widgets’ and you call the site John Smith and Co dot com, then you stand about as much chance of getting listed for your goods or services as I do of becoming the next President of the United States!

The keyword is ‘Relevency’ – anchor text = product/service – the site title = first port of call for the googlebot.

My role is to act as an advisor, I have already made it clear that this is not a quick fix to page one of Google.

I read in the forums threads like ‘my client is a moron, I told him it would take time, but ‘oh no, you are rubbish!’

Think of that from the marketers point of view, we live in oppressing times, money is short, advertising is expensive and the News media are losing revenue daily – people and Companies simply do not have the funds to conduct massive campaigns.

My wife Leslie is a mortgage broker, she has her own business, the sites I set up for her are all on page one of Google. www.sharedownershipmortgages.org.uk – www.openmarkethomebuy.org.uk – www.sharedequitymortgages.org.uk and around 4 others. She gets 4 mortgage enquiries per day – 7 days a week. Her problem as an official Homebuy Stakeholder Broker is obtaining the Government funding so often promised by a certain Gordon Brown.

But what do those links tell you? Put simply, that we are professionals. I am doing this because I enjoy it. I have assisted hundreds and hundreds of people to get their sites listed. Now it’s your turn!