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Posts Tagged ‘web design’
Monday, September 21st, 2009
What is the most important web design issue facing small businesses? Is it content development, site navigation, logo design, keyword management? No. It’s none of those.
Most small businesses struggle the most with using web site design as a branding tool. It’s one of the most important aspects of web design, but it can also be one of the biggest pains for a small business trying to keep up with the larger competition. How do you manage it?
Branding is a real challenge for most small businesses anyway, but in terms of web design it can get sticky. How much design should you use? What elements show go into your web page? Which elements will you use over and over again from page to page? These can be hard questions to answer.
I’m not trying to minimize the difficulty of other aspects of web design, but using it to brand your business is a bold step and a necessary one. For more information on web site design services and branding, visit Small Business Mavericks.
Tags: Branding, small business, web design, web site design
Posted in Branding | 3 Comments »
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
There are two people who are essential for your web development team. Do without one of them and you’ll almost ensure your website fails. The first person you should employ on your website development team is a web developer. I’m talking about a developer, not a designer.
While a web designer can be a good asset, a web developer is essential. The developer will have a more in-depth understanding and knowledge of website code than a designer. The designer is all about looking pretty. Your web developer is concerned about site attractiveness, but he is also concerned with functionality. If he is any good at his job, user friendliness is always at the forefront of his mind.
While your web developer is concerned about your site visitors’ experience, he may not understand SEO all too well. That’s his weakness. And it’s also the reason you need to employ that second person on your team. The SEO.
The SEO is very important because he is going to help your web pages rank for their important keywords. Occasionally, your SEO and your web developer are the same person, but if they’re not then they need to be able to work closely together so that they develop a website that is both functional and optimized for web traffic. Ideally, your website will meet these three objectives:
- Functional
- Attractive
- Well optimized
If it falls behind on one of these objectives then there is a weak link on your web development team. Where is it?
Tags: SEO, web design, website development
Posted in website development | 2 Comments »
Monday, May 4th, 2009
If you want to build a successful website, whether you are building a site for an existing business or starting an online business, you need to consider these 3 essential factors. How you approach each of these factors will determine to a large degree how successful you are at building an online presence:
- Site Design
- Website Development
- Website Promotion
Website design is all about how your site looks and how easy you make it for your prospects to find your website.
Development is about the functionality of your website. Is it easy to navigate? Do you make it easy for your customers to find what they are looking for and are you effective in converting them to customers?
Finally, website promotion is all about how well you market your website so that prospects can find you. Is it search engine optimized? Do you use social media effectively?
If you want to be successful online, it helps to have a plan. You’ll have to consider all three of these essential factors in your plan. Leave one out and you could very well be leaving money on the table.
Tags: web design, website development, website promotion
Posted in website development | 2 Comments »
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
After you get viewers to visit your small business website, your next goal is to keep them there. Deep links do just that.
Deep links are links to other pages deeper in your website.
They refer to content you’ve already created, information they’ll find insightful–and all you have to do is lead (in this case, link) them to it.
Some web designers go a little overboard with this tactic and aren’t striving to link to relevant content. But why do that when you’ve gone to the trouble to create a dynamic website chalked full of helpful tid-bits, contest and discount information, interviews, checklists, and customer features? Why not use your own material?
Any time you’re writing new content, you’re going to be aware of your keywords.
You will write with focus, not manipulation, and it’s only natural to refer to something you’ve already written just as it’s natural to refer to a past conversation when talking with a friend or co-worker. When you do refer to an internal page, such as a post about a previous how-to article, or a great interview or discount, create a link to that page. It’s that easy–and practical.
If your blog is linked to your page, (and you blog regularly, which you should), you’ll have even more material to reference, Visit your own archives and remind yourself of what you’ve written. You can even link to a comment post and create a whole new article based on a question or comment previously written.
Sometimes you put a lot into a post and for some reason, perhaps you didn’t know as much about keywords at the time, or you weren’t indexed properly, that post got very few hits. By writing an article that is a fresh approach to the subject, you can deep link to that original article and breathe new life into your hard work and create even more keyword density.
Why go to the trouble to create multiple web pages if they’re not going to rank well, or no one knows what wealth of information they contain?
One more smart tip is to utilize your social media contacts and link back to a favorite post or article. Don’t just refer to your main webpage, but take the time to discuss something specific and then link to it. If you comment on someone’s blog, don’t just list your main webpage, but link back to a particular article, hot-to helpful tip, or discount that has some connection with their blog or what was discussed.
Viewers type in keywords to find the websites and blogs that contain the information they’re looking for. So why not make it even easier for them to get past your small business introductory home webpage and delve into the heart of the content you’ve created by creating deep links.
Tags: Blogging for Small Business, deep links, keyword density, links, Social Media, web design
Posted in Blogging for Small Business, Business Writing, Networking for Small Business, SEO for Small Business, Small Business Internet Marketing, Social Media, Tools for Small Business, Uncategorized, link building, search engines, website development | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
Keywords are a very important part of your web design. If used correctly, keywords can help search engines find your site and drive traffic your way. Small business websites need all the help they can get and with a little bit of know-how, you can position your small business site for maximum exposure.
First, you need to develop your keyword list.
How? One easy way is to brainstorm. What is your site about?
List all the key words that describe your business, its services and products. If someone were looking you up in the phone book or on the web and couldn’t remember your exact name, what might they check under?
Other ways to create your keyword list is by utilizing sites such as Keyword Discovery.com or SEObook.com, or Google AdWords.
Ideally, your Internet search will verify many of the keywords you came up with on your own, but it will also give you some new possiblities. You should have about 50 to choose from, and of those 50, you’ll probably focus on 10 to 20 on a regular basis. By keywords, I also mean keyword phrases, such as: water damage, carpet repair, etc.
It’s important to note that the broader the category, the more competition you’ll have. It’s better to be king of a small kingdom than a peasant of a large kingdom. Don’t go too obscure, but narrow the search to what your company does and what people would look for that would lead them to your site.
Once you have your keyword list, it’s important to optimize each page with one or two keyword phrases.
To optimize a page, the TITLE tag is on of the most important components. The best position for a keyword is at the beginning of your tag. Place only one key phrase at the beginning of the tag. Remember to scatter one or two keyword phrases throughout each of your web pages. You’ll find that it comes pretty natural if you took the time to choose the proper keywords.
See? It’s not as difficult as it sounds. Keywords are the best way to draw traffic to your site and let the search engines know what you’re all about. Take the time to incorporate keywords into your website design and in time, you’ll reap the benefits for your small business needs.
Tags: building a website, keyword phrases, keywords, SEO, web design
Posted in Blogging for Small Business, Local Internet Marketing, PPC for Small Business, SEO for Small Business, Tools for Small Business, Uncategorized, link building, search engines, website development | 1 Comment »
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
Kalena Jordan wrote an excellent article on how some web designers cheat their customers by not providing the best SEO possible on their site designs. Kalena brought out some great points that I’d like to elaborate on. To summarize:
- Flashy sites are not necessarily the best sites to have
- There’s more to SEO than simply writing meta tags
- In fact, each page’s meta tags need to be customized for the page
- The keywords used in the body of your text is very important
- Text links from one page to another on your site are also very important
These are all salient points from an SEO perspective and any site designed without these in mind will ultimately fail, but I’d like to add a few more points to this list:
- Code-to-text ratio is as important as keywords and links in your body content
- Other page elements like page headlines and subheadlines can influence page rankings as well
- While link building has nothing to do with page design, your page designer should keep in mind what elements on a page will encourage voluntary links from other sites within your niche
- Visual elements like photos, graphics, and videos can be optimized as well
- Link attributes such as titles can give an added SEO boost too
- Dynamic navigation bars will kill your site SEO faster than anything else will (almost)
There are thousands of things to think about when designing a website with SEO in mind. Any web designer that hasn’t thought about the above as a MINIMUM isn’t worth chancing your site design with. Don’t take a chance with a web designer who builds beautiful sites without addressing the most important SEO concerns.
Tags: SEO, web design, website
Posted in SEO for Small Business, website development | 1 Comment »
Monday, August 25th, 2008
Kalena Jordan, who I thought was on top of things pretty well, has discovered that Google now crawls Flash. Of course, those of us who have been keeping up have known about this for at least a month.
This is indeed good news, but there are still boundaries you should give your design team with regard to Flash files. The primary boundary is don’t build an index page that is entirely made of Flash. It will be a disaster for your website. And while we’re busy making rules, don’t build any page on your website that consists solely of Flash.
Google may be able to crawl Flash, but this crawl is a limited crawl. Text and links in Flash are now crawlable, but the images are still to be treated like any other image and since Flash is primarily image oriented, that leaves a lot of real estate that will go uncrawled. Essentially, if you have one line of text and a link in your Flash file, which takes up your entire page, then all Google will see is this:
This is one line of text (here’s the link)
The other search engines won’t even see that, which means that your search engine marketing will be limited to Google. I think, for most small businesses, it’s a bad practice to get into to rely on just one search engine for traffic – even if it is Google with its lion’s share of searchers. You can still get good qualified traffic from Yahoo! and MSN, and, yes, even AOL and Ask. So don’t count them out.
If you are going to use Flash in your website then use a Flash video surrounded by text for better optimization or put Flash in your header and have a completely textual web page well-designed with graphic enhancements just as you’ve got right now. Until Google figures out how to crawl images, text is still the crown on the king of content. The old principles of web design still apply.
Tags: Flash, google, search engines, web design
Posted in website development | 1 Comment »
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