10 Reasons You Need a Website for Your Business

Posted in: Uncategorised at 3:05 am, April 17, 2010

One of the great things about the internet is that over the past ten years, it has grown dramatically, with somebody selling just about anything you can imagine. Every day people are searching for things to buy online, so why shouldn’t you be promoting your business and/or product(s) on the World Wide Web? There is always a reason for a business to create an online presence, and you are about to learn ten of them.

    Information

    Owning a website allows potential clients to read up on what you have to offer and learn about the history and success of your business. You can also keep customers up to date about anything that may interest them with the service or product you are providing.

    Professionalism

    Just like a classified advertisement in a local newspaper or business directory such as the Yellow Pages, owning a website shows that you are serious about your business and provides a professional approach to potential clients.

    Town Map

    This is a surprisingly uncommon feature for local based businesses, but providing a map of exactly where your business is located will help people find you easier.

    Online Sales

    Obviously, it is always a good idea to sell your products through an ecommerce system on your website. This also provides the opportunity for you to expand your business by selling products internationally.

    Provide Support

    You can use your website to talk directly to your customers by using a forum script for support, or you can even use a simple contact form.

    Save Time

    You can save time by providing a Frequently Asked Answers page on your website, eliminating the need for potential clients to phone you or enquire directly when they have a few questions. Think how much time and money this could save.

    @Domain

    Using your own domain in your email address looks much more professional than using a Gmail or Hotmail address, especially when distributing business cards.

    Competition

    If you have competition in your niche, the odds are they have a website, and if not, you should beat them to it. Optimising your web pages so that web users can find your website by searching locally (i.e. Pet Store Leeds) will certainly put you above the competition.

    Recurring Custom

    You can use a website to inform previous customers about new products or services you have to offer, which can easily lead to recurring customers.

    Get Referrals

    Adding a “refer to a friend” option on a website will allow happy customers to recommend your product or service to their contacts with just a couple of clicks.

I hope that this article will set you on the right path to finding online success, but what is next? Where do you go from here? If you’re tech savvy and in no rush to get a website up and running, you should consider purchasing a few books on web design and development, and search engine optimisation, and also browse a few forums such as DigitalPoint. Alternatively, you can hire a designer, hint, hint.

Most Effective On-Site SEO Techniques You Should Be Doing

Posted in: Search Engine Optimisation at 1:32 am, April 16, 2010

If you run a website but know very little to no SEO, this article will certainly help you by explaining the most useful and effective on-site SEO tactics out there that every webmaster should be using.
On-site SEO in case you didn’t guess already, is the part of Search Engine Optimisation that is implemented onto your website, while off-site SEO consists of tactics such as link building and directory submission.

Page Title

The page title is vastly important in on-site SEO, and should always consist of your primary keywords and optionally your secondary keywords, separated by a comma, and optionally followed by your websites name, separated by a hyphen. You should not use more than three keywords/phrases in your header it looks spammy and the search engines think so too.

Implement Keywords to H1-H3 Tags

Header tags are of grave importance in on-site SEO. Search engines prioritise the importance of text by using H1 as the most important, down to H3. You should use this to your advantage by creating keyword-rich header content, using the H1 tag for your primary keyword and h2 for your secondary keywords. This will make a huge difference and greatly increase your SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Meta Description

You should utilise the meta description tag to ensure informative detail for people that find your site through search engines, if it looks tidy and compelling, you are more likely to receive a visit. Note that meta keywords do not count towards your ranking by most top search engines.

Link Structure

Always link to your pages with the keywords you want them to rank for, this is considered a high quality resource for indexing the linked page, and if used effectively, could improve the SERP for the linked page greatly.

Alt Text

Using the alt tag for your images is arguably the greatest way to optimise your images for search engines. This is especially important if you rely on results from Google Images and image search engines alike.

Regularly Update Content

Regularly updating your content will result in your site being crawled faster by search engines. You should not move keywords and phrases about, but simply writing a few articles on your niche every week or so will work greatly towards your success, the more content, the more pages to index, and the more keywords for the search engines to see.

Static URLs

If your site is powered by PHP, you definitely need to make sure you are using some form of static URLs to create SEO Friendly URLs.

Don’t Over-do It

Too many keywords in your pages can result in a penalisation by search engines, especially Google. Make sure your keyword density does not reach over 5% for each page, and if it does, I recommend that you edit it immediately, or risk a possible ban from the top search engines.

10 Things You Should Not Do In Modern Web Design

Posted in: Web Design & Development at 1:06 pm, March 25, 2010

This article counts down on ten of the far too common web design errors. If you are a beginner in web design, you could get a real head start by reading this list.

10. Splash Page

Splash Page
A splash page is an index page that requires you to click another link to enter the actual site. This is bad for both SEO and Bounce Rate. This is the page that will be indexed above all of your other pages in the search engines, which means your #1 position on Google has just left the building, you cannot fit many keywords into a short “Welcome” message, or send the spider straight to other links on your site, which will damage your subpage page ranks. Another problem is actual visitors, as lazy as they are, only want information. They do not care for a fancy looking “Welcome” page, and will likely hit the back button and choose a similar site to get what they came for.

09. Abusing Blending Options

Abused Effects
This is a very common beginner mistake. When you see all those shiny blending options, you just can’t help yourself, can you? But come on, we have all been there.
Remember when using effects, stick to web standards, a simple drop shadow and/or inner shadow, and/or a slight gradient.

08. Wacky Navigation

Bad Navigation
Another bad idea is irregular website navigation, usually accomplished by advanced designers and their love for all things Flash. You should never create navigation where the visitor will actually have to try to figure out how to change page. Yes, out of the box ideas can be good, but in situations like this, it is best to stick with a standard horizontal or vertical navigation bar.

07. Flash Intros

Flash Intro
Hold on, doesn’t this qualify as a Splash Page? Well, technically, yes, but Flash Intros are so annoying and useless that they deserve their very own number on this list. Nobody wants to sit and look at a loading bar for thirty seconds waiting for the intro to start, just to click “Skip the intro”, and most of your guests are likely to leave straight away.

06. Confined Content

Confined Content
This happens when the webmaster simply wants too much content to appear above the fold (before having to scroll down), but if you have some good information in the header, and a well formatted document, the guest is likely to read throughout the entire page anyway, whereas a page overloaded with information will often be neglected.
Always space out your text; making it easy to read, and always choose either a dark text on a bright background, or a bright text on a dark background, you should not use colours for paragraph text, though colours can format the page nicely if used as headers.

05. Automated Media

Automated Media
This has to be one of the most irritating aspects of flash abuse. There you are, browsing the web, when suddenly; some music starts playing out of nowhere that sounds like a ring tone from the late 90’s (no disrespect to Muse, MySpace was the best example I could think of). If you must have an audio or video option on your site, have it turned off by default, and provide the option to listen to/watch your media.

04. Horizontal Scrolling

Horizontal Scrolling
While some may like the look of horizontal scrolling, and the unique style of navigation on Portfolios, this is not a good way to present professional websites. How many of us have a horizontal scroller on our mouse’s? Not many at all, in fact, I do not even know if such mouse’s exist, which means the guest will have to scroll through the browser, which provides a bad user experience and can result in high bounce rates, which is why this is another one of those web things where we just have to stick to standards.

03. Image Content

Image as Content
Content is King. Google reads text, not images, not flash, TEXT, understand? Your content should be keyword rich and in text format, or it is all for nothing, and you can kiss your high rankings goodbye. The same goes for navigation bars, an image as a background is fine, but you want text for the actual links.

02. Tiled Backgrounds

Tiled Backgrounds
Does anything else have to be said about this? It simply looks horrible; never use tiled backgrounds, never, never, never, ever!

01. Everything Flash

Everything Flash
Having a full site in flash is the best way to destroy your online presence. As mentioned previously, Content is King. Flash content is unreadable by search engines, and having a full site in Flash is the worst thing you can do regarding Search Engine Optimisation.
Flash is a great tool to create animations or display media, but it does not belong in modern web design in whole. If your site is 100% flash, GAME OVER.

Is Article Submission Still An Effective SEO Tactic?

Posted in: Search Engine Optimisation at 12:12 pm,

Lately I have noticed a debate on whether Article Submission is still effective in Search Engine Optimisation or if it is no longer necessary. After reading through several articles, I have decided to write my own opinion regarding modern Article Submission.

In my experience, the answer depends on the quality of the article and the information it provides. If your website receives low traffic with anywhere between 0-500 unique visits per day, you should consider article submission. However, if your website is already gaining high traffic, with 500 unique visits per day and upwards, you would be better off keeping your content unique and submitting it to social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Del.icio.us and Twitter. Not many Article Submission back-links hold much weight from Google, whereas Social Bookmarking usually provides the highest quality back-link.

Quality Information

When writing an article for submission you should always write quality informative content that will make the reader want to know what else you have to teach them. When a reader feels content about the information they have just read, they will often click a link to your page to see what else you have written.

Many webmasters argue that you should always keep the best quality articles uniquely for your site, while this is true for larger sites; you will receive very little to no traffic by submitting your reject articles to Submission Services, you should submit a high quality article, with more high quality articles on your site.

Keywords & Links

Always write keyword rich content and make sure you include links back to your site and other related articles with quality keywords; do not over-do it, but having a couple of well keyworded links to related articles of your website can improve the click ratio from the article.

Format Your Article

You should always make your article easily readable by creating headers, spacing out text, and bolding/italicising necessary elements. A few pictures or charts/diagrams also often go down well.

Don’t Submit Everything

You should not submit every article you write, in order to keep a lot of your content unique, for a small site, submit one article for every five you write, for a medium site, submit one for every ten, and for a large site, one for every twenty. Remember to write as many articles as possible for your website, but only if you know what to write. Do not bother writing two paragraph short articles that provide minimal information on the subject, try to stretch the article as much as possible, explaining about everything you write.

The Importance of Valid Code

Posted in: Web Design & Development at 12:07 pm,

Learn the importance of valid hand-written code and understand how certain companies can afford to undercut other designers with such amazing offers.

The Importance of Valid HTML

I have seen it countless times before, throughout advertising forums and through word of mouth. Many web design agencies offer their services for a groundbreaking price of $100 for a five-page design. The average client does not see any problem with this and will happily go ahead and hire these guys without knowing why the services are so much cheaper than any other professional web designer.

Well this is either what they do not want you to know, or what they do not know themselves.

Search Engine Bots / Spiders

Every website is built using a mark-up language named “HTML”, standing for “Hyper Text Mark-up Language”, this code is how web spiders crawl through your sites content and find relevant information to send back to their respectful headquarters. Such web spiders often rely on valid coding to help navigate their way through the page, and without valid code, they can easily get lost and even lose any information gathered, or worse, they will leave your domain completely! Now said companies seem to have at least one hundred mark-up errors in their own site, so god knows what their client’s websites are like.

This is the main reason that valid (X)HTML code is so important, a properly structured website will allow the spider to easily navigate through your code, indexing relevant information then following the next link on your page and doing the same thing there.

Cross-Browser Compatibility

With valid mark-up also comes cross-browser compatibility, meaning that no matter what web browser your visitors are using, your site should look the same for them as it does for you. Invalid code can be a real nuisance with cross-browser compatibility, causing your sidebar to appear ten feet above your monitor and your navigation bar to be falling off the side of the screen. OK, I am exaggerating a little, but you will often notice bugs in invalid code whether it be one pixel off, or one hundred pixels off.

So next time when you’re looking for web design services, know that paying the extra cash pays off in both your businesses future and success, and remember, If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. ~James Goldsmith