March 24, 2010 by 1 Comment

Why Hire a Web Designer When I Could Buy a Template

web designer
* Why hire a web designer when there are 100s of template designs on the Net?
* Why invest money in a web designer when you can download a free template?
* Why wait weeks or months to have a site designed when you can get a ready-made template?

These are some of the frequently asked questions business owners have when deciding on building a website to sell their products and/or services.

7 top reasons to hire a web designer

1. Professional knowledge

A professional web designer who has been designing websites for 10 years has accumulated a ton of knowledge about what works well on the Net. He will be familiar with the common mistakes new site owners make when establishing an online presence and will know how to design a profitable website.

2. Customized design

If you want your site to stand out from your competitors you should not use a template. Chances are many other online users will have the same design. A customized website enables you to have a unique design that matches what you’re selling.

3. Less costs in the long term

A professional design can be less expensive in the long run because it was built with a solid foundation. This means it contains clean code, the web pages load quickly and are search engine friendly. Templates often contain proprietary code that contains html errors, loads slowly and are not optimized for the search engines.

4. Search engine optimization

A professional web designer will make sure your web pages are optimized for the search engines. This means the pages will validate for correct html, css, contain appropriate meta tags, heading tags, descriptive file names, clear navigational structure and image descriptions. Even though you may find a pretty template you won’t understand what’s in the code underneath the design unless you’re a web designer.

5. Familiar with marketing strategies

A beautiful website will not attract visitors on its own. It needs to be marketed frequently and consistently to generate a continuous stream of traffic. A professional web designer can help you implement powerful traffic generation strategies.

6. Website maintenance

Business owners often don’t have the time, knowledge or desire to update their websites. They prefer to have a webmaster who knows what they are doing and can quickly and easily add new content whether it’s text, videos, audios or images. The web designer can also install scripts to capture email addresses, add a forum, blog, RSS feeds or social media tools. He or she can track the progress of the website by monitoring site statistics.

7. Cross browser compatibility

If your website doesn’t display correctly in all the major browsers you’ll miss out on lots of visitors. A web designer will make sure your site appears correctly in Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari and Chrome.

When you buy a template you may save time and money in the short term however it may cost you dearly in the long term. Hiring a professional web designer will guarantee a top notch design that will help brand your business and give you peace of mind knowing that it’s been built correctly.

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Filed Under: Link Popularity, Web Design Tagged With: , , , ,
February 11, 2010 by 1 Comment

How to Optimize Your Website for the Search Engines


Do you want to generate lots of free traffic to your website?
How do you optimize your website so it’s search engine friendly?
How do you increase your search engine rankings?

website redesign

If your website achieves first page rankings on Google on any of the other major search engines you’ll receive lots of free traffic. Keep in mind there’s no guarantee you’ll achieve and/or maintain top rankings because search engines often change their ranking formulas. Your site may be at the top for several weeks then disappear because the formula has changed or competing websites have outranked you. Sometimes you’ll get top rankings in one search engine but not in the others.

10 Ways to Optimize Your Website for the Search Engines

1. Keyword research

This is the most important aspect of optimizing your website because people find your site in the search engines by entering specific keywords. Use the free wordtracker tool or google adwords tool to create a list of keywords related to your niche. Prioritize your list by displaying the keywords containing the most searches in ascending order.

2. Meta tags

These include the title, description and keyword meta tags.

  • Title meta tag: Write a brief (approx 6-10 words) description that describes what your site is about. Use your main keyword(s) in the beginning.
  • Description meta tag: Describe one of the main benefits of your site in 170 characters. Longer is fine but realize it may be cut short by some search engines. Don’t use the same description as your title meta tag.
  • Keywords meta tag: This tag has almost become useless due to it’s abuse however it’s a good habit to include it as some smaller search engines value its presence. Keep the length between 200 and 500 characters. The keywords should be separated by commas.

3. Heading tags

These include h1, h2, h3, etc and are primarily used for headings and subheadings in your content. This tells the search engines this text is more important than the main content.

4. Content

The first paragraph is the most important section of your content. It should include all the keywords and keyphrases of your title and description meta tags. Try not to place images, flash or video before the first paragraph so the search engines will find your content easily.

Weave your keywords into succeeding paragraphs but don’t overdo it. Using too many of them dilutes their power. Optimize each page with only 1 or 2 keywords. Use the thesaurus to find similar keywords instead of always using the same one.

5. Images

Only include images that relate or add value to the content. Optimize the images by using the “alt tag.” This is an html tag used to describe what the image is about. Search engines can’t read images but they can read the text descriptions contained in the code.

6. Validate the code

Code errors often prevent web pages from displaying incorrectly in the major browsers and can slow the loading of your website. Check for code errors with an html validator

7. Cascading style sheets (CSS)

CSS separates the design from the content. Whenever you need to alter a design element (e.g. color, width, etc) you just need to edit the CSS file.

8. Links

Use text links in your navigation menu and internal linking (linking to other pages or websites) so search engines can index them. Use anchor text (linked text) within your content to increase link popularity.

9. Web page speed

Web pages should load within a few seconds otherwise your visitors will leave. Avoid adding large or too many images, video, audio, javascript to your web pages. Place your your CSS and javascript in external files instead of inserting the full code in the web page.

Often web hosts overload their servers with too many websites causing them to load slowly. Check the load times of your web pages. If your website is correctly optimized and still loads slowly check your web hosting service.

10. Redirect non-www urls

Search engines read non-url pages (e.g. http:// http://www. www. domain.com) as all different pages. Insert 301 redirect code in the .htaccess file then upload this file to your server. (Read “How to Redirect a Web Page Using a 301 Redirect“) Now whenever someone enters any of those combinations they’ll get redirected to your full website address e.g. http://www.domain.com

Once you’ve optimized your website start building links to all your web pages. Your rankings will increase based on the number and quality of links pointing to it.

Related articles
Link Building Strategies Boost Search Engine Rankings
How Not to Optimize Your Web Page
Optimizing Title Tags – Top 10 Strategies Part 1
Optimizing Title Tags – Top 10 Strategies Part 2
Optimizing Keywords Meta Tags – 4 Top Strategies
Optimizing Description Tags – 7 Top Strategies

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Filed Under: Web Design Tagged With: , ,
November 30, 2009 by 1 Comment

Image Optimization – How to optimize your images for the search engines


horse pictures

Did you know that your web site images get indexed and ranked by the search engines?

If you correctly optimize the images on your web site they can achieve high rankings. For example if you enter “horse” in the Google search box you’ll see several horse images for the top results. When you click on any of these images it will take you to their respective web sites. Image optimization gives you a leg up on your competitors who may not have implemented this strategy.

How to optimize your web site images?

1. Optimize the file name

Use the keyword that describes the image in your file name. Instead of naming your horse image “image1” name it “horse.jpg”

2. Optimize your description

Search engines only read text therefore include your main keywords in the image description (alt tag). Make sure it clearly describes your image (and not something else). False use of this tag may alert the search engines you’re trying to trick them.


<img src="horse.jpg" alt="horse picture">

3. Optimize the image title tag

Example


<img src="horse.jpg" alt="horse picture" title="horse">

4. Optimize your content

The web copy surrounding your image also affects the position of your image in Google’s image search. So you would place the horse image within the copy containing horse content.

5. Include the width and height attributes

Larger images tend to do better than small images so include width and height dimensions to show search engines the size of the image.


<img src="horse.jpg" alt="horse picture" title="horse" width="640" height="480">

6. Optimize the web page

If you optimize your web page for a specific keyword it will do better in the search engines than a page that doesn’t have that focus. Using too many keywords in your web copy will dilute the ranking power for each keyword.

7. Use high quality images

If your image gets listed at the top of the first page it should be crisp and clear so visitors will want to click it to view the image on your web site.

Go through the images on your web site to make sure they are correctly optimized. It may give a boost to your current search engines rankings.

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November 13, 2009 by 2 Comments

How Not to Optimize Your Web Page


how not to optimize web page
If it’s blatantly obvious your web page has been optimized for the search engines Google may penalize you. In past years site owners stuffed hundreds of keywords in the keyword meta tag to improve their rankings. As a result this tag was rendered almost useless. The same could happen to your web pages.

Google frowns upon pages that have been over optimized and may lower your rankings as a result. This is why Google constantly changes their ranking rules.

Here are some of the most common places keywords are inserted on a web page:

  • domain name
  • tilte meta tags
  • description meta tag
  • keyword meta tag
  • H1, H2, H3 tags
  • file name
  • several times in the first paragraph
  • bolded text
  • multiple times throughout the web copy
  • hyperlinks in the web copy
  • navigation links

Inserting your keyword phrase in all these locations could trigger a spam filter as it’s obvious the page has been SEOed.

How should you optimize your web page?

Write naturally without thinking about where to place your keywords. If you’re always thinking about optimizing your content it will be obvious to your readers. The content may not flow well because you’ve included your keyword phrase too many times.

After you’ve finished writing your content go through it to check how many times you’ve mentioned your keyword. Shoot for 2%. This means 1 keyword for every 200 words.

Your home page should contain general keywords because it summarizes what your web site is about whereas the internal pages should contain more specific keywords related to your topic.

Instead of using the same keyword phrase throughout your web copy use several related keywords. For example if your main phrase is “article marketing” you could also use content marketing, content promotion, strategies for marketing with articles, etc. By using 2-5 words in your phrase your content not only reads better for your audience but it’s not obvious your spamming the search engines.

The next time you write web content let it flow naturally from your mind without correcting it along the way. Only edit when completed. This will enable you to churn out well written content quickly and easily.

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