Web Design: Usability and SEO-Friendly by Natalie Aranda

The idea of Web Design has changed quite a bit in recent years. In the early days of the Internet, everyone was playing around with web design. A person with a bit of knowledge of HTML codes could put together a nice looking website in a couple of nights work. In some ways that has not changed. It still is easy to make your own website, and millions of people are doing it. However, the wide spread use of the Internet for commercial purposes has created a demand for something that goes beyond just the simple construction of an attractive site.

If your site is intended to generate business, then it must have traffic. In what is called the brick and mortar businesses, traffic is important. If you have a store located on a back street out of sight, you have to find other ways to let people know it is there in order to generate customers. A website that no one can find is like a store building on a back street. No one will see it, and it will get no traffic.

The way that a site becomes seen is by coming up high on search engines. This is the essential element in proper design. The methods that enable a site to have a high search engine ranking are known as SEO. This is search engine optimization. The techniques of search engine optimization are not the kind of things that amateur web designers can master quite as easily as they could create a simple site. They include such things as link building. Link building is the placement of links on other sites that point users back to your site. The number and quality of the links that do point back to your site is one of the most important criteria used by search engines to rank your site.

It has to be understood that even when your site is intended to be specific, it must still have search engine optimization. For example, if your site is a Utah based mortgage company, it is still going to rank high on a search engine when that is the criteria entered on the search. Utah web design or mortgage web design must consider SEO-friendly principles in order to rank high even on such specific searches. The most important fact in the generation of high traffic levels is that people will tend to visit the highest ranked sites that come up on a search engine list. If you want to generate traffic to your site and your business, you must give consideration to SEO principles in the web design and mortgage web design.

About the Author

Natalie Aranda is a freelance writer.

Take Your Business Online and Grow... by Nicole McCullum

With over 2 billion Internet users and nearly 200 million users in North America alone according to internetworldstats.com, the practicality of taking your business online is obvious. In case you need further convincing, take a moment to think of the number of emails you receive per day, the last time you searched the Yellow Pages for a listing, or the number of times a business associate or prospect asked, "What's your website address?"

The Internet has become more and more mainstream for business owners and most now take for granted that their companies must have an online presence. Some businesses have websites just to say that they have one, while others recognize the important role a website plays in their overall marketing strategy. Whatever your reason, you should know that if you're going to invest the time and money in developing a website, you should reap every advantage it can offer:

Global Awareness of Your Business - The Internet is made up of multiple distribution channels such as online directories, e-zines, blogs, networking forums and more that can generate awareness of your business, products and services through linking, submitting articles or interactive participation.

Level the Playing Field - Whether you're a mom-and-pop shop or a Fortune 500 company, whether you're doing business on Main Street or Wall Street, establishing your business online gives you the presence and image to compete at every level.

Put Your Best Foot Forward - Your website can reinforce or replace your corporate print material and work 24/7 to promote and sell your products and services. Unlike print brochures, catalogs and other static media, your online information can be enhanced on the fly, allowing you to adapt to rapid changes in business climates, inventory, customer needs or to your competitors.

Get More Satisfied Customers - An online presence will allow you to provide your customers or prospects with immediate answers to their questions without their waiting for your physical storefront to open, being placed on hold, or awaiting delivery of your company brochure. Saving your customers time in turn saves you the exorbitant cost of print advertising design, manufacture and mailing - and possibly the cost of losing your prospect during the wait.

Reduce Operating Costs - You can sell your products and services online and automate responses to customers without the need for additional sales or customer service staff.

Minimal Investment, Higher Returns - Whether you build your website yourself, purchase a low-cost template or get a custom design by a professional designer, a successful website produces a higher return on investment than any other medium. Consider the cost of a website compared to the expense of an ad in the Yellow Pages, print marketing materials or the additional staff required to offer round-the-clock service, and you'll find that a website can offer your business greater exposure, savings and profit potential than other methods for only a fraction of the price.

The fact is that the world of online commerce is thriving and if you're not there yet you should be - to ignore this trend is nothing short of committing business suicide. To help you get there I'd like to share a few important steps and tips to make your trip to the World Wide Web a success:

1. Know your reason for going online. Whether it's to replace your company brochure, sell your products and services or lend credibility to your business, knowing your purpose will help you achieve your goals and objectives faster.

2. Hire a professional web designer. Of course you can attempt to build your website yourself or rely on your friend's nephew, but having an amateur website will only hurt your business. It's not the image you want to portray to prospective customers and it certainly won't give your business the credibility it needs to compete.

3. Select an appropriate domain name. Your domain name is your online address; the easier it is to remember the better for business. Keep it simple and make sure it appropriately represents your business. I suggest using your business name if it's available.

4. Get the right hosting provider. Your hosting or Internet service provider will give you the space you need to put your business online. Make sure they have at least 99% uptime, because whenever your host's servers go down your website will too, potentially costing you business. Make certain they offer 24/7 customer support so you don't waste excessive time troubleshooting.

5. Find a happy medium between copy that sells and keywords. Installing the right keywords may make your website more appealing to search engines, but remember that your text is also being used by your prospective clients to decide if you're the right choice. Hire a professional copywriter if necessary.

6. Market and promote your website. Once you've successfully taken your business online, it's important to promote and market it effectively to reach the 2 billion-plus users on the Web. You can do so by submitting your site to online directories, optimizing your site for search engines, gaining top search engine placement using pay-per-click, and placing your web address on all marketing collaterals including business cards, direct mail, email signatures and more.

About the Author

Nicole McCullum is the Director of Business Development for Captivate Designs (http://www.CaptivateDesigns.com) a leading Web and Graphic Design and Internet Marketing firm dedicated to helping small and mid-size businesses achieve online success. You may reach her at Nicole@captivatedesigns.com .

Best tips to improve your web site by usha rani

Content information rules

The most significant thing to remember about well-liked web sites is that they should always be rich in content.

First impressions matters

You first need to think about the communication you are sending to your own customer. The first page of your web site needs to be of brief description of your website. You page should not be too busy - attract visitors to dig deeper into your web site through the use of appealing text and attractive graphics. If you are serious about your business through website then purchase your own domain name and don't use any "free" hosting service.

Design your sites and not the pages

Your first concern needs to be the site's complete design. When you are starting to design a new site from scratch, you can try to make a design, which would make sense to users, has a reliable look and feel, and is not too difficult to expand in the near future. The uniformity of design of a site is one of the factors, which differentiate amateur sites from qualified ones.

Get around easy

Your viewer should be able to easily navigate to any required page in your web site from one page to another page. It's again significant to link in a reliable, well thought out manner so that the users could learn to navigate. Have clear links on your pages and, if you are selling a product, make it trouble-free for people to purchase it! Show your business name; address, phone number and other E-mail address on every required page. Invite customers to get in touch with you with their questions and comments or feedbacks. Add links to other sites only when it is actually required, or on a particular links page at the end of your site. You desire visitors to go through your site before moving off to another!

Be a stranger

Once you are done with your web site outline, view it in other browsers. Does it look like you required it to look?

Keep it current

Come up with new reason for people to surf through and revisit your pages and suggest them to their friends. This could be in series of articles, tips, a daily cartoon, or other interest catching event. The words most probable to draw visitors are: Free and Special. Be sure you really offer something of worth if you use these words!

About the Author

Usha Rani is a Copywriter of Vancouver Web Design. She written many articles in various topics.For more information visit: Web design Vancouver. contact her at atomic55.net1@gmail.com.

Search Engine Optimization and a New Meta Tag

Yahoo is now recognizing the “NOYDIR” meta tag. They have added the NOYDIR meta tag for the sole purpose of allowing web site owners control over what our free indexed listing display.

Yahoo has been pulling web site listings from the open directory for many years now. The Open Directory data base is web site content that has been added by human editors (DMOZ.org). When you do a search for a keyword, you will see very detailed results and very short results. The short results are from the open directory data base and do not reflect the information in your title, description, and keyword meta tags.

Yahoo came out with a new meta tag that would dismiss the content in the open directory data base "NOYDIR" and index the meta tags in the web page instead. Now, web masters and search engine marketing experts can finally take control of what is displayed in the free listings.

You may be getting great placement in Yahoo’s free listings but if the information displayed doesn’t do your web site justice, you may not see much web site traffic from it. Add the NOYDIR meta tag today. Google, MSN, and the other major engines do not recognize this tag and your results will not be affected in these engines.

SEO the Waiting Game of Search Engine Marketing

As a professional Search Engine Marketer, I have tried every ethical optimization technique available to try to achieve top search results. Some work well and others don’t show any sign of improvement in ranking once completed.

What I have come to realize is that search engine optimization and good ranking take diligence and lots of patience in achieving great Search Engine positioning.

You can have the right keywords, the right met tags, quality page content, great back links, and submit to engines regularly. There is not magic wand you can wave to see your listing suddenly blow your competitors site off the map and get you in that top spot.

A new site can take anywhere from 1-6 months to show up in the search engines with the right SEO techniques. Existing web sites can take anywhere from 1 to several weeks for the adjustments you made to show the new positions.

Each search engine will update its data at different times. Google may index your site data within a week after you make your adjustments and take another week to shift your position for the keyword. MSN may take 1-2 weeks to index your data and your update your new positioning. Yahoo can take up to a month to update you web site data and positioning. Be patient it will happen.

I recommend optimizing your sites with the time frame in mind. If you advertise holiday specials, then you need to optimize you specials page in advance to target the holiday keywords.

Your Search Engine Marketing Strategy should be part of your overall Search Engine Marketing plan. If you have available funds, pay for paid inclusion or pay per click advertising for the keywords you wish to target while you are waiting for the natural placement to occur.

When you start to get great placement in the free ads area, turn off the pay per click ads for those words. Now you’re getting free traffic.

Remember free placement does not happen over night. You have to be patient, do your work, and make sure your information is relevant to what you want to list for in searches.

by Shawn Hickman

Choosing a Web Designer the Easy Way

by Steven Gardner

When you choose a web designer, there are many things that you need to be aware of and that need to be taken into consideration before you make a decision.

To some extent, the ability to work successfully with your web designer is sometime as important as their actual skill in being able to deliver the project.

A web designer that is skilled in what they do but is a pain to deal with can make the whole process frustrating and not worth the money being spent, especially if you have an emotional attachment to the project (which you should have being the one supplying the money and motivation)

That relationship can be worth a large proportion of the contract. However, there are some key things you need to consider. Be careful in what you get for your money. Some possible pitfalls you may want to check on

Obviously what do you get for your money

What is included? Design, Content, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Graphic Design, Updates? You need to get these details so you can compare your quotes against each other. You also need to quantify some of these things in terms of quantity, hours, numbers search engines submitted to etc.

How easy is it to incorporate your branding

Some template sites are hard to blend a logo or colours into them, be wary of template driven website companies, some of these people are skilled enough only to change the text on a template. Some designers design their sites from the ground up incorporating all of you design elements in their design. These companies offer the most flexibility.

How reliable is the services provided

With hosting and email, too much down time can make the whole experience unworkable. You don't want to have to change hosts after six months because your designer has provided you with a poor host. Some people rely heavily on email and these are the people that need to choose carefully so their business inst impacted.

What are the costs for making changes later on?

Updates and maintenance on your site is something that will eventually happen, even if you don't change the content frequently (see the Making Your Site Super Sticky Article for the benefits of this) you will eventually change some content and so you need to know what it will cost over a year.

Hidden costs

Make sure common things (like search engine submissions) are either not included or are an extra cost. Some key things can be omitted to keep the price down. Make sure you don't get sold short. An important one...is the web designer doing the job part time Are your web designers doing this as a full time job? Some designers are working during the day and then web designing at night. A lot of designers started out this way, but it can cause issues when you need something done and they don't do the job from 9-5.

If all these things check out then you have found someone who you can work with and provide you with a service that will get you your desired result.

Remember; choose a designer with the right skills, but also one you believe you can work with on an ongoing basis. Build a working relationship that will benefit you both and your web project will benefit as well

Steven Gardner runs DeepWeb Web Design, a web design business that caters to all businesses looking to get an edge with their presence on the Web, providing web design, maintenance and consulting services. You can find him at www.deepweb.co.nz

The Art and Science of Webpage Building

Webpage building is partly an art and partly a science. Art comes into play when you want to create websites that are visually pleasing. Science is also important because you need to understand the method that goes into building pages that are optimized properly for search engines.

If you want to make your own website that stands out among the many competing sites on the web already established, you will need to keep the art and science of webpage building in mind at all times. In other words, you need to create websites that are search engine friendly and user friendly all at the same time. Here are a few specific tips that will help you through the process:

Make the Site Easy to Navigate Today's web visitors are impatient and more than a little finicky. If they come across a website that is hard to navigate, they'll log off and go elsewhere. This is extremely important to keep in mind during the webpage building process. The site should be easy to navigate and should be set up so that the user does not get trapped in one section. If they hit the back button, it should take them back to where they were. When you make your own website, you will also want to put a link to the home page on every other page you create.

Watch Out for Broken Links Nothing is more frustrating to a user than clicking on a link that doesn't work. When you create websites, you should periodically review all of your outgoing links to make sure that they actually go somewhere. While this won't be something you need to do every day, it should be something you take care of once a month and during the initial phases of the webpage building process.

Keep Content Fresh If you want to make your own website, but don't want to keep updating it with new content, you might want to rethink the idea altogether. The only way to create websites that stay fresh and keep visitors coming back for more is to consistently update the site with fresh content. If you have the same old stuff on your site from month to month, visitors will notice and so will the search engines. Webpage building is an ongoing process. Anyone who tells you differently is lying.

About the author: Cliff Posey, owner of CRP Marketing, owns and operates webbusinesstoolsonline.com Cliff Posey has also operated several other successful web businesses including Love Song Cards and Radio Career Consultants. The content in this article was developed from his experience in these businesses and his continual research into further business improvements.