Whether your company is large or small, you must have a web presence that works for your business. Commanding a powerful presence on the World Wide Web has become a table stake. A company’s web design details and web presence has replaced a wide array of communication vehicles. Nowadays customers, suppliers, and even potential investors form a first impression from a company’s web presence.
And it’s not just the homepage – a good cover followed by unfriendly navigation, hard to decipher visuals, or simply too many graphic images will ruin a visit to a website.
Next, you have to be sure that the front end, “the market engine,” is tied tightly to all of your company’s back-office functions. Everything must work smoothly so that billing, customer care and relationship management, inventory, shipping, and even sales can use your web presence as an integrated business tool.
So in a nut shell, here is basically the steps to great web design when you tie it into SEO and SEM. Getting yourself a favorable listing in search engines is a matter of following these two steps when designing your website pages.
Step 1: Use your TITLE Tag Properly!
Most search engines place a lot of weight on the content of your TITLE tag. Your page’s title is very important and you should design it properly. Do not set the title of your page to something totally unrelated to your site. For example: “Welcome!” or “Thank You For Visiting!” simply will not do.
When surfing the net I often see plenty of pages where the title is “Untitled Document” or “Title Your Page Here” – the page owner hadn’t even specified a title at all. It’s unfortunate because those pages are missing out on potential search engine ranking.
Your TITLE tag should clearly represent what your site is about. If you’re building a page that talks about your company’s products, the title should thoroughly reflect that topic. “Our Products” or “Product Listings” is a bad choice for a page title – people are probably going to be searching for your company by name or by the type of product you sell. Thus, using our website as an example: “Vancouver Web Design, SEO Vancouver, BC Web Design”. What ever business you are in, make sure your title tag reflects exactly who you are and what you do.
Also consider using keywords in your TITLE tag. For example, let’s say you’re selling real estate. You might want to make the title of your main page “Seattle Real Estate, Real Estate Agency in Seattle, Listing Homes, Property and Commercial listing for the Seattle Area!” As you can see, this title gets right to the point about the topic of the page. It also uses your keyword: “Seattle Real Estate,” and more specifically “Real Estate Listings in Seattle” (twice). Someone searching for “Real Estate” is more likely to find YOUR page than a page titled “Homes For Sale.”
Step 2: Keywords aren’t just for META tags
Over the years, META tags have been hawked as “the” way to get good listings in the search engines. Early on, this was true – when META tags were first created in the HTML specifications, search engines put a lot of weight on them. Several years ago you could literally boost yourself to the top of the search results by including repetitive keywords in your META tags.
However, META tags have now become the most abused part of web pages. People routinely add META keywords to their page which have no relevance to their site’s topic. For example, many webmasters use META keywords like “pics” or “mp3″ even if their site has nothing to do with those categories. They’re hoping that people who search for hot topics will stumble across their page and stop by.
Those tactics do not work anymore. META tags now carry a surprisingly low weight in all of the popular search engines. What is important now is the overall content of your page. Search engines have algorithms (methods) for determining what your web pages are really about. These algorithms are closely-guarded secrets, for obvious reasons. However, they all focus on one thing these days: the REAL content in your web page. If you create a web page about “The CompanyABC Business Opportunity” but include META keywords like “free pics” and “download music,” your site’s not going to be indexed under the topics you defined in your keywords. In fact, it might be rejected altogether!
Not only should you make sure that your META keywords tag appropriately reflects the content of your page, you should ensure that the text content of your page contains a good distribution of your keywords. Mention your company name often (and evenly) throughout your site.
For Example: “Our Company is the best company around. Imagine working at home and being your own boss – Our Company makes it possible! Your potential for earnings with Our Company is unlimited. Our Company allows you to sell as much as you want or as little as you want. The amount of money you make with Our Company depends on how much effort you put into your Our Company business.” Using your company name strategically and through out your web page is going to get you much higher rankings when someone performs a search for Our Company.
As you can see, the keyword (Our Company) is evenly distributed. Don’t try bunching up your keywords at the end of the page, that doesn’t work and may prevent you from being listed at all. You should concentrate on using keywords as part of your site’s content, and spreading them evenly throughout your text.
As you can see, these two steps are pretty simple. It’s all a matter of incorporating them into the design of your web pages – or redesigning your pages to fit, if your site is already live and submitted. There is never any guarantees that your website will end up #1 in the search results, but I do guarantee that if you follow these two steps you’ll achieve better overall rankings.
Above all else, avoid common spammer tactics like grouping keywords at the bottom of your page, or trying to “hide” keywords by making the text the same color as your page’s background. Search engines look for these methods and will often disqualify your page if they encounter what they think is spam.
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Tags: Communication Vehicles, Design Details, Great Web Design, Nut Shell, Title Tag, Web Presence
Posted in Web Design |
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With careful considerations, normally financial, high quality website design is often beyond the reach of small business organizations. Top web design services normally command a higher budgetary requirement. Still, with more firms offering web designs, as well as technology made more accessible, small business can now have high quality business website design that is not only easy on their pocket, but allows them to attain their business objectives as well.
Recognizing the importance of a good website design to generate traffic to small business to empower them to grow, some firms are providing their web design services for this purpose. As a matter of fact, even a massive company like Yahoo has began to provide this kind of services to small business.
Why is having a quality website design a key to a small business’ success?
A quality website design is essential for small businesses to make its mark in the Internet that is becoming the hub for e-commerce. More and more companies are building their presence on the World Wide Web through their respective web sites. So for them to survive, businesses should have the capability to break new grounds and be as imaginative as feasible. This is especially applicable to small businesses where they cannot compete head on with bigger corporations in terms of resources.
What is nice about quality website design is that it need not be as expensive to develop a successful web design. A great web design can spell success and earn millions for a small business.
A good quality website design for small business can also establish its identity and mark it differently from other small businesses. In a small business setting where everything is equal, having your own business identity is essential. A good website design will guarantee that you are a unique entity. It has the power to influence web site visitors to deal with you ahead of the others.
Success in web design for small business can materialize with the following:
• The design should be able to communicate the message of the firm to its target audience
• A good web design should excite internet visitors as well as generate interests
• The web design should be able to generate traffic and consequently increase business for the company.
• The design shall allow for faster results for the company
• A good design will allow for better use of available tools
• It shall also be able to take advantage of the benefits of technology
Many business companies are getting a grip of the importance and urgency of establishing a quality website design. In cyberspace, a high quality web design is a powerful instrument to stay alive in an intense and ever-changing world of competition. Small business wants to be heard. They want to be recognized. They need to legitimize their foothold on the virtual ground. They need to create an impact in the World Wide Web. They have to succeed. A quality website design can be their best tool.
Tags: Business Website Design, Great Web Design, High Quality Website Design, New Grounds, Own Business, Web Design Services
Posted in Small Business |
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