Web Design & SEO For Small Businesses

Ranking your website above the SERPs for relevant keywords is key to any successful search engine optimization. Especially if you need to optimize for local search results getting your domain listed for the top 10 local search results will make a big difference. Local internet marketing is a very affordable method where you get targeted visitors for your business. Compared to organic ranking, local search marketing can achieve results much faster.

1) Keyword placement – Using the right keywords of your business. When you list your business for local search engines instead of using your business name use you main keyword phrase in the title of the listing. Also use major keywords in your description of the listings as well as under specialty or expertise fields.

2) Use you local address – Also use the local address while optimizing for local search marketing. One of the particular attention that search engines likes is the proximity of the address used in pages you are listing. Try to use your local telephone number for your local search marketing link building. emarketingmatador.com has a great list of directories for an effective local search marketing link building check them out.

3) User Review are important – Reviews always helps increase your conversation of your website. I don’t suggest to get fake reviews. Once you have successful completed your project of your clients ask them about giving an review for you in local search engine listings. Don’t try to fake user reviews. Visitors can easily identify a fake review from an genuine one and smart enough not to buy from you.

4) Display Images/Videos – Now local search engine listing allows you to have images, logos and even videos. Take advantage of these features while listing your business with google local and yahoo local. Logos and images will increase credibility  and branding. You can upload of your business premises picture as well. If you have a good marketing video upload that as well. Online videos spending has increase because online video drives engagements which will help you to accomplish your primary marketing objective of showing your unique selling proposition to increase your online leads and revenue.

5) Linkbuilding with local directories – Link Building is key for local search marketing, because local search listing is based on the weight of the backlink each site is gained. Check out your competitors in the local search listing and identify from where they are getting their local link juice identify those pages and try to get listed there. Try different cities and different niches and see from where they are getting those listings and get listed there.

6) Keep you business information up to date - Update your address and phone number in the local directories up to date. Most often we don’t keep track of directories/website where we submit the website, It is always useful to have a spreadsheet and add the listing when ever you make a submission.

If any of you have any other tips on local search marketing please provide that on the comments.

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Validation in Website designing provides guidelines for the web designers to prepare well structure and browser friendly website. Website validation ensure that the websites comply with web standards. A validated web page defines which version of html or XHTML is used to code the website.
It is necessary for browsers to process the document correctly. Here are valuable Firefox adds on for web page validation.

1.  HTML Validator – Validates HTML documents using the CSE HTML Validator engine for Windows. This addson require CSE HTML Validator for Windows. It is very simple to use and efficient in its performance. This is a great tool for web developers and web admins who want to go an extra mile. An excellent add-on!

2. W3C RSS Validator -
Validates a page using the W3C RSS Validator. Once you open the RSS feed into the browser window, you can right click on the page or goto the Tools menu and validate the RSS feed. The results will open in a new tab.

3. W3C CSS Validator – Validates a page using the W3C CSS Validator. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the CSS of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab. Will only work on pages that have a CSS file associated. For example it will work with http://www.w3.org/ as the URL has a CSS file.

4. W3C Page Validator – Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab. This is a simple extension that will work only for online pages.

5. W3C XML Validator – This is a very simple extension that validates W3C XML schema documents.

6. W3C Offline Page validator – Validates the source of a HTML/XHTML page via the W3C Markup Validation Service using the direct-input form. Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service, even if the page is not public.

7. Validaty – One Click Validator. Provides you a button to validate a page using a validator like…

8. Total Validator – Perform multiple validations and take screen shots in one go. This 5-in-1 validator works with external, internal, or local web pages using the Total Validator service or local copy of the desktop tool…

So that’s my list of 8 extensions for web page validation which will make your validation experience better. Some of them are very useful and essentical for every web designers. What Firefox Validation addons is your favorite please leave your comments.

Creating a website is only a part of the requirement for a successful online business. You have to also know how to make the website search engine friendly so that it gets a good ranking on search engines. So if website ranking is important to your website, you have to remember these tips to ensure that your website is search engine friendly.

1.    The first point to remember is to use unique tags that identify the content of the respective web pages of your website. Make sure this is generated automatically for your site as it will make a huge difference in the ranking of individual pages and products.

2.    The content of the website should be well structured and keyword rich. In addition to it, it should also have bullet points, highlighted words and heading tags to help search engines in crawling them.

3.    It is better to place your straightforward menu at the top of the page to make it easy to navigate the page. And if you have various deep level pages in the website, have a sitemap that is linked to the homepage for search engines to easily find it.

4.    Update the website regularly to keep the website fresh. This can be done with a cms (content management system) or blog. Fresh content on the website boost your keyword combinations and improves the chances of visitors finding you in their searches.

5.    Don’t use the same keywords on different pages as it reduces the value of a keyword on a particular page. It also makes it difficult for search engines to decide on which page to show on searches.

6.    Though Flash gives flashy ads for your website, it should be used sparingly as it does not help in improving the page ranking of your website.

7.    Make the layout of your website as clean as possible. This makes it easier for search engines to access your website. It is better to use Cascading Style Sheets for design implementation and to store scripts in external files.

8.    As search engines can’t read text in images, don’t do this. Instead use ALT tags to embed text in images.

9.    Your website should have a meaningful directory and file names with keywords in them as search engines pick them up faster.

10.    When linking to your home page, make sure the link is linked to the full domain name and not just to the file name. This increases the flow of traffic to your website.

Please leave your comments or if you have any other tips related to search engine friendly web design.

Cheatsheets provide an simple and excellent way to get an overview on specific topics. These 10 list of wordpress cheatsheets provide a quick find references to wordpress users. These wordpress helpsheets collection lists of frequently wanted information for WP users. Includes information on template files, snippets for both headers and footers, and more.

For those of you love wordpress will find these cheatsheets handy while working on WP. Please leave your comments and thoughts and any other cheatsheet which I have missed out.

1. The WordPress Help Sheet from WP-candy

2. Useful Blogging cheatsheet for WordPress users from Andy Wibbels

3. WP Help Sheet with basic templates to php snippets in wordpress.

4. WordPress Cheat Sheet for Theme Tags and Plugins

5. Advanced WordPress Help Sheet from WP Candy

6.A detailed WP Cheatsheet for wordpress files

7. Quick Reference guide for wordpress template and wordpress theme development

8. WordPress SEO Cheat Sheet for Web Designers

9. Very Detailed Optimized for Search engines Cheat sheets

10. Optimization Cheat Sheet for WordPress

You have been at sites where you wait to website to load within couple of second and gets frustrated and leave. Click and refreshing multiple times for the page to load and still doesn’t load full. Sometimes the images doesn’t load or the styles of the page isn’t loaded. Users expect your website to load fast or within couple of seconds then you will lose those visitors. To avoid these hurdles we have few tips on how to optimize and speed up the web page to load fast.

1) Compress your graphics
Recently there has been an explosion in do it yourself kind of web site programs out there. Add your text and upload your images, but the problem with these kind of programs are these images are not optimize to load fast. Use image editing program like photoshop and other online image editors to compress your graphic before you upload from to your website. Uploading your images straight from you camera might not bigger in file size and too big for the web.

2) Remove unnecessary fancy stuffs
Removing unwanted flashy flash movies and animated gifs which takes every to load your website is key to make your web page load fast. Also generate unwanted javascript and ajex files for cool and animation can cause delay in pulling the website quick.

3) Use your content wisely
Don’t use PDF, images and flash for your content in the web page. Present your web page content in standard HTML. It loads faster and is user friendly and easy to download.

4) Use Clean Code
One of the reason for slow download of your web page is because of the junk code in your HTML. The advantage of building web pages with HTML complying to the latest W3c standards is it elimnate most of the junk code as well as your web page would be compaitable with all browsers. The other advantage is it is search engine friendly which allows the search engines to index your web pages faster.

5) Pick Good Hosting
Most of the time when a web page takes time to load is due to their web hosting server. Host on a server which has fast processors. Looking for cheaper hosting always end up in bad server where tons of websites are hosting. Check with your hosting provider if you have a web site slow loading problem and move to a better ones.

6) Use Efficient web programs
Often most of the web designers and developers pick the wrong web program for their website like ecommerce and Content management system.
These programs are created to make the website functional easily and faster. For example the CMS you choose d to run the website has a lot of junk code in it, then the loading of the web page will be slow. Apart from these drawbacks most of these programs are not search engine friendly. Check out the online reviews of these programs before you buy it.

The bottom line is a fast loading website don;t make your visitors leave fast also it is a user friendly to your users.