Web Design & SEO For Small Businesses

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.

Over-Relying on your home page – Most of the website owners thing home page is the most important page of their website, and give less importance to the other pages of the site. Off course the home page is the first and it tells a lot about your business, but ignoring the other pages of the site is a big mistake on part of the website owners. Also home page can go certain limit where you can put and get the maximum out of it. The success of your home pages should be passed on to the other insides pages so that it will also bring in leads and sales to your business. Over dependence of homepage for traffic will reduce your chance of getting more traffic to your website, since all the focus is given to the homepage most of the conversion will happen on the homepage and the rest of the pages on the site won’t convert, because of no call to action and no importance given.

Three reasons why you need to optimize inside pages.

1) More targeted content – your website conversion will increase if you have more inside pages optimized for different product and services. Since each inside pages has more relevant content it will rank well on the search engines because of the quality content.

2) Getting Authority in Google – The more content you have on your website it will help to get Authority status in Google check out my earlier blog posts on Google Authority listing. More content makes your website to be more relevant to your site and it will help you gain more credibility in the eyes of Google and higher in search engine ranking results.

3) Focused product page – Having a single page dedicated to a product will generate more pages to a website. Which in turn creates more pages and more focused product page with all details of the product which helps in your PPC marketing as well as unique product page will convert more.

4) More Pages mean more traffic – Having more pages can bring in more traffic to the site which means more sales and revenue to your business. Another advantage of having more pages helps you identify keywords which you would not have thought of. Optimizing for those keywords will benefit the site as well.

Recently most of the website owners started seeing a big drop in traffic some of them as much as 90% drop in traffic. Some of the owners also saw a drop in ranking as well for their main keyword terms.Do you think it is Google penalized for sites which is over optimized? A thread on webmaster world today there is a huge discussion about that.So what constitutes an over optimized pages? Below are few tips on avoiding over optimization of your web pages as well as keep your ranking on the search engines.

1) Don’t Over optimizing the title with repeating the keywords several times. Just focus on one keyword at the beginning of the title, and try to write the title as a sentence so that it is use for the human visitor.

2) Write your

Meta description title with less keyword density and try to add a variation of the keywords you are trying to target on that page.

3) Don’t make your H1 tags as keywords but make it a sentence and make sense to the user.4) Instead of using keywords strategically inside the content make keyword flow look like natural you can solve that problem using long tail keywords.

5) Don’t use the same keywords phrase to link back to the website use different variation of the keywords and make sure that look like natural in the eyes of the search engines. 

Reducing over optimization can get back your lost traffic but it is always try to do it right the first time so that way you don’t need to go through all these kind of trouble.

Google Recently started showing authority listing for some sites for search phrases either for their business name or keywords relevant to that category. Recently Nate Whitehill posted that his blog gained an authority listing. There are several factors which determine for Google to list your site as an authority. Till now nothing is clear about it, some evidence that links and relevant content could be the factor to be deemed as an authoritative.

If you are running a sitemap and have a Google webmasters account you can see weather you site has gain authority listing. Under Google Webmaster Tools on the right navigation you can see a link called links under that category you can see Site Links.

Some of my evidence shows the following factors determine a authority listing.

1) You domain name or business name used in link pointing to your website. Also the same term being using inside the content of the web pages.

2) The Domain name is been used as an anchor text while linking.

3) You Domain name or Business name has links from local directories and sites like Better Business Bureau.

4) The term people searches and the destination pages has a strong relevancy.

5) A search Query which has been searched for several times to reach that destination.

6) Link from higher Page rank web pages.

The bottom-line is relevancy and links of your web pages and anchor text of your business.

 

Most people when they think of website promotion, they think about search engine marketing. But actually there are different ways to promote a website without depending on just search engines to get targeted traffic. All you need to do is thinking in a creative way, try innovative ideas and different way how to promote it. Online Marketing is not just all about SEO it is all about Creative Marketing. If you can do it right, there is more waiting for your website to come out of sandbox, link popularity and dependency on Search Engines.

I have put together 25 different ways on how to promote your website online absolutely free.

1) Web Content optimization – Content is key to any website. If you website is optimized for search engine it will definitely going to be noticed and started getting traffic and links.

2) Link Building – Links are so crucial for online visibility not only to the search engine eyes but link from good relevant sites can bring you targeted traffic and get noticed.

3) Article Distribution – Article syndication is one of the best and cheapest way to promote your website. There are hundreds of article directories out there to promote.

4) Online Press Releases -Online Press Release or press statement is a perfect way to attract media attention or publicity for products and services of your business.

5) Freebies – Giveaways and Freebies can attract a lot of attention as well as links from other websites. If you can create a unique tool or useful free product online it can get noticed and drive traffic to your site.

6) Unique Ad Creation – Pay Per Click Campaign is all about how you create a good ad, the more unique the better, A well written ad gets attention of the search engine visitors and will click on your ad.

7) List Building Email promotion – List building or email list building is a good way to bring visitors to your website, if you provide a newsletter subscription or free advice on your niche you have the right to ask for the visitors email address and name which can be used for future promotions.

Blogging – Blogging is a newest buzz word out there every business are getting into this new web2.0 marketing technique. Blog commonly knows as web logs where visitors can engage in a conversation.

9) Sponsored Reviewing – A review about your website is another way to promote your website or blog. There are several blogs and website that does this.

10) Commenting – Comments on review sites and blogs is a another way to do a promotion. If you comment and engage in a conversation in blogs which is relevant to your industry chances people will visit your website.

11) Social Media – This is the new craze among marketers Place like Facebook, Myspace, digg and stumbleupon can bring in tons of traffic if you promote it properly.

12) Online Contests – Facilitate and run contests on your website can get viral if people willing to participate in contest will spread the word through their website and blogs.

13) Forum Posting – This is the place where like minded people hang around, So to get noticed you need to engage in threads asking question and answers related to your topic.

14) Video Marketing – Videos are an effective way to promote your website. If you can broadcast relevant videos related to your industry visitors will folk to your website.

15) Affiliate Marketing – affiliate, reseller, and associate programs will allow your products and services to be listed on other websites which increases sales.

16) Mobile Media Marketing – can be mobile advertising, mobile search, mobile messaging, ring tones… and this is still in its early stages.

17) E-books Marketing – E-book marketing is a great way to achieve popularity of your website, If you can offer free tips and ideas via e-Books which can be downloaded for free it can create a viral effect.

18) Joint Venture - Same Target Customers and Partner Up With other online marketers who share the same niche you can sell your products to their list as well visa verse. But doing joint ventures you can get targeted traffic.

19) Banner Advertisements – One of the oldest forms of online advertisement to get noticed online still it works if you can create a eye-catching banner ad.

20) Sponsored Links – Search Engines hate this but still you can get a sponsored link weather it is do follow or no follow on high traffic relevant website it is a great way to promote a website.

21) Testimonials – A strong guarantee makes it safe for prospects to give you a try. A customer who is indecisive about your product or service may go ahead and give you a try if there’s no risk. The guarantee will push many customers “over the edge” when there’s doubt about making the purchase.

22) Podcasting – Podcasting your website content is another way to promote your website. Your digital media files which are distributed over the web would be downloaded into media players and listeners will follow your website.

23) Classified Ads – Classified ads online through Craigslist.com, usfreeads.com, Squidoo, Hubpages is another way to promote your website.

24) Local Search – If you website is local based then you can submit you Local Search databases like Google, Yahoo and MSN local as well as other local directories.

25) Interviews – Finally if you an expert in your niche you can offer interviews in different websites and blog which will give more exposure to your website.

Hope these techniques if implemented in your online marketing to-do list you can see success in your online venture and also I think this atleast motivates you to start. If you feel that there are other different ways please, feel free to comment.