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.

Competitive analysis is a form of evaluation of your competition directly or indirectly with your business. The Good Advantage of Online competitive analysis is because you have access to your competitor’s business information and their website online which might not be able to gain similar information offline. This gives us a better opportunity for marketers to analysis the competitive data for their advantage.

Some of the benefits of conducting a online competitive analysis is it help to identify with whom you are competing against in the market and also to find what’s your strengths and weakness. Through Competitive analysis you can identify your unique selling proposition which your competition is not offering.

Here are the 10 best ways to identify your competitive analysis:-

1. Using a variety of resources to find where your competitor is bidding on Pay Per Click. If you think your competition is bidding on certain search engines and not on all then they are getting a good ROI from that pay per click, may be because of low competition in that particular pay per click search engine.

2. Identify who is coming up in the natural search results, because for a site to come up under natural search results means they have a well optimized site. So you need to focus in the same area they are focusing on your website from the optimization point.

3. Identify whether your competition is utilizing partnerships, outsourcing, and relationship with other websites and is it beneficial for your business to have these kind of relationship with other websites.

4. Need to find your competition is a member of business and trade associations, and registries and join them if it benefits and if possible to get a referral link on their websites which helps in your link popularity and online visibility.

5. Identify how your competition is making money from the website and their revenue model. Also look for more potential area where your competition is not targeting tap those areas.

6. During the course of analysis Use Practical method by ordering online and make use of your competition services to find how good is their customer services, how is their online sales process and identify what they are doing right or wrong and take advantage of their mistakes.

7. If your competition is offering free mailing or newsletter subscription join them to identify their marketing strategies.

8. Using search engine analysis from where they are getting backlinks, any bookmarks in social media sites. After identify from where they are getting these links try to get link on those web pages.

9. Analyze your competitors PPC ads which will give you how to modify your PPC campaign ads.

10. Use different online tools like Alexa, Compete, Ranking tools to find what are their rankings and ratings are and do that on a regular basis to find who they are doing compared to your website.

An effective competitive analysis gives you a lot of information about your competition and will discover your business strengths and weakness and improve your rankings online.

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.

Web metrics is key to understand who your customers are, where the web traffic is coming from and what kind of traffic is converting and increase sales of your products and services of your website. Without Analytics you would be wasting your high value marketing dollars into water after all your efforts to optimize your website and increasing traffic to your website.

There are several benefits a web analytics installed to your website:

1) Analytics will give you a detailed metrics of your website of each visitor so that you can focus on certain areas of your website which needs improvements.
2) It will allow you to track conversion rate and possibly increase that after analysis the metrics of your website.
3) Allow you to track all your marketing effort weather it is email marketing or search engine marketing based on data you receive from the analytics you can plan your marketing efforts.
4) Business decision can be made using the stats of your website to focus on which area of the business needs attention.
5) Allows you to see which area of the world you are getting traffic and the reason for that and improve that traffic to convert more.
6) Understand the kind of browsers and operating system the visitors are using to reach your website which allows you to create the website compatible with all these browsers and OS platforms.
7) Click path tracking of your website which is more likely to convert into a sale, membership or subscribers.
Determine the upwards and downwards trends of the products you are selling and divert the attention when it needs it.
9) Analytics allows you to identify referring sources of traffic from other websites and which one converts better and keep that traffic coming from those profitable referrals.
10) Website metrics allows you to measure do all sorts of traffic weather it is paid advertisements, free, directories and also offline marketing efforts.

The bottom-line is analytics will allow you to real time analysis of visitors interaction on your website can make changes to increase profits and sales.

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.