by Artisan | Website Design Journal
Definition of SEO
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It is a buzz phrase for the process involved in making a website easy to find for search engines and making the website rise in ranking in the search results when someone types a particular phrase into the search engine. The most important thing to determine is what key words or phrase will someone type into Google to find information just like yours.
General Rule
Anywhere from 300 to 300,000 websites might be competing for that same key word. To rise above them, you have to offer them the best information for that topic. You have to include that search phrase in several places across your website. The best place to put that phrase is in headers and titles. But it is also important to include it in all the text of all your information, and your information should continue to grow.
What Google Sees
A search engine only sees and considers the words in your website. The images won’t help you, with one exception; if you name your image files with relevant search phrases, you might appear in “image searches” which will then link back to your website. So that can help too.
Think Local
If most of your customers are going to be local to you, then don’t target the entire country or the world. Include your location in your text. Let the search engines know where you are located. Embrace your location. If you want to go national, leave out your specific location and emphasize your country. If you want to go global, leave off the location altogether, but be aware that the larger the region you are targeting, the larger the competition for that search phrase.
How to use the Tag.
When you use a key search phrase in a Post or Blog Article, consider also applying Tag Phrases to that article that match the search phrases you included in the article. If the phrase is not in the article, using it for a Tag will not help you. Search engines like Google have gotten very good at discriminating between well written information and bogus ramblings with too many occurrences of the same phrase. Write well, write often, and write a lot.
The Journal is your SEO Power Factor
These tips are your best strategy for achieving high search rankings. Your website design should include a journal, or blog, to give you the tools to grow and improve your SEO. Your blog is your SEO power factory. Nurture it, grow it, be helpful and informative in all you write. The basic rules of good SEO are pretty simple to understand. However, putting them into practice requires a good writer and a lot of good writing.
Guidelines for Optimal SEO in Website Design
- Include your primary key word in page titles.
- Use key words in your writings.
- Use key words properly, not excessively.
- Write more and more content relevant to your field.
- Link to other websites with relevant content.
- Include relevant content of every media you can.
- Use only perfect grammar and clear language.
- Write a relevant meta description.
- Making sure your website is properly compatible in mobile devices.
- Build pages that load fairly quickly.
If you follow these guidelines, with all the regular effort it requires, your website will rise in the search rankings over time.
by Artisan | Website Design Journal
Of course, your website design is the most important feature of your marketing plan. Your website is the intended destination for all your customers, and it is where they decide whether nor not to buy from you. What is the second most important marketing venue. What are the options?
- Direct Mail | USPS Mail & Email Coupons and Invitations to past customers.
- Google Adwords | Buy Advertising Space on Google Search with Click Through Fees.
- FaceBook Advertising | Also with Click Through Fees.
- Social Networking | Creating Free Advertising by Networking with Friends and Associates.
Your past and present customers will always be your greatest resource for improving business. If you don’t have many customers yet, then it is time to reach out to your local community. If you don’t have one, then it is time to start building one. Bring your local community into your Social Network profiles as friends. Start with real friends. People need to connect on a human level, not digital only. But if someone is a friend of one of your real friends, you have a better chance to build trust and a new relationship.
Active Social Networking is Guerrilla Marketing. Your investment is time, the composition of well planned information, publishing to the network, and providing a good reason and a measurably result. Thanks to the internet, there are no barriers to global publication. The social network websites that are regarded as the most widely traveled and used in the USA are:
If you are wildly ambitious, or well funded, you will engage all 5 of these at once. If you are lean and practical, you will choose one to start and do a good job.
Everyone loves video. It has many applications. YouTube is a social networking venue. People collect videos and subscribe to your profile when they like you. You can communicate to them with comments and new videos. When you provide real entertainment or real information, people come back. They will learn what you sell. By setting goals of creating a series of interesting videos, you will be gathering valuable content to use on FaceBook and Google+. This exciting content will attract new people to join your network. The most advantageous creative content is video, usually accompanied by a title and synopsis in words.
LinkedIn, Google+, FaceBook, Twitter, can all be managed in one tool such as HootSuite. In a different way, it can be managed from your website if it is built in WordPress with the right plugin. I is certainly important that you fuse your social networks with your website. They are all supposed to be supporting your website by bringing you more traffic.
Seriously, your present and past customers and friends are your most important social network. If you can’t reach them on FaceBook or YouTube, then find a way to reach them. You best goal should be to meet face to face or talk on the phone with happy customers and ask for referrals. This is basically all that you are doing on FaceBook with a growing collection of strangers. Let them get to know you. Send them video that you have collected on YouTube or Vimeo. Give them a personal touch. Just because they follow your FaceBook page, doesn’t mean you have met them and that you are friends yet. Make and effort to make friends. That is social networking.
by Artisan | Website Design Journal
First of all, it is not free. The free trial is limited in functions and designed to make you want to pay the fee and get more tools. The cost is similar to a shared hosting service. Weebly, Squarespace, Wix, they are hosting companies. The difference between them and other hosting companies is that customers must use a website builder tool to build websites. Godaddy has a website builder too while also offering shared and dedicated hosting alternatives. Eventually, more hosting companies will provide website builders.
Here is a chart comparing the features of the top six companies:
Review Chart on Website Builder Hosts
Not all templates on website builders are fully compatible with mobile devices, and I find that the choices for templates are usually limited, and these themes have limited features too. There is a good chance that many other websites look a lot like yours. You will often get halfway into designing a website to find that a design feature that you wanted doesn’t exist in that template, and there isn’t much you can do about it. If you ever want to move your website from one of these site building hosts to another hosting company, it is not going to be as easy as it would if you had built your website with your own customer WordPress installation and a top of the line theme.
The real question is this? Do you want to build your website yourself, or hire someone else to help you?
You can also hire a website designer with experience in marketing design, information presentation and copy writing to build a better website for you than you could alone. A good designer doesn’t need a builder tool. He/she will have his own custom collection of tools and his own set of standards for how a website should behave. A good website designer can offer you many features that you won’t be offered on a builder tool and help you with photography and copy writing and overall presentation.
If you are a business, you must have a website. Websites are the primary form of advertisement on planet Earth in 2016. It should be important to you that your website is as good or better than your competitors. It will make a difference. It is hard to achieve the quality you deserve if you have no experience building websites. The way the information is presented is important. Can you write marketing copy well? Can you make interesting graphic representations of your information? Do you know what people expect to see on a website?
If you can reach your goals on your own, that’s good. If you want help, hire a website designer who can write market copy and design information and knows the rest of the online marketing world, and work together. You will get a better product with better ideas and land more customers.
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by Artisan | Website Design Journal
Imagine you have become enlightened. You know that one of the top 3 most important platforms of advertising you could possibly add to your business is a state of the art, professionally designed website. The first website you had was thrown together by a friend or relative for free, but you know this will no longer be enough. You have matured and so have your business objectives. You are ready and willing to pay professional rates to a professional designer for professional results, but you still don’t want to pay top dollar. You want to keep the cost down as much as possible, while not sacrificing quality and effectiveness. Realize that nothing comes of nothing and that to save money, you have to save the designer some effort and time by doing some of the work for him. You just have to determine which components of that work you have the skills and the time to complete. This article should help you move in that direction.
Photography & Graphics
.We can schedule a time when all your employees are dressed nicely and on site. I can travel to your office and take photos of everyone, then return and crop them for upload, and you can pay me for all that time. Or you can tell all your staff that you need portrait photos by the end of the week and that the world is going to know what you look like, so make them professional.
If you have many products, or even a few products, you probably already have photography for those products. Find the original JPG files of all those photos and get them ready to send to your web designer. If you do not like the photos you have, maybe you could take new photos with your phone camera and send those. The most important rules for achieving excellent product photos is as follows:
- Set up a clean and intentional background
- Get close, include the entire item with a little room at the edges
- Set up bright lighting, or do it outside in the sunlight.
- Hold the camera very still, and take several shots.
If you follow these rules with any photos you take, I bet you 10 dollars you will succeed.
You might also have some kind of concept you need to convey using more than words, using a diagram or a chart or some kind of illustration. It is important that this graphic clearly respresents the information and has a professional look. AquaJazz can clean up these graphics for you, but if you take the time to clearly sketch some idea of how you wish to represent the information, this will save you money during the web design process.
If you want some kind of big, attractive slide show on the home page, this will require big, attractive photographs. To save you a lot of money, you should find those photos in your own collection, or ask someone you know who is good at photography to provide them for you. The alternative is that AquaJazz will spent several hours searching through large online collections for ideal candidates, then ask you to pay anywhere from $50 to $100 each to buy the rights to use them on your website. Again, I can stage and produce custom photos for you, but if you find them yourself, you will save lots of money. Web designers do not have a magical source for beautiful free photos. Free photos are usually free because they are not attractive.
Verbal Content | Market Copy | Sales Pitch
Perhaps you have a print brochure containing some literature. Start there. You might also have some literature from the wholesalers of your products. Gather that. Perhaps you recently wrote a powerful sales letter to a prospective client, and that letter sold them on your services. That letter could have valuable material for a page of the website. Include that in the material that you hand to your web designer.
Do you truly have a clear and organized description of your services, written by someone who can write well? If not, this is the time you need one. Be sure that the literature you want to put on your website contains the terminology relevant to your business and your customers. The words in your website are what search engines use to find you. Graphics make your website beautiful. Words do the marketing. Without words, you are an invisible hot dog stand in cyberspace with a missing objective.
Technical Details
Every website has a domain and a hosting plan. The domain may have been purchased at the hosting company, but the hosting company might be the wrong kind of hosting company to upgrade your website. In that case, we have to move you elsewhere. It takes time to extract your domain from a registrar to move it elsewhere. Sometimes all we need to do is change the DNS number of the domain at the registrar to point to a new hosting company. Allow time for this. There are many shabby, overpriced hosting companies. Some are not even hosting companies, but brokers taking your money for doing nothing. If you are on one, I will move you before I build a new website.
To determine all these details, and to get you set up, you will need to send the web designer your usernames and passwords to all related accounts. I have to enter those accounts to build the website.
Draft an Outline
Go find a website built by a competitor to your business, or something similar. Make sure that you actually believe that the website is well designed. Examine what they did. Take notes. Gather ideas. Pay attention to what pages they have. What is on those pages. Why? Are they useful pages? Do you want those pages on your website? Make a list of the pages you think you need and what should be on them. Write it all down.
Delivery
Make sure all this material is in stored in the form of computer files. Now, attached it all to several emails and send it to me. If you have done a good job, my job will proceed smoothly and you will get a truly professional website for a reasonable price, and it will get completed quickly.
So there you go, Portland Oregon. If you want to save money, be prepared. I will help you with all these things any time you like, but there is a lot you can do too.
by Artisan | Website Design Journal
What are the dangers to your website in 2015?
Here is what can happen. Robotic password finders attempt to log into your website by pounding on it until they decode your password. Malicious code can be injected into a plugin or page that redirects users to other websites like pornography. You might not even know that you clicked a link in an email that put a trojan virus on your computer that has stolen all your passwords and personal information, then they break into your accounts and do damage. This last one is very bad and would require extensive repair that I can’t even get into right now. Don’t click on links from strange emails without consulting the source first. The other two can be prevented most of the time by proper website assembly. This is why you need to hire a professional website designer.
AquaJazz equips websites with protection from hackers,
Security monitor and firewall plugins can protect you from most invasions, or at the very least, alert you when they happen and provide a fairly quick clean up solution. You need a good password, and you need to change it to a new one at least every few months or even more often. If you have the kind of website that might be a frequent target, we have to install very high security plugins and set them to maximum protection. This sometimes involves a fee to the plugin developer. Some of the free plugins are enough for most websites, and these plugins are quite sophisticated and only available to websites built with a CMS like WordPress. If you have a hand coded website, it probably won’t pass the test on a tablet or smart phone, but worse, it is probably going to be very vulnerable to hackers.
If you are invaded, and the damage is extensive
The best repair strategy is to revert to a version or copy of the website that existed before the hack. You can only do this if you have been backing up the website regularly. This can be an automatic task scheduled and executed at the hosting panel, or facilitated with a plugin that sends you copies that you save on your computer. Now you know, but keeping track and making it happen is what your website designer should do for you.
by Artisan | Website Design Journal
Your website might need a MakeOver if . . .
- The page is clinging to the upper left corner of the browser.
- The print is tiny, or too big, or both or all mixed up.
- The color scheme is kinda dirty, sort of depressing.
- The background is busy and the print is not readable.
- There are too many colors, and they are not complimentary.
- There are too many type style fonts and their ugly.
- The photography is amateur and uninviting or out of focus.
- The images are too small and scattered around randomly.
- The reader has to choose from 30 to 75 different links.
- It’s hard to decide what to read first.
- The page is too narrow when it could fill the screen.
- Each page looks like a new website, not design consistent.
- There are links that are broken, or lead nowhere, or too old.
- There is no clear call to action or objective to each page.
- You have to search for the phone number and it isn’t linked.
- The website is difficult to navigate on a mobile device..
- The website does not inspire customers to contact or buy.
- You are not getting any business from your website.
AquaJazz would like to give your website a MakeOver.
Invitation to a MakeOver
