Small Business Design Resources

Quick Tip: Update Your Website Often

Updating your website often keeps your website fresh in search engines. When I say update I’m not talking about a constant redesign, I’m referring to content. Search engines love text, so the more often your website has fresh content for them to scan, the more “points” your website gets for being an up-to-date source for visitors. The best way to add content to your website is by publishing articles on your blog of course. Learn more about What is Blogging.
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Quick Tip: Link Correctly to Your Homepage

It’s very important for SEO purposes that you link to your homepage correctly. Basically when you link from your inner pages or another website back to your homepage you must be sure that you’re linking directly to the root address, in other words link directly to your domain name.

So for example if your homepage is saved as home.html DON’T link to yourwebsite.com/home.html instead, just link to yourwebsite.com

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Quick Tip: Register Your Domain Name for More than 1 Year

If your domain shows that it’s expiring in less then a year, the search engines see your website as not being stable and they may deduct points for SEO. It’s best to register your domain name for more than a year to show the search engines that you have a stable website and that you’re not a temporary spam site.

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Quick Tip: Measure Anything on a Website with MeasureIt Firefox add-on

Do you ever need to know the size of a window, a banner, or a column on a website, but have no idea how to measure it? Well, if you’re using the Firefox browser, now you can download the MeasureIt add-on.

Once you download the MeasureIt add-on, you’ll notice a ruler icon on the lower left-hand corner of your browser window. To measure anything on your screen follow these simple steps: Read more »

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Quick Tip: Keep Your Website’s Main Content “Above the Fold”

In website design the term “above the fold” is referring to content on your website that the user sees first without needing to scroll. Keeping your most important content above the fold of your website, gives you a better chance to get your point across as soon as the user enters your website.

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Quick Tip: Use an ALT tag for your website images

For search engines an image is just a block that they cannot read. So to help search engines recognize images on your business website you have to include an ALT tag in the HTML code. To check if an image has an ALT tag just hover your mouse over an image and if you see text appear next to your pointer, then there’s an ALT tag associated with that image.

Here’s a sample HTML code for an image that includes an ALT tag:

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Quick Tip: Add your business to local search listings

Get your business seen by local searchers! Some listings are free and some have a fee.

Now you can see how your business is listed in popular search engines all from one place. Take a look at www.getlisted.org and make sure you take the time to add your business information to at least the free listing services.

Adding your business to local listings increases chances for people who are looking for your products and/or services in your area to find you faster.

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Quick Tip: Use hyphens in your URL structure

All pages on your website should have a clean URL structures to make it easier for people to read. For example:

wrong:

http://www.example.com/index.asp?_prod138272=isp9872=498260

correct:

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Quick Tip: Use a Custom Domain Name for Your Blog

When setting up your blog you want to be sure to buy a domain name and a hosting account. Having a blog on a subdomain on one of the free blogging platforms such as wordpress.com or blogger.com (yourblog.wordpress.com or yourblog.blogspot.com) gives all the search engine benefits to that blogging platform. All the hard work that you’re doing in creating great content for your visitors doesn’t help your website ranking for your business if you don’t have your own custom domain.

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Quick Tip: Remove Yourself from your Analytics

Using an analytics program such as Google Analytics to track your website’s performance is necessary to determine what works and what parts of your website still need improvements. To make sure that you have clean result, you need to remove yourself from your analytics program. You and everyone in your company could possibly be accessing your website hundreds of times a week and therefore skew the tracking results drastically.

If you’re using Google Analytics, you can simply add a filter to exclude your IP address, but there’s a better way described in the article Count Me Out!

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