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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Get Your Website Better Positioned in Google for Good Result

With more and more consumers and businesses starting their search for services online, businesses today must have a well designed, easy to navigate, user-friendly website. Small business website design is no longer a luxury – it has become a necessity. If your website is cluttered, slow or difficult to navigate, your web visitors will simply bounce back and move on to your competitors.

An important element of website creation and website design is to make sure that your website is not just nice-looking, but also SEO friendly. You want search engines, and especially the King of search engines Google, to point searchers to your site when they perform a search that is relevant to your business. For example, if you sell custom wedding invitations on your site, you want people who go online and type the keyword “custom wedding invitations” in the Google search box to land on your site. This is only going to happen if your site appears on the 1-3 first pages of search results.

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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: 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: 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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Using Social Media For Your Business

Flickr photo - Mouthing off by demi-brooke

Have you been following the Celebrity Apprentice? On Season 8 Episode 6, the objective of the game was to create the best viral video. A viral video is one that is emailed from person to person, thus spreading the word about your product. In this case they were advertising laundry detergent. Before the dawn of the Internet, companies spent some percentage of their advertising and marketing dollars on TV, radio and magazine commercials and depended to some extent on “Word of Mouth” advertising. People use to say that if you impress a customer, they will tell 3 other customers and if you disappoint a customer, they will tell 10 other people. Businesses often used to, and still do today, offer additional discounts to existing customers when they bring in new customers. Word of Mouth advertising is a tried and trusted fundamental cornerstone of business marketing. Read more »

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What is Blogging

A lot of websites these days use blogging as a way to draw customers. Blogging means posting a fresh article to your site every day, every week, or at some other interval that makes sense to you. Blogs can be useful to customers who may check out your website regularly to find out new information related to your product, your service or your company. New customers may be led to your site using keyword searches or by following links from other sites that reference your site, or from links you embed in other articles on your website.

The primary purpose of a blog is to provide fresh content for your website to keep your customers coming back. They want to see what new products you are offering, hear what’s new in your company, and see what additional services are available. A blog is also a great way to add fresh content to your site to keep it at the top of the search engines.

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Optimizing Your Website Content

Your website might be well implemented, have a nice easy flow, attractive color scheme and easy navigation, and your product might be the best gadget ever invented or the best service in the business. But if people can’t find you, they can’t buy from you. It’s that simple.

Search Engine Optimization refers to creating a site that is keyword rich. Keywords are the words that people type into their favorite search engine to find what they are looking for. For example, if your website sells shoes, you will want keywords such as shoes, pumps, high heels, loafers, patent leather, boots etc. More creative keywords or keyphrases might include descriptive phrases such as blue suede shoes, sexy 4 inch heels, pumps that are to die for, and so on. Most people post articles on their website to increase keyword density.

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