| An effective website attracts customers to your business, generates sales leads and closes sales - multiplying your profits in the process. Professional web design firms must combine uniqueness and innovation in design with state-of the-art technology and maintenance support to create a powerful website that produces results. Before hiring a web designer, consider the following ten factors: 1. Effective Web Designers communicate well Experienced web-designers support multiple modes of communication for interacting with their clients. These include phone, email and live chat. Depending on your requirements, you can use the communication method that suits you best. 2. Website Design Budgets Should Focus on Results Effective web-design teams often combine the method of flat fees with hourly billing for software design and installation. It is never advisable to enter into open-ended billing relationships with Web designers until the maintenance phase of the project. 3. Smart Web Designers and Developers Make Billing Easy An experienced web-design company usually charges twenty to fifty percent of the project fee in advance, and accepts payment through checks and major credit cards. 4. A Web Design Company Shares Its Work Professional design companies encourage their designers to maintain portfolios representing their best work, client information and testimonials. You can request portfolios to assess the effectiveness of the company’s web design solutions. 5. Flexible Website Designers Use Time Saving Technology Quality web design teams support the use of inexpensive and time saving technology. This includes open source publishing and e-commerce tools like WordPress for handling Weblogs and corporate information pages, osCommerce for online shopping features and Zope for building customized content management and customer interaction tools. These tools enable businesses to achieve professional standards while saving time and money. 6. Efficient Web Design Professionals Blend Stock and Scratch sources Efficient website designers always maintain a set of stock templates and images to speed up work. When designing a website for a client, they select an appropriate stock template and customize it from scratch to meet client-specific requirements and ensure uniqueness and freshness in design. 7. Intelligent Web Professionals Distinguish Design and Hosting Many website design firms offer complementary and low cost Web-hosting solutions, usually as part of their maintenance packages. Quality firms provide excellent uptime, reliability and service. Compare the cost and benefits of an in-house hosting solution and an independent web-host before making your decision. 8. Creative Website Designers Let Clients Handle Minor Updates Experienced Web designers develop architectures for Websites including publishing platforms that simplify the process of making changes. These plans are so effective that they allow you to make minor updates in-house or with the help of a less expensive Web professional. These web designers often save their skills for launching or re-launching websites and major revisions requiring considerable work on design, templates and graphics. 9. The Best Web Developers Understand Standards and Accessibility The designed website should comply with both web standards like standards for interface design and browser accessibility, and state and federal guidelines such as providing accessibility features for the visually impaired and people suffering with other medical insufficiencies. Experienced Web designers should also ensure SEO optimization of your website and prevent it from become inaccessible and unusable. 10. A Good Web Design Company Gets Honest about Rates and Turnaround Time Even the most efficient Web designers can combine only two of the three features (High quality, speed and low cost) when designing your web-site. Professional web design teams will provide you accurate estimates about their rates, speed and turnaround time. Firms that are more expensive often have smaller waiting lists. If sufficient time is available, you can get a high quality website at a lower cost. Select a Web design firm that meets your requirements. Focusing on Results sets Premier Website Design Professionals Apart Effective Web designers comply with all of the above-mentioned practices. More importantly, they make clients feel comfortable about wading into unfamiliar waters. The right Web design firm can enable your business to save thousands of dollars and valuable time. About the Author: Daljeet Sidhu is Co-founder at TradeSeam. See guide to hiring web site development firms. Compare web design services quotes. Sellers JOIN for sales leads. Source: http://www.isnare.com/ Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=422286&ca=Internet |
Monday 26 December 2011
Website Design - Top Ten Ways To Identify A Quality Design And Development Firm
How to Rank High in Search Engines Result Pages (SERP’s)
Studies have revealed that 90% of Internet users find websites through search engines and out of those users, 90% do not go past the first 30 results displayed. With this in mind it is easy to see why it’s important for your website to rank high in these results.
Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's) are the pages you see after you type in a search on Google or other search engines and click on the Search button. Because 90% of people use search engines to find what they are looking for these SERP’s are the most important pages on the internet.
The Search Engines Result Pages (SERP’s) can be broadly divided into two categories: “Organic” or ”Natural” listings and Paid Advertisements usually bought on a "Pay Per Click" (PPC) basis.
Roughly 80% of clicks at Google occur within the organic listings not the PPC listings. This is why is it important to get your site to rank naturally in the search engine result pages. Getting your site to rank high is not tricky; it’s just a matter of optimising your website to be search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of engineering your website so it can be properly read by the search engine spiders. SEO is pretty much common sense, search engines are text analysis systems so if your webpage is full of images with little text your site will not rank high. You need to target each keyword/phrase on different pages. So if you want to target the search terms “business plans” you need to have one page with the title “business plans” and lots of text about “business plans”.
To me this is just common sense but then I have been working in the SEO field for a number of years. However it never ceases to amaze me why people still call their home pages “home” or have their business name on the title of every single page of website. The owners probably search for their business and are pleased when it comes up first in Google. This is only good for the customers that know your company which is fine for large brands like Argos or Amazon but if you’re trying to get customers from for internet users you need to optimise your text for the search engines.
The other aspect of getting high SERPs is trust and authority. It is kind of no different than any other business trying to gain trust and a good reputation. Forgetting the cyber world for a moment, in the real world established businesses have much more clout that new start up businesses. Like your favourite restaurant. If a new restaurant opened up just down the street you might not want to chance eating there and stick with your favourite restaurant. Now if you hear that its gaining a good reputation for good food you might then decide to try it out yourself. The same can be said about websites except the trust you get is via an algorithm. The more links you get from already established trusted (authoritive) sites the more Google will trust you. It makes sense really, because a good website will not link to a rubbish or not relevant website.
Another aspect of trust is by doing things with the search engines terms and conditions. This means building links naturally and using keywords excessively. Adding 500 pages in one day is not a naturally progression, search engines like websites to expand naturally, anything else and their warning lights flash which means they might look into your site and possibly penalise it.
So the only way to obtain high SERPs is to do everything the search engines like. This means building websites that are easy to navigate (so users and the crawlers can find every page easily), have lots of good relevant interesting content and plenty of trusted links. Make your website the best site on the internet in your chosen niche and you shouldn’t go far wrong.
About the Author: Carolyn is the webmaster of Search Solutions Ltd, experts in obtaining High Search Engines Results.
Source: http://www.isnare.com/
Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=280696&ca=Internet
Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's) are the pages you see after you type in a search on Google or other search engines and click on the Search button. Because 90% of people use search engines to find what they are looking for these SERP’s are the most important pages on the internet.
The Search Engines Result Pages (SERP’s) can be broadly divided into two categories: “Organic” or ”Natural” listings and Paid Advertisements usually bought on a "Pay Per Click" (PPC) basis.
Roughly 80% of clicks at Google occur within the organic listings not the PPC listings. This is why is it important to get your site to rank naturally in the search engine result pages. Getting your site to rank high is not tricky; it’s just a matter of optimising your website to be search engine friendly. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of engineering your website so it can be properly read by the search engine spiders. SEO is pretty much common sense, search engines are text analysis systems so if your webpage is full of images with little text your site will not rank high. You need to target each keyword/phrase on different pages. So if you want to target the search terms “business plans” you need to have one page with the title “business plans” and lots of text about “business plans”.
To me this is just common sense but then I have been working in the SEO field for a number of years. However it never ceases to amaze me why people still call their home pages “home” or have their business name on the title of every single page of website. The owners probably search for their business and are pleased when it comes up first in Google. This is only good for the customers that know your company which is fine for large brands like Argos or Amazon but if you’re trying to get customers from for internet users you need to optimise your text for the search engines.
The other aspect of getting high SERPs is trust and authority. It is kind of no different than any other business trying to gain trust and a good reputation. Forgetting the cyber world for a moment, in the real world established businesses have much more clout that new start up businesses. Like your favourite restaurant. If a new restaurant opened up just down the street you might not want to chance eating there and stick with your favourite restaurant. Now if you hear that its gaining a good reputation for good food you might then decide to try it out yourself. The same can be said about websites except the trust you get is via an algorithm. The more links you get from already established trusted (authoritive) sites the more Google will trust you. It makes sense really, because a good website will not link to a rubbish or not relevant website.
Another aspect of trust is by doing things with the search engines terms and conditions. This means building links naturally and using keywords excessively. Adding 500 pages in one day is not a naturally progression, search engines like websites to expand naturally, anything else and their warning lights flash which means they might look into your site and possibly penalise it.
So the only way to obtain high SERPs is to do everything the search engines like. This means building websites that are easy to navigate (so users and the crawlers can find every page easily), have lots of good relevant interesting content and plenty of trusted links. Make your website the best site on the internet in your chosen niche and you shouldn’t go far wrong.
About the Author: Carolyn is the webmaster of Search Solutions Ltd, experts in obtaining High Search Engines Results.
Source: http://www.isnare.com/
Permanent Link: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=280696&ca=Internet
Link building for effective search engine optimization
When you begin the task of acquiring quality and relevant backlinks to your website there are many factors that can increase or decrease your search engine rankings. This article outlines the difference between good and bad backlinks.
A quality backlink pointing to your site should be in the same category and relevant in content to your website. The page where your link is located should be indexed by Google and the page should also have a Google page rank. The webpage where your link is located should also contain no more than 30 other out-going links to other websites. Link pages with more than 30 out-going links are less relevant to the search engines. Having your link posted on this type of webpage can affect your search engine rankings in a negative way. Other excellent techniques of acquiring backlinks are directory submissions, posting articles, blogs and forums.
For directory submissions select the proper directory category and take a look at how many other websites are contained in the category where your link would be posted, if you can manage to get on the first or second page of the listings, this is a quality backlink. Also look at the Google page rank of the landing page for your link. If the page has a Google page rank this is also a quality backlink.
Backlinks to avoid would be a zero page ranked webpage, especially if the home page has a zero page rank. Links posted within framed webpages which will also steal your traffic. Especially avoid link farms, webpages which contain more than 100 unrelated outgoing links, This type of link page is frowned upon by many major search engines. Avoid Webpages with mirror sites containing the exact same content with a different URL, also pages that utilize redirects and URL cloaking. Never post your link on a webpage that contains a "no follow" or "no index" robots meta tag within the source code. Dynamic websites with question marks in the URL should be avoided because they are not always indexed by the search engines.
Avoid posting your link on a page that opens very slow or contains mostly ads and flash banners. Try not to aquire or purchase great numbers of backlinks in a short period of time, backlinks should be accumulated gradually. Also avoid webpages and directories that list their results in alphabetical order, as their database increases your link could be moved to a less relevant page with less pagerank. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors involved in the process of acheiving high search engine ranking.
A quality backlink pointing to your site should be in the same category and relevant in content to your website. The page where your link is located should be indexed by Google and the page should also have a Google page rank. The webpage where your link is located should also contain no more than 30 other out-going links to other websites. Link pages with more than 30 out-going links are less relevant to the search engines. Having your link posted on this type of webpage can affect your search engine rankings in a negative way. Other excellent techniques of acquiring backlinks are directory submissions, posting articles, blogs and forums.
For directory submissions select the proper directory category and take a look at how many other websites are contained in the category where your link would be posted, if you can manage to get on the first or second page of the listings, this is a quality backlink. Also look at the Google page rank of the landing page for your link. If the page has a Google page rank this is also a quality backlink.
Backlinks to avoid would be a zero page ranked webpage, especially if the home page has a zero page rank. Links posted within framed webpages which will also steal your traffic. Especially avoid link farms, webpages which contain more than 100 unrelated outgoing links, This type of link page is frowned upon by many major search engines. Avoid Webpages with mirror sites containing the exact same content with a different URL, also pages that utilize redirects and URL cloaking. Never post your link on a webpage that contains a "no follow" or "no index" robots meta tag within the source code. Dynamic websites with question marks in the URL should be avoided because they are not always indexed by the search engines.
Avoid posting your link on a page that opens very slow or contains mostly ads and flash banners. Try not to aquire or purchase great numbers of backlinks in a short period of time, backlinks should be accumulated gradually. Also avoid webpages and directories that list their results in alphabetical order, as their database increases your link could be moved to a less relevant page with less pagerank. Quality backlinks are one of the most important factors involved in the process of acheiving high search engine ranking.
| Author Bio Article written by the CEO of http://www.submit-site.org/ Article Source: http://www.articlegeek.com/ |
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