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The Significance of SEO in Web Design

SEO In Web Design

The Significance of SEO in Web Design

People go online to search for different types of information and this means that your company needs a strong online presence. Many users need to carry out searches before they make a purchase. Your business thus requires a website that will be ranked on the first page of search results. Websites represent companies and have the ability to determine whether or not users will be receptive to them.

Search Results

Having a website is important but in order for it to help your business become more profitable, it needs to be seen in search results whenever searches are carried out using particular keywords. This is based on the tendency of people to search according to what they are looking for, such as product or service.

Websites that do not appear on the first page of search engine results when people carry out searches can be regarded as non-existent among online users. This is why you need to ensure that your site ranks highly for specific keywords so that search engines place your site higher than several others that are related to the same keywords. SEO includes a variety of factors and plays a critical role in web design.

Value of SEO

Web design and SEO work together and more web designers are choosing to integrate SEO when designing websites. It is important for business owners to be aware of how important SEO is in web design and the value it adds to the design process.

A web design that is compatible with SEO is likely to draw more traffic. A website may be attractive and dazzling but if it is not search-engine friendly, you restrict the ability of major search engines to access your content.

If your website content is not readily accessible to search engines, it will not have a high ranking in the search results. Integrating SEO appropriately in your web design includes aspects such as technology, navigation, linking and content.

Content, Keywords and Links

The content on your web pages is vital for SEO success. During the process of building your site, it is advisable for the web designer to be aware of what your business entails. This makes it possible for lists of keywords to be selected in the initial stages of development according to what users are likely to search for when looking for information that relates to the site. Content is essential in SEO but should be used properly to avoid any unethical practices that may lower our ranking or lead to search engines penalizing your site.Strategic and meaningful placement of keywords will help you get a better ranking for your web pages in search results. Adding keywords to content while creating the web pages will help to cut down on the time used to change content on web pages for the purpose of SEO. Link building enables you to have links directed from other credible sites to help you achieve better search engine rankings for your website. In order for quality content and proper link building to yield the best results, web design needs to cater for SEO. SEO is as critical as the design concepts for your website. If the site is designed while incorporating SEO, the web pages will soon start ranking higher and attracting more users through search engines. Find out how you can analyze a web design company through its portfolio here.

Search Engine Friendly Sites

Search engine optimization constitutes a range of things including content, keywords, and title tags. If you are not sure of how to implement SEO, you can consult a professional web design service that will help you create an SEO compliant site. Search engines require relevant and original content along with suitable visual elements such as videos and images. Search engines invest a lot in bandwidth and sites that are easy to crawl through require fewer resources.

Web designers create SEO compliant sites that can be crawled faster and easier by search engines. Technology and navigation are among the factors that are considered in search engine optimization. The objective of search engines is to enhance the usability of the web. Make sure that SEO is incorporated into your web design process right from the start. After spending a considerable amount of time, money and effort in creating your site, you need to ensure that as many as people as possible will be able to access it.

Good web designers are aware of the importance of creating attractive sites with SEO in mind. SEO enables you to get better ranking for your site on the web. When users search for products that are available on your website, they will be able to see it as soon as they type in the keywords.

A higher ranking for your website will increase the possibility of your site getting more clicks. It is important for you to drive more traffic to your website because the people who visit your site may become your customers.

Overall Design

The design of your home page is important because it is the first impression of your website and business that your visitors get. Good web design should leave a lasting and positive impression. It is always a good idea to have a clean and clutter-free home page that will not cause your visitors to leave as soon as they log on.

Consider other aspects such as the sizes of your images, navigation, user and search engine friendliness, colors, and overall design. Responsive design is a popular concept because it involves designing for various devices. With the ongoing advancements in technology and increase in online visitors, SEO practices continue to evolve.

Conclusion

Web designers now have access to more technology and options than they did and this is evident in how advanced web designing has become. When you design a website, the user should always be a priority because this helps to determine SEO rankings. This is based on various technicalities and makes it necessary to always prioritize the end user during the design process.

Web design is beneficial for businesses, customers, and search engines when it is not complex or overwhelming. It should lead to links and content that users need while giving businesses the opportunity to reach more people.

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Why A Responsive Website Is Important

Why A Responsive Website Is Important

Why is it so important to make your web designs responsive?

Responsive web designing is being massively adopted by all small to large business. But why is it so necessary in the current time?

The adoption of smartphones and tablets over the last couple of years has spiked up enormously. No matter how much we realise that technology and devices are taking over our lives, we ultimately buy into it because it has become the world we live in. But that’s the beauty of technology, it evolves at such rates that even we the creators of it cannot grasp.

Before we knew it, responsive web designs went from just being an idea to being adopted by almost every single business that exist today no matter what the size. Responsive web designs allow one website to provide a great user-experience across many devices and screen sizes.

What led to this paradigm shift?

1. Smartphones and tablets took over

The fact that PC’s are sold in millions a year whereas smartphones and tablets in billions proves the decentralization of PC’s. (Its interesting to ponder about whether there could be a new device very soon that completely centralizes smartphones.)

2. Recommended By Google

Google states that responsive web design is its recommended mobile configuration, and even goes so far as to refer to responsive web design as the industry best practice. And when google says something, we listen.

3. Easier to manage ‘Search Engine Optimization’

Responsive web design makes managing your SEO strategy Easier. Managing one site and one SEO campaign is far easier than managing multiple sites with multiple SEO Campaigns. From a marketing perspective it is very crucial to get you websites more traffic and obtain a higher search position searched from any device.

In web design we are constantly looking to test products to improve the user experience. And it is very important for any user or visitor of your website to get the best experience no matter would device they are viewing from.

Why is responsive design an ideal solution for you?

1. One website to design build and update

When you opt for a separate mobile website, you need to build two different sites.

With responsive, it’s all the same. This not only saves time and money in the original design stage, but it also will make it a lot easier for your development team. With responsive designs, you can make design changes to your website and it gets reflected for all resolutions and screen sizes, it’s all done in one place.

2. It is more practical time-wise

The biggest advantage of using responsive design for developers comes down to how much time and effort you save.

For back-end developers, there’s only one version of the site to be updated. All the content could go in the same place, the entire project becomes a lot simpler.

For front end developers, the process is certainly a better choice than creating multiple stylesheets. Imagine all of your CSS code in a single place and no need for multiple edits for making a minor change in design.

Clients will also find it much easier and less time consuming to manage and maintain a single site with much less content to manage.

3. It is more cost effective

Building and Testing across a number of websites increases your development, support and maintenance overhead.

Responsive design solves this redundancy.

You can also further save money by “optimizing” for the most popular gadgets and simply “supporting” the others.

4. It is easier to maintain

When several versions of the same site have to be managed, it leads to a lot of effort on maintenance. If different people are handling the mobile and desktop sites, keeping everything in sync requires a great deal of communication and planning. This is certainly solved with a responsive design.

5. Stronger Online Presence

A lot of companies around the world cater to mobile visitors and have a specific mobile site that lives on a subdomain. This site looks different from the main website. Although it fits the brand standard it doesn’t feel like the original website.

With a responsive site, your design of the main website is exactly what is reflected on mobile and other devices. So it will give the exact same feel, unifying your website despite being viewed from a plethora of devices.

6. Increased conversions & lower bounce rates

If one of your goals from your main website is to get conversions, a responsive website is essentially a sales-ready one. Your conversion rates depend on whether your user has a satisfying experience and keeping in mind that the user is likely to visit from any device, the user should be willing to convert regardless of what device he is on.

If a visitor of your website arrives on a mobile and the user has to pinch or zoom into the website to look for anything, search box for example, the user is likely to bounce or leave the site.

Having a responsive site will certainly reduce your bounce rates. The user will be willing to spend more time around the website and will be more likely to navigate to other webpages of your website.

But wait adaptive or responsive?

So first up, what’s the key differences between responsive and adaptive design?

Responsive design is fluid and adapts to the size of the screen no matter what the target device. Responsive uses CSS media queries to change styles based on the target device such as display type, width, height etc, and only one of these is necessary for the site to adapt to different screens.

An Adaptive design, on the other hand, uses static layouts based on breakpoints which don’t respond once they’re initially loaded. Adaptive works to detect the screen size and load the appropriate layout for it — generally you design an adaptive site for six common screen widths:

320 480 760 960 1200 1600

If you are designing a website from scratch, you are better off designing it to be responsive, so that every user is ensured to have a good user experience. Responsive designs hands down have a better layout than adaptive ones. While a responsive design will require more coding, in today’s world the majority of websites that are being newly designed are designed to be responsive because the result is simply better.

Having said that, theoretically, there is no big difference between responsive and adaptive web design, an adaptive design can make your design more manageable as you just need to consider few states. Practically, there are many responsive design problems while implementing, and the adaptive design is easier to be implemented and test.

So ultimately the choice is yours. Almost any kind of design idea has its own advantages and disadvantages. Think about your product or service and what would best suit it.

Tools and resources for building responsive sites

Google resizer is a good resource to quickly preview your site on multiple devices.

Responsive web designing tool is a tool that has been built to help with testing your responsive websites while you design and build them. You can enter your website’s URL into the address bar at the top of this page (not your browser’s address bar) to test a specific page.

Responsify is a browser based tool, which allows you to create your own responsive template. ResponsiveSlides.js is a tiny jQuery plugin that creates a responsive slider using list items inside < ul >.

Adobe Edge Reflow is one among many tools that make it possible to visually design a responsive website. Re-flow converts the Photoshop (PSD) files content into HTML and CSS and then visually adjusts the design using breakpoints in Reflow.

Final thoughts

Having the ability to offer your consumers a beautiful optimized experience no matter what their choice of device, means you will expand the reach of your service which will increase the chances you have of engaging with individuals.

‘Responsive’ isn’t just a buzzword anymore. It’s a must to stay ahead of the competition. The approach is a clear winner in terms of effective results for your website.

If you have any tips or thoughts on responsive web designs, write them down on the comment section.

The post Why A Responsive Website Is Important appeared first on jacobmartin.me.

from http://jacobmartin.me/why-a-responsive-website-is-important/

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How To Redesign Your Website And Not Lose Traffic

One of the most important elements of a website redesign. Preserving your traffic and search rankings.

Redesigning websites can be an exciting and daunting task at the same time. It is a kind of project that aims to make changes and updates to any company’s most vital and valuable digital property, their website.

While website redesigns should be made with a futuristic approach, they must also be done considering user needs, because a user-centric approach may also contribute to digital success.

To ensure that the site wouldn’t only be visually pleasing after the redesign, but also remain functional and serve its purpose, essential steps should be taken into consideration to meet organizational success.

The following checklist outlines vital steps to ensure that your website does not lose traffic and still rank high even after redesign.

Pre-launch Phase

Analyze user behavior

Page and website analytics should be checked and used to evaluate which pages are effective. After a thorough analysis which involves a review of organic rankings and website traffic, you will be able to determine which areas to focus on during the redesign phase.

Determine the website redesign variables

This step requires you to identify and write down the ‘changes you want to apply’ to your website. Knowing the changes that you want to implement will help you plan and estimate the duration of the project to redesign your page.

Identify performance indicators and objectives

Make sure you have a list of your objectives and KPI’s (short for Key Performance Indicators). KPI’s allow you to measure how well you are achieving your objectives and long-term goals.

Launch Phase or Build Phase

Make sure to maintain SEO best practices on your newly redesigned site – SEO elements are commonly forgotten when rebuilding a website; and when SEO components are missed, your redesigned pages will lose organic search traffic and consequently affect your search rankings. Here is an SEO checklist to keep your website optimized:

Do keywords and topics research

Always perform a keyword or topic search to learn what your website visitors will use to find your website

Local search listing

If you have a physical address, local search and directory are key. Local search listing will help protect a company’s brand at a basic level so be sure to update a directory listing

Keep your website design mobile-friendly

These days, web visitors are mostly performing searches using mobile phones and portable devices. Be sure to do a mobile-friendly test to make sure that your website works on various types of mobile phones and other portable devices.

Minimize use of JavaScript and heavy loading pages

Search engines have incorporated how fast a page loads into their search ranking factors. To ensure a high ranking, optimize your website by increasing page loading speed.

Set-up an analytics solution

Implement a tracking solution set up by your analytics specialist to accurately measure your redesigned website performance as well as user behavior.

Define a list of things that need to be monitored once your site launches

At the first few days of launching, there might be some errors and bugs that will show and you want to make sure that these errors and bugs are monitored so that you will be able to address them immediately.

Post-launch Phase

Monitor KPI regularly

Always check your key performance indicators to see how your redesigned website is performing and to see if you are meeting your goals and objectives

Perform a split test

A split test, also called A/B testing is a process of comparing two versions of your webpage against each other. Conducting a split test will help you determine which webpage design performs better.

Run another SEO audit after a couple of months

After around 2 to 3 months, run an SEO audit to evaluate how your website is doing in organic search and ranking after Google re-indexes it. An SEO audit will also help you identify opportunities to maximize your website traffic.

The post How To Redesign Your Website And Not Lose Traffic appeared first on jacobmartin.me.

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How to do SEO for a Website Step by Step

In this post I will show you how to do SEO for a website step by step. SEO is a technical process that allows a website to rank high in search engines for specific search terms, this is done through a mix of technical website edits, content creation and outreach to other websites to link to yours.

On page optimization:

On page optimization is the process of making website edits to different elements of the webpage and website in general in order to make it more crawl able to search engines, these on page edits also help tell search engines what the website or webpage is about. Here are a few examples:

Title Tags:

Title tags are the main title area of a specific page on your website, this is the main text that pulls up on the search engine search results page. Typically you want your exact match keyword or key phrase in your title tag. Your title tag also has significant effects on your click through rate, so it is really important to test and give the title a lot of attention.

Meta Descriptions:

Like title tags, meta descriptions also show up on the search engine search results page, it is the small description under the main title. It is also highly recommended to have your exact match keyword or key phrase in the meta description, also like the title tag, meta descriptions do have some effect on click through rate so spend a little time on this element and make sure it has a call to action.

Internal Linking:

Internal links are a great way to help search engines understand what your site is about and which pages on your site are important. You can also pass powerful link juice to specific pages by linking to important pages from other popular pages on your site. For example, the majority of natural inbound links on a website should come into the blog posts or articles section (most websites link to informational articles not service pages) so creating internal links to your important service pages from a popular blog post can help to pass some of that link juice and authority to your service page.

Alt Tags and Image Names:

If you use images on your site (which I am sure you do or at least should) you should use the exact match keyword or key phrase as the image file name and also the alt tag. This helps search engines know what your page is about and also what images to display on the image results page.

Bolded Text:

Don’t go overboard here but sometimes it can be a good idea to bold or italicize keywords within your text to help search engines understand your page.

The Importance of Content

If you read up on the latest internet or digital marketing news, then I am sure you have read that content development and content marketing are extremely important for SEO. Great content is important not only to your visitors but search engines as well. The more content you have on your website, the longer your visitors will stay, and the more pages search engines will index and it also increases the chances of your content showing up for keywords.

Creating great content for your website can be a large investment but most of the time is it worth the cost or effort. Search engines will see you as an authority in the industry and rank you higher in SERPS and your visitors will share it on social media, brining in even more visitors. You can start off by creating blog posts and articles, and as you gain more visitors and your audience grows, you can expand your content to include industry articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, and tutorials.

Off Site Optimization  (Link Building)

Link building is probably the most written about, talked about and controversial aspect of SEO. The main goal of building links is to get other high authority websites to link back to your website, passing some authority along with it. Getting links that contain exact match keywords in the anchor text are helpful for boosting rankings, although Google has recently penalized sites for overusing keyword anchor text.

There are 3 main types of links:

Whitehat – This really means good quality link building, doing outreach for people who will write an article on their website about your business or industry and link back to your website in the article, or where you can post an article on another site while linking back to your own site.

Blackhat – This means spammy, super low quality links. These would include paid links from different sources, PBNs and any other high volume paid link service, you should completely avoid these types of links.

Organic – These are links that are naturally created from people sharing your articles or content online or from major sites like news outlets writing about your company and linking to your site.

Most websites have a difficult time generating enough high quality organic links to raise their ranking in search engines. This is why link building can become an essential part of an effective SEO strategy.

Keeping Track of Your Progress:

Finally you will want to keep track of all of your efforts and see which pages are moving up in the SERPs.

Google Analytics – You can use Google Analytics to learn about your visitors. You can monitor your organic search traffic sources to find out witch keywords people are using to find your website.

Google Search Console – Search Console allows you to track and monitor your website rankings, it also allows you to submit a sitemap and check for crawl or indexing errors on your website. Search Console is a great way to stay on top of your website rankings, you can monitor specific pages and see which pages are ranking for specific terms and what position those pages are ranking in the search results page.

The post How to do SEO for a Website Step by Step appeared first on Phoenix SEO Expert - Jake Martin.

from http://jacobmartin.me/how-to-do-seo-for-a-website-step-by-step/

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Internet Marketing Strategies for Phoenix Based Local Businesses

The majority of businesses today are practicing one form of internet marketing or another, that is because the evolution of the internet has made it one of the most convenient, accessible and effective platforms to promote your business on. And it’s not just the broad reach that makes Internet marking such a great tool, but also the fact that unlike before, businesses can now target specific demographics, so their marketing dollars can be focused almost exclusively on their target market.

So it’s no question that if you own or run a business in Phoenix, you should be doing one form of Internet marketing or another or you are missing out on countless new customers each month.

Here is a quick list of some of our top Internet marketing strategies…

Web Design

Websites are not always thought of as a marketing tool or tactic, but they have huge influence on the probability that a customer will contact your business or convert into your sales funnel. Your website is truly the face of your business online and the center of your Internet marketing efforts, so if your website is not professionally built and designed, and packed with interesting content, then it wont really matter how much time you put into developing your marketing strategy, you are still going to lose potential customers.

Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing

Search engine optimization and search engine marketing allow your business to appear at the very top of search results for popular search terms. With an effective SEO strategy, your company website will be directly linked to the keywords potential customers are using to find your services. Search engine marketing or SEM works the same way, in the case of SEM, rather than working to rank your website in the top search results for popular keywords, you can pay the search engines to feature your ad to appear at the top of the search results page.

Email Marketing

Creating a free ebook or special offer on your website that requires visitors to leave their email is a great way to build up your email list for email marketing. Email is still a very popular (and very effective) means of marketing to current and potential customers. There are companies like MailChimp that make it super easy to embed an email signup form on your website or upload your current email list and start sending out email campaigns. And not every email has to be a sales email, monthly or quarterly newsletters are also a great way to connect with your audience and can lead to sales down the road.

Blog Blog Blog

There are a number of different reasons to keep a blog. You can continually and consistently post new content and keywords to your website, giving your SEO a boost with each post. In addition to that, your blog is a great place to update your customers, give advice, market new services and just connect with people who are searching for information related to your business.

I hope these tips helped you out!

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