Improve Your Web Site’s

So, you’ve decided that your company needs a web site. Now what? Since we are ultimately talking about your “online business image”, unless you yourself have web design experience, finding that perfect web designer to create your company site is a very important next step. If you’ve never had a web site created before, you will find that there is quite a lot to consider if you want your site to be successful, and you may have to do a bit of homework to find the right person for you.

Regardless of the type of site you want, to be successful, your site will need to do, at least, these 3 things:

- Look professional
- Function properly
- Get good positioning on the search engines

In achieving this goal, there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news is that there are all kinds of designers out there, offering all kinds of services, and prices are pretty much across the board. The good news is that there are some simple points you can follow to help make this process easier.

So, how do you go about finding a designer?
Since there are so many different companies offering web design, you might start by making a list of what your specific needs are. Every site is unique so it’s a good idea to know what you need before you start calling around or sending in estimate forms. Some things you might need to know are:

- Will you be selling a product online?
- Does your site require a database?
- Do you also need web hosting? or a domain name?
- Do you want to have your clients contact you through a form?
- How many pages do you think the site will be?
- Are there any pages or features specific to your business that you would like to have on your site?

Also, write down a couple of URLs of sites that you like. Or maybe you’ve seen a specific feature on another site that you would like to incorporate into your own site. Having a rough idea of the kind of site you’re looking for will help you find the right designer for your project.

Referrals
One of the best ways I’ve found to find the right designer is to get a referral from someone you know personally who has already had their site designed and they are happy with the site, and their experience with the designer. So let your friends and family know that you are shopping around for someone to help you create your online business image. People who have had a good experience with their web design company will be more than happy to pass the information along.

If you do get a referral from someone, go and look at the designer’s site and see what else they’ve done. If you’re interested, you can fill out a free quote form on their site, or email the designer with the specs of your project.

Job sites
There are a number of online sites that will help you match your project with a number of designers who will then bid on your project. The one thing to be aware of is that these sites have all types of designers listed with their service from those with years of experience, to those who just bought themselves the latest version of Front Page and have now labeled themselves “web designer”.

Although these job sites do make it harder for less experienced people to be listed as a serious prospect, when they ask for your project description, you can include on there that “only serious professionals need apply”. You can sometimes eliminate the amount of riff-raff that will send in proposals for your project.

The biggest problem people have with using these job sites is that potential clients are usually overwhelmed with the number of quotes they receive for their project. Be aware that you may have to rifle through a lot of proposals that are not what you are looking for.

These sites usually offer a Designer’s Profile and some kind of a rating system, which can help you learn a bit about a potential designer. Reading the reviews listed from previous clients can also help shed some light on your choice of designers.

Yellow Pages
Yellow Pages ads are expensive so chances are that you will find professional design firms to successful web design individuals listed there. They will usually list their URL in their ad and it’s always a good idea to go to their site and see what they have to offer before contacting them.

What you should be looking for in a designer?
Possibly you have a couple of designers you are interested in. But how do you know for sure? There are a few specific things that you should be aware of when picking your designer.

Portfolio
First and foremost, you want to check out their portfolio! This is the body of work that this designer has recently created and it tells a lot about what they offer. All web designers should have an online portfolio that you can easily access.

Take a good look at their own site and other sites they’ve created. Do the sites look professional? Is the style of the designer something you would like to have on your own site? In addition, you can contact companies that have had their site designed and ask them about their experience with this designer.

Price
Another thing to consider, although this is not the top priority, is price. Although there is no clear-cut rule as to what an “average” price for web design is, this is one situation where, in most cases, you get what you pay for. This is simply not the time to cut corners. So in considering price, also consider that you are paying for this individual’s expertise, as well as their time and experience.

It is more important to create a successful site that has a good position in the search engine and one that you are very happy with the look and function of than to save a couple of bucks. If you get a good site, your site will be able to grow with your company and, hopefully, that’s for a very long time!

Search engine optimization
The number one mistake that most first time web site owners make is that they don’t know what to do with their site after it’s designed. It is very possible to have a beautiful site designed for you and no one ever sees it.

A good designer will not only help you create a professional looking site, they will also ensure that your site gets a good ranking with the search engines so that your site can be easily found online. Make sure that your designer will optimize your site for the search engines and submit it to the major search engines.

Specialized services
Will you be selling your products or services online? Will you need a database driven site? How about Flash or embedded video or audio? Not everyone offers these services; be sure to ask specifically about what you will need for your site.

A couple of other things to consider is web hosting and domain name registration. Make sure if you need these services that your designer can help provide them too.

Compatibility
Lastly, when you are talking to potential designers, it should be someone you seem compatible with. Does the designer seem friendly and are they willing to answer all of your questions? Do they respond promptly to your emails and/or phone calls? Basically, is this someone you “click” with?

Communication with your designer is crucial. You need someone who is willing to answer any questions and keep you up-to-date on the status of your web design. A good designer will keep in touch with you every few days, at least. You don’t want to get down to the final days of creating the site only to find out you don’t like it!

Testimonials
Most designers will have testimonials from previous clients on their web site. It’s a good idea to see what their customers are saying about their services, and again, calling one or two clients regarding this web designer’s services is a really good idea.

Summary
There are many factors involved in finding and picking the right designer to build your company’s web site, but the key is to remember that this is your business image, one that you hope to have for many years to come, so you want to pick your designer as you would pick a real estate agent to find your “dream house”. If you pick the right designer the first time, you won’t be looking for someone to redesign your site in 6-9 months.

Be thorough, ask questions, look at samples, and you’ll find the perfect web designer for you!

About the Author: Teri Tucker is owner of T&I Grafix Business Web Design, a full service web design company that offers custom web design, logo design, search engine optimization, Flash animation and web consulting services. For more information on our design services, please visit our web site at http://www.tigrafix.com or email us at teri@tigrafix.com.

It is hard to believe the all too short northern summer is almost over. In less than two weeks, kids will be going back to school and commercial webmasters will be gearing up for the autumn and winter sales seasons. This is as good a time as any, perhaps better than most, to cover SEO 101, the basic techniques that form the foundation to an advanced SEO or SEM campaign.

For the purposes of brevity this piece starts with a few assumptions. The first assumption is a single, small business site is being worked on. The second assumption is that the site in question is written using a fairly standard mark-up language such as HTML or PHP. The last assumption is that some form of keyword research and determination has already taken place and the webmaster is confident in the selection of keyword targets.

Believe it or not, basic SEO is all about common sense and simplicity. The purpose of search engine optimization is to make a website as search engine friendly as possible. It’s really not that difficult. Basic SEO doesn’t require specialized knowledge of algorithms, programming and taxonomy but it does require a basic understanding of how search engines work. There are two aspects of search engines to consider before jumping in. The first is how spiders work. The second is how search engines figure out what documents relate to which keywords and phrases.

In the simplest terms, search engines collect data about a unique website by sending an electronic spider to visit the site and copy its content which is stored in the search engine’s database. Generally known as ‘bots’, these spiders are designed to follow links from one document to the next. As they copy and assimilate content from one document, they record links and send other bots to make copies of content on those linked documents. This process continues ad infinitum. By sending out spiders and collecting information 24/7, the major search engines have established databases that measure their size in the tens of billions. Every day, both Yahoo and Google claim to spider as much data as is contained in the US Library of Congress (approx. 150 million items).

Knowing the spiders and how they read information on a site is the technical end of basic SEO. Spiders are designed to read site content like you and I read a newspaper. Starting in the top left hand corner, a spider will read site content line by line from left to right. If columns are used (as they are in most sites), spiders will follow the left hand column to its conclusion before moving to central and right hand columns. If a spider encounters a link it can follow, it will record that link and send another bot to copy and record data found on the document the link leads to. The spider will proceed through the site until it records everything it can possible find there.

As spiders follow links and record everything in their paths, one can safely assume that if a link to a site exists, a spider will find that site. Webmasters and SEOs no longer need to manually or electronically submit their sites to the major search engines. The search spiders are perfectly capable of finding them on their own, provided a link to that site exists somewhere on the web. Google and Yahoo both have an uncanny ability to judge the topic or theme of documents they are examining, and use that ability to judge the topical relationship of documents that are linked together. The most valuable incoming links (and the only ones worth perusing), come from sites that share topical themes.

Once a search spider finds your site, helping it get around is the first priority. One of the most important basic SEO tips is to provide clear paths for spiders to follow from “point A” to “point Z” in your website. This is best accomplished by providing easy to follow text links directed to the most important pages in the site at the bottom of each document. One of these text links should lead to a text-based sitemap, which lists and provides a text link to every document in the site. The sitemap can be the most basic page in the site as its purpose is more to direct spiders than help lost site visitors, though designers should keep site visitors in mind when creating the sitemap. Here is an example of the basic sitemap (http://www.stepforth.com/company/sitemap.htm) used on the StepForth site. Google also accepts more advanced, XML based sitemaps, providing a wealth of information on their Sitemap FAQ page (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html).

Allowing spiders free access to the entire website is not always desirable. Good SEOs should also know how to tell spiders that some site content is off limits and should not be added to their database using robots.txt (http://www.robotstxt.org/) files. Last week, Mike Banks Valentine of Website101 (http://www.website101.com/) wrote a good overview on how to write and use robots.txt files in his article, “Search Engine Spiders Lost Without Guidance - Post This Sign!” (http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2005/aug/22.html)

Offering spiders access to the areas of the site one wants them to access is half the battle. The other half is found in the site content. Search engines are supposed to provide their users with lists of documents that relate to user entered keyword phrases or queries. Search engines need to determine which of billions of documents is relevant to a small number of specific words. In order to do this, the search engine needs to know your site relates to those words.

There are four basic areas, or elements, a search engine looks at when examining a document. After the URL of a site, the first information a search spider records is the title of the site. Next, it examines the Description Meta tag. Both of these elements are found in the section of the source code.

Titles should be written using the strongest keyword targets as the foundation. StepForth’s primary keyword target is Search Engine Placement. A glance at our index page shows that phrase is used as the first three words in our site title. Some titles are written using two or three basic two-keyword phrases. A key to writing a good title is to remember that human readers will see the title as the reference link on the search engine results page. Don’t overload your title with keyword phrases. Concentrate on the strongest keywords that best describe the topic of the document content.

The Description Meta tag is also fairly important. Search engines tend to use it to gather information on the topic or theme of the document. A well written Description is phrased in two or three complete sentences with the strongest keyword phrases woven early into each sentence. As with the title tag, some search engines will display the Description on the search results pages, generally using it in whole or in part to provide the text that appears under the reference link. Some search engines place minor weight in the Keywords Meta tag however, it is not advisable to spend a lot of time worrying about the keywords tag. After reading information found in the section of the source code, spiders continue on to examine site content. It is wise to remember that spiders read the same way we do, left to right and following columns.

Good content is the most important aspect of search engine optimization. The easiest and most basic rule of the trade is that search engine spiders can be relied upon to read basic body text 100% of the time. By providing a search engine spider with basic text content, SEOs offer the engines information in the easiest format for them to read. While some search engines can strip text and link content from Flash files, nothing beats basic body text when it comes to providing information to the spiders. Very good SEOs can almost always find a way to work basic body text into a site without compromising the designer’s intended look, feel and functionality.

The content itself should be thematically focused. In other words, keep it simple. Some documents cover multiple topics on each page, which is confusing for spiders and SEOs alike. The basic SEO rule here is if you need to express more than one topic on a page, you need more pages. Fortunately, creating new pages with unique topic-focused content is one of the most basic SEO techniques, making a site simpler for both live-users and electronic spiders. An important caveat is to avoid duplicate content and the temptation to construct doorway pages specifically designed for search placements.

When writing document content, try to use the strongest keyword targets early in the copy. For example, a site selling the ubiquitous Blue Widget might use the following as a lead-sentence; “Blue Widgets by Widget and Co. are the strongest construction widgets available and are the trusted widget of leading builders and contractors.”

The primary target is obviously construction applications for the blue widget. By placing the keyword phrases “blue widgets”, “construction widgets” and “trusted widget” along side other keywords such as the singular words, “strongest”, “trusted” and “builders” and “contractors”, the sentence is crafted to help the search engine see a relationship between these words. Subsequent sentences would also have keywords and phrases weaved into them. One thing to keep in mind when writing basic SEO copy is that unnecessary repetition of keywords is often considered spam by search engines. Another thing to remember is that ultimately, the written copy is meant to be read by human eyes as well as search spiders. Each page or document in the site should have its own unique content.

The last on-site element a spider examines when reading the site (and later relating the content to user queries), is the anchor text used in internal links. Using relevant keyword phrases in the anchor text is a basic SEO technique aimed at solidifying the search engine’s perception of the relationship between documents and the words used to phrase the link. A good example is found on towards the bottom of pages in the StepForth site (http://stepforth.com/). Note the use of the words “placement services”, “seo results”, “SEO Faq” and the topic of the internal pages these links point to.

In a nutshell, that’s pretty much it to the basics of clean, search engine friendly SEO. The foundation of nearly every successful SEO campaign is simplicity. The goal is to make a site easy to find, easy to follow, and easy to read for search spiders and live-visitors, with well written topical content and a fair number of relevant incoming links. While basic SEO can be time consuming in the early stages, the results are almost always worth it and set the stage for more advanced future work.

About the Author: Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time for StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at jimhedger@stepforth.com