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SEO is vital for anybody who wants more visitors. People all over the world rely on search engines to help them locate information, find products, and learn about different brands. Read on to find out how to get your site to the top of the search engine rankings.

Search Engines

Header tags are important to use. Since you don’t want headers that are too big, you can implement CSS to reduce the size. Headers are essential because search engines enjoy using them to rank sites. Use both H1 and 2 tags to emphasize the things most important about your site so that something worthwhile turns up on search engines.

Get a domain name for your site that is both memorable and relevant. Names like this make searches for your content easier. They create brand recognition which, by itself, can generate profits.

After determining the optimal keywords for your website, get them into your page’s title. Your title will make an important impression on your site’s visitors, so choose a title that is both intelligent and relevant. This ensures that you get hits based on keywords and search results.

Site Map

The inclusion of a site map is useful in attempting to increase traffic to your website. All your webpages will receive equal attention. Not only can your visitors use a site map for navigation, the search engines will be able to index your site better if you have one.

Put those keywords into your URLs! Should there be special characters or numbers in the URL, you must consider whether people will actually search using them. This can hurt your search rankings. Including relevant keywords improves a page’s traffic.

Use a site map so that search engines can easier index your pages. The site map, or navigation bar, lets the search engines access your pages from all other pages on the site. Even if your website is just a hole in the wall compared to giants like Amazon, a site map does wonders for your search engine optimization.

Be active on your blog – you will increase your search engine ranking by doing so. Site traffic should then, therefore, increase.

Search Engines

Successfully optimizing your site for search engines may seem intimidating, but as this article has shown you, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Knowing the few basic principles that determine how the search engines work, can help you tweak your site to attract more visitors than ever. Before you know it, you’ll have a slew of new customers.

A lot of people ask me where is a good place to start with Website Design?
I tell them to check out the 960 Grid System. It is a development workflow
system that allows website designers an easy blueprint of
web development in 960 pixels width. There are two main
variants to the 960 grid system, 12 and 16 columns, which you
can use separately or in tandem.

Step 1: Create a new document in Photoshop

You will want to open Photoshop and use a width of 1680px and a height of 1100px, then fill the background with #F9F9F9, which is a light grey color.

Step 2: Adding the Grid to your Photoshop document

Although we are talking about the 960 Grid System by Nathan Smith, it should be noted there are other grid systems you can use in Web Design. Just do a search on the Internet for “Web Design Grid System” and you will find several. The 960 Grid System is great because for one, it is widely used, and two it is simple and fits most screens, from 15″ and above! Plus you can easily switch to a fluid width web site and adapt to 25″ and larger screens.

By now you should know that you need to Download 960 Grid System.
Once you download the file, extract it and open the “Templates” folder. Open the 960 12 column grid in Photoshop.

The next step is to insert the grid into the document that we have created. Select the “12 col Grid” group and merge, then copy and paste it into the main document. Or you can skip the previous step and just edit the template file you have just created. Keep in mind, any changes you make will be saved to the “templates” folder within the archive you just extracted!

The next step is to create a baseline grid. This helps with areas such as spacing elements and line-height. Start with a new document which is 24px by 24px, delete the background and draw a 1px line along the bottom of the document. You need to define this as a pattern by doing: EDIT > Define Pattern and give it a name you will remember.

Okay, create a new layer here, then fill the layer with the pattern, Edit > Fill. This will be the baseline grid.

Now we need to mark out the area’s we will be working with by using guides. So create a new view guide by View > New Guide, then select vertical and create guides at 360px, 840px and 1320px, the reason we put these guides is so we get to 960px working area between 360px and 1320px and a central line at 840px.

Save as a Template

Okay, so we have created our template. Now you can save it and use/reuse it when necessary. This setup keeps things simple, and you can change the height of the canvas depending on your web design project.

Step 3: Starting the Design

Look for the next post in this series of 3. I will provide the links when I finish writing the rest!

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Info on the 960 Grid System

The 12-column grid is divided in 60 pixel portions and the 16-column is 40 pixels.
Each column has 10 pixels margin on the left and right, which creates 20 pixel wide gutters between
columns. The purpose of the 960 grid system is to provide
a quick development environment for web developers. The CSS
is already written and there are a ton of templates to work off. Many other
large web companies are using the 960 grid system to
design their websites

It’s an unfortunate fact that Internet Explorer 6 will always incorrectly expand any dimensional restricted block element so that oversize content is unable to overflow, as the specs require that content to do. IE7 has fixed this issue and does not wrongly expand boxes such boxes, instead allowing the overflow property to operate as intended by the W3C.

[css]
div {
background: #fff;
border: 6px solid #ccc;
height: 100px;
margin: 20px;
padding: 20px;
width: 400px;
}
[/css]

I will be comparing IE6’s way with the correct behavior as seen in Firefox. The W3C says a rigidly sized block box should allow oversize content to protrude or overflow beyond the edges of the sized box.

There is no real “fix” for IE6’s incorrect behavior, except to work around or avoid it. Several possible workarounds will be detailed as I discuss the issue.

If you want to read more about this issue then Click Here ….

Resources & Links

• CSS Length Values via Mozilla Developer Network
• HTML Borders via Quackit.com
• The CSS Box Model via CSS-Tricks
• CSS Float Theory via Smashing Magazine
• CSS Positioning 101 via A List Apart
• Resources for Grid-Based Design via Vandelay Design

Designing a website that promotes your business in the best way possible is all about the design. A web design degree isn’t necessary, but having the right information on what will work and what won’t work is necessary. Contine on to get a good education on how to build a better website.

Do not use a lot of graphics. You want the site to look professional and well-designed instead of cluttered. Graphics should improve your site, not just pretty it up. Using an adequate amount of graphics keeps clutter away and helps you focus on site usability.

Try the common “newsletter” technique to keep your readers reminded of your services. You can keep your visitors informed about important events, updates, and changes when they sign up for a newsletter, and the flow of information will often tempt them to revisit your site. Stick the sign-up form in a spot that’s out of the way, such as in a sidebar, and keep good records of those who sign up. Just send your newsletter to subscribers.

Make your front page very simple. People who are shopping around decide quickly whether to use a site or continue searching by viewing the front page. Make sure that you provide a very clear description about your business or other purpose for your site. Other information on your site should also be minimal, but still clear, so that you don’t overwhelm your visitors.

When designing a large site, always incorporate a search feature. Try having a search box in the upper-right of your homepage that allows searching for terms on your site. FreeFind and Google both offer search plugins that can easily be added to your website.

Try pulling images into your post to maximize engagement. Pictures on your website can provide a friendlier approach to visitors. People like to look at pictures, so they will probably spend more time on your site.

File Sizes

No matter what your website looks like, all the file sizes should be small. Your file sizes have a lot to do with the speed of your site loading. You want your website to load very quickly when potential clients visit. Remember that there are still lots of people who do not have high speed Internet. Test each section of your site to ensure it loads rapidly for every visitor.

The information located above will help you develop a great website. When you have proper information, you can do anything. Use the information from this article to help you build a great website.

A search engine results page (SERP), is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the keywords have matched content within the page. A SERP may refer to a single page of links returned, or to the set of all links returned for a search query.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform I am sure you are all aware of. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you must be living under a rock.  You can use Twitter for social media marketing and for SEO. Twitter can add results to your current SEO strategy and definitely does not deserve to be overlooked. If you already have Twitter for your business, and utilize it for social media marketing, but you are not seeing results, check out “signs twitter might not be working for your business” blog article we wrote a few months back.

If you are ready to start using Twitter to improve your SEO, then continue on to the rest of the article. We will cover a variety of topics including, Brand Name, Profile, Links, Hash Tags, Mentions, Helping others, Tweets Interval, Your Blog Page, Twitter Buttons and Building your online brand.

Twitter Username = Brand name

You want to create a Twitter username that speaks directly to your customers about your brand name. For instance, we use, @XTELWEB as our Twitter username. It’s easily accessible by typing “http://www.twitter.com/XTELWEB” into any browser, and it helps SEO our site because our name is right in the username, and on the Twitter URL. You want to stake your claim on your Twitter username as soon as possible. Even if you don’t plan on using Twitter for SEO in the immediate future, people are signing up for this large social networking site by the millions, so you don’t want to lose out. Using your Brand Name as your Username also helps when your potential prospects are performing a Twitter Search, they can easily find your account, and follow your tweets.

Twitter Profile / Bio

Every Twitter account features a Profile and Bio section on the members page. This is where you want to get creative and definitely put your company URL in this area. This will create a backlink to your page that your Twitter followers / potential prospects can click and be taken to the page you insert here. Generally your company home page URL would be put here, but if you wanted to create a special Twitter landing page that has offers / discounts for people that find your company through Twitter, that is acceptable too. Also feel free to do some keyword research and analysis, using Google Adwords, or KeywordSpy perhaps, and make yourself a nice little “Bio” area that uses highly ranked keywords that fit into your companies criteria. Don’t look like you are using your Twitter account just for marketing though and make this Bio personable. If you need help, you can always contact us and we can write the content for you. Sometimes it’s a good idea to have a professional SEO Company write content for you, because we know how to analyze and research the keywords necessary for increased search engine rankings.

Twitter Links

Google displays Twitter Links in the SERPS page now, even though they are NOFOLLOW links, they can still aide in linkbuilding campaigns, and getting traffic to your website.

Hash Tags (#webdesign, #seo)

Hash tags on Twitter is a feature that basically functions like Meta data for your tweets. These are tweets that start with the “#” symbol and can be included in front of words you want to organize and trend on twitter

Twitter Mentions

You’ve probably seen it a million times if you are a regular Twitter user, its the “@” symbol. You place the “@” in front of another users Twitter name and it creates a reply or mention of that user. You can use mentions to share links and other information on Twitter. If a new user follows you, send them a mention/reply and say something like “@”UserName – thanks for following me, check out my website at http://goo.gl/8yKl2 . This lets the person that just followed you know that you are a live person, maintaining your Twitter account!

Tweet Interval

You don’t want to keep tweeting and tweeting and tweeting, without taking a breather in between. This will cause the people that do follow you to ignore your updates, which would cancel out the whole SEO strategy incorporating Twitter. Try to limit your tweets, if you are tweeting deals on products you sell, limit them to every few hours to once a day. Leave some room in between.

Your Blog Site

Twitter can be used to promote your company blog site. You can post blog articles on your site, and then have them automatically tweeted using various Twitter tools. These are great for keeping things low maintenance. If your blog article is interesting enough, people will re-tweet them!

Twitter Button

Add a twitter button to your website , it lets people share content from your website to their twitter accounts! Its a great tool that can boost links, traffic, SEO and social media marketing all in one little package!

Building your online brand with Twitter

Twitter does not just help your SEO, it can help build your company online brand. By creating professional Twitter user account pages, writing great content on your Twitter page, and then having people share content from your website, using a Twitter button, and also having users re-tweet content, you are on your way to building a reputable online brand. This shows users you actively engage in the online world, and that your company is up to date with technology. Twitter is also accessible from mobile phones through several APPS, no matter if its an iPhone or Google Android phone, there are Twitter apps. Imagine the possibilities just by creating a Twitter account for your business. We specialize in all these things and can definitely get your company started. Just contact us and we will get back to you ASAP regarding your company Twitter account.

It’s probably safe to say that your friends and siblings are on Facebook. Almost all of your loved ones are probably on this website. Do you think it is likely your customers are on the social media website? Keep reading for information on how to conduct a successful Facebook marketing campaign.

Sponsoring a contest can be a fantastic way to get more followers on Facebook. Take advantage of this great idea. Provide fans with coupons or even a product when they share or Like your page. If you do offer a cash or gift prize, though, make sure it is actually awarded. Be honest in business, of course.

Generate some attention for your Facebook campaign by organizing a giveaway. Get people to join by enticing subscribers with some free items. Let people know who won by announcing it on your profile, and use this strategy again if you wish to get additional subscribers later on.

Any content published online should be linked to your Facebook page. If you write a blog, make sure that new posts appear on Facebook. Link your Twitter and Facebook pages to have your tweets posted on your page.

Try making a group versus a page. Creating a group on Facebook will make other people more likely to start a community with each other where they can interact. Do not hesitate to use a page and a group so your subscribers can receive your updates through your page and share their own content on your group.

Always answer all the questions and comments sent to you via Facebook. Try to answer their question with a helpful answer, and thank that person for contacting you. If you can answer someone’s question with a link leading to content you’ve already published, that’s even better.

Custom tabs can help you make your Facebook marketing strategies more efficient. You can expect an overall improvement in your business by using tabs to keep your Facebook page organized for your customers. If you have a current promotion, make a special tab for that.

Buy a Facebook ad. You can tailor your ad so that only people of specific age or gender criteria see it. You can also make sure you stick to a budget. A long-term commitment need not be made. You are able to discontinue your ad at any time.

Any company that doesn’t regularly deal with customers doesn’t really need to have a Facebook page. Those customers are random, so they do not have any reason to read your daily posts. Instead, invest your time in creating targeted Facebook ads.

Your want to post content with value. Basically, whether it’s some helpful information or a look at a hot, new product, all posts should contain useful information. Avoid trying to oversell your products, or your subscribers will tire of the constant advertising.

You’re a Facebook user, so use your own experience to understand what a customer looks for. Use the information in the following article to create a successful Facebook marketing campaign. The more you work it, the greater your return will be.

SEO is sometimes hard to get a hang of. There’s a ton of things that can affect SEO, and there are lots of people who say they can help. This article is going to break down the important things that will help you achieve success with SEO.

Search engine optimization is not an instant process; be willing to wait for results. Large changes in traffic volume will not immediately happen. If the creation date of your site is not very long ago, it may take a few months to build your SEO. Like the promotion of any brand, time needs to be taken to build brand awareness.

Avoid Flash on your site. Flash takes a while to load and is not readable for some spiders, so it isn’t indexed. Succeeding with a search engine crawler means that your content should be easily found and used by them.

Search Engines

Make the most of your title tags to ensure that search engines correctly interpret the purpose of your site. Search engines usually will not show content past 60 characters. They favor the first 60 characters, as well, giving less weight to words past that.

To make a specific page of a website more search engine friendly, include keywords in the page’s URL. Try to reduce the amount of numbers and symbols your site’s URL has. Including important keywords that are relevant to your site will significantly improve your page’s traffic.

If you host video or audio content on your website, try to include transcripts. The transcripts allow your content to be easily understood by search engine robots. This will ensure your website gets a higher ranking.

Many believe that keywords in their comment tags will create a more visible site. You should focus on delivering quality, relevant content instead.

New content should be written and published often. Set a goal for yourself for weekly updates of new content and stick to it. The search engines are looking for web pages that produce new content on a regular basis versus a page that only has a small amount of new information added periodically. Sites with a regular stream of new content garner higher page rankings.

Duplicate Content

Keep away from spam filters and never use duplicate content. Know that it is quite possible to use duplicate content without even knowing it. Using the same description is easy, but could be flagged as spam.

There is so much that goes into whether or SEO is successful or a failure. There is also so much info on how to be successful with this technique. The advice you read here should allow you to quickly set up an SEO campaign which works.

Perhaps you thought that email promoting was an outdated trick. You would be wrong. Email solicitation is one of the earliest marketing techniques used on the Internet, but it is no where near finished. New strategies and techniques are constantly being made to make marketing emails effective and fresh. Read the following tips and make your email marketing work for you.

Only send emails to those who have requested them. If you mail unknown recipients, your email may be perceived as spam. They won’t know if they know who you are, and then they will think about whether they care at all about the actual content or your email. Most of the time, sending unsolicited mail is just deleted, or worse, reported. Neither of these outcomes are good for your business.

Pick an audience to target. When you have acquired a small group of viewers, think of innovative ways to get them to spread the word to their friends. Remember to have a subscribe link inside your email; hopefully, your customers will pass it to their friends that have similar interests on the products that you offer. This can help you grow your readers organically.

All emails should be proofread before they are sent out. Be certain that your newsletters and emails contain no errors. Prior to transmitting the message, check a sample of the email to make sure that it looks the way you intend for it to look. Also, if you place links in your email, test them to make sure they work.

Subject Lines

Test out different subject lines with the A/B testing method. Create an email with two separate subject lines. Send an email with the first subject line to half of your list, and an email with the second subject line to the other half of your list. This is a great way to measure the effectiveness of each subject line, helping you to understand how to send out emails that get read.

Marketing via email might be old, but it still has lots of profit potential. If you take this article’s advice into consideration and stay on the lookout for more ways to innovate and improve your e-mail marketing efforts, there is no reason the strategy can’t continue to serve you admirably for years and years.

Do you wish to become more knowledgeable about WordPress? This is a tool that millions of people are using to create their blogs and websites. It isn’t very difficult to master. It is utilized by both novices and professionals. Read this article to get some insight about improving your WordPress skills.

Become familiar with the tools available to use with WordPress. For example, clicking the Kitchen Sink will give you choices such as importing and formatting posts. You can make use of this to control many elements of formatting.

Be sure to use Title & Alt. Use both title and alternate text when uploading your images to your site. This way, you can add a lot more keyword phrases to your content, and visitors who have images disabled on the computers will get a good idea of what is there.

WordPress is something that people can use to get video blogs onto their sites. Although you may have to put in a little more time, you will get rewarded for your effort in the end. Internet users are a visual group. Using video is a powerful tool because it allows you to express your thoughts visually.

When you are committed to post content, make up a schedule. You will feel motivated to post regularly if you have a good schedule. You could write a lot of posts at once and then use the WordPress scheduling feature to post them for you.

Sometimes you might think some changes you’ve made weren’t saved. That is usually not the case. You may have a full browser cache that is interfering with your WordPress website. Just hold the ‘shift’ key when you refresh your browser to see the changes.

Your search engine ranking can be improved by taking a few moments to enhance your pictures when you upload them. You should incorporate title tags to your photos. If your image goes on Pinterest, you will get more exposure.

With WordPress, you’ll be able to create a website that looks really professional. It takes very little to get started. There are tools and resources available to make your blog look great. Therefore, make the most out of it.