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To run a successful website, a solid knowledge of beneficial web page design techniques is vital. It is through good design practices that your site becomes more appealing and easy to use, which makes it attractive to visitors. Proper design will first attract visitors to your site, and then ensure that they return often. Keep reading for a collection of tips you will find useful through the process of designing your site.

Include search elements that let visitors search site content. Those searching for specific information will instantly scan for a search option. Without this tool, the visitor might leave and go searching on another website. People look for these search boxes in the top right corner of the page, so place the search box in that area.

Broken Links

Before publishing websites, check them for broken links. People will become frustrated if they a link leads them to a broken page. Links can be checked manually, and you can also find software that will check your site to see if there are any broken links.

Don’t let content that is out of date linger on your website. You will lose the attention and credibility of your readers if the promotional offer on your page expired months ago. Allowing information that is outdated to remain on your website is a sign to users that you have not taken the time to update your site and it implies that you don’t care about their time. Review your website often, to remove anything which isn’t updated with the latest content.

It is important that your website is easy to read. Most website visitors do not really read online content. They just scan it looking for interesting tidbits of information. Break text into sections with headers that can be scanned easily by your readers. Be sure important information is given top billing. This ensures your site is user friendly.

It’s a good idea to set up your site so that it can retain a copy of user information that must be entered repeatedly. An example of this is if someone fills out a form to register, and then has to fill out other forms for other things. If the person’s info transfers from one form to the next, it will be much more convenient and less time consuming for the user. This kind of “sticky” information saves your users time and effort, and they will likely appreciate the streamlining this kind of good design provides.

To create an attractive website, buy one of the various site-building programs out today. These professional programs are easy to use and can help you make beautiful sites faster. Otherwise, people will not be interested in visiting your site.

Don’t have pop-ups. Everyone hates getting pop-up after pop-up on a website. Many people will close a website that brings pop-ups as soon as they can, no matter what size the site is. You can avoid losing customers and visitors, by simply refusing to allow pop-up ads on your website. If you have a host that requires the use of pop-ups, then look for a new one.

Promoting good web page design practices will give you a ton of benefits. Using best practices helps your site exude a genuine feel. It engenders trust in your visitors. Additionally, visitors will find your site more attractive and user-friendly. Your website’s success all depends on how well it is developed. You now have the tips in this article to start your design projects. With the ideas listed above, you will find yourself creating a great website in no time at all.

Just wondering what everyone uses to post their video’s to multiple video sites at once?

XTELWEB | 727-359-5150 | chris at XTELWEB dot com

In marketing your business, you need to decide which marketing tools will be most effective. Many businesses have been able to connect with potential customers and clients through marketing via email. These are just a brief sampling of effective e-mail marketing techniques.

Never send out unsolicited marketing emails. If you send marketing materials to people who didn’t ask for them, they may mark your marketing messages as spam. In addition to having a negative effect on your reputation, this could also cause ISPs to block you.

Send emails to people who are familiar with you and request your notifications. Your emails will appear to be spam to those who are unfamiliar with your company. 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. Your emails will not even be opened. Do not waste your time emailing people you do not know.

Proofread everything you send out through email. Correct any emails or newsletter problems you may have. You should also test the layouts of your emails to make sure they are displayed properly on different browsers and devices. Additionally, if you incorporate links within your message, test them for functionality.

To get customers enthused about getting your emails, give prizes away through your newsletter. This form of email promoting not only gives your readers a real value for their participation, but also encourages them to refer friends. In fact, a referral program is a great way to grow both your email base and your customer base.

Experiment with, and evaluate, different email layouts. Put your important information and any new offers near the beginning of your messages. Try using various formats to figure out which of them gets more responses. Once you find what works, continue to use it. Your customers will be more comfortable with something that is useful and familiar to them.

Focusing on marketing via email can be a smart decision when you are trying to promote your company. Take advantage of the advice you’ve read here to come up with an email promoting campaign that’s different from everything else out there. Never stop seeking out new ways of creating fresh, compelling emails for your subscribers to read.

So this is definitely the absolute most annoying part of being a web designer.  Checking your designs to be compatible with different web browsers.  Most people today use different web browsers on all types of platforms, whether its Windows, Macintosh, the iPad/iPhone or even your cell phone, compatibility is king.

You would think that when they first designed the internet and the browsers we use to browse the internet someone would say, “Lets make everything the same, so it can all be viewed the same.”  WRONG!  That is not the case! There is nothing more frustrating then getting approval from a customer to complete a design workup and then that customer telling you the website does not work in a particular browser.

There are a few different services out there to help you on your path to ultimate browser compatibilty.

Here are some of the tools personally used at XTELWEB:

Adobe BrowserLab:

This is a great new tool which is actually based on Adobe Technology that allows you to view your site in several browsers with several operating systems.  You do have to register to use this tool and Adobe is letting you use it for the first year free which is totally awesome.  The downside is that the tool only shows screenshots so you can’t test usability with it, but if you combine this tool with another….you’re in business.  At the time I posted this Adobe Browserlab allowed testing in Internet Explorer(IE) 6 – IE8, Safari 3 – Safari 4, FireFox 3.6 and Chrome 3.

Visit: Adobe BrowserLab

 

IE Tester:

This is my personal favorite tool because for one, it does not run in your existing browser, its an actualy stand-alone application, which to me seems the most “trustworthy”.  Its also a free tool, and free is good.  This tool, as suggested in the name, is for testing compatibility across Internet Explorer Browsers, which is fine because it seems most coding errors are with IE anyway.  This tool allows you test website compatibility in Internet Explorer 5.5 , IE6 , IE7 and the new Internet Explorer 8. 

Download: IE Tester

 

BrowserShots.org

Last but not least is a website called BrowserShots.org – what a great business idea….this site probably makes tons of money on advertising. Basically this service allows you to enter a website domain, choose the platforms and browsers you want to test on, and voila – a screenshot of your requests.   This site does have its drawbacks though, like the fact that at times I have waited for over ten minutes for two screenshots.  But like with all services, there is a free, and a paid.  You can order premium service which allows you to get your browser shots faster, though I have not tried it, it does sound promising.

Visit: BrowserShots.org

 

Thank you for reading!

Have you had trouble driving traffic to your WordPress blog? Do you want to create one but need to make sure you do it correctly? Successfully operating any web content creation is a matter of balancing personal knowledge with honest effort. You will find great ideas in this article that you can use.

Choose a design that is relatively unique when making your WordPress blog; don’t just choose the design everyone else is using. Although creating an individual design takes more time, it will make your website look more personalized. It is important to create a site that shows the individuality of your business.

Get familiar with the tools on WordPress to help you blog. For example, clicking the Kitchen Sink will give you choices such as importing and formatting posts. This can be used to control several formatting elements.

You have to make sure you use Alt and Title. Use your Title and Alt. text tags when you use images in blog posts. This will give you more space to use for SEO phrases. Additionally, it will help viewers whose images are turned off know what is on the page.

Learn what you can before installing WordPress. When you plan ahead, the better your site will be. Learn about SEO, creating effective content, and using WordPress and its many features to help ease your workflow.

Make a schedule for your posts. You will increase your motivation if you know exactly how long it’s been since your last post. In fact, you can sit down one day and create posts for the rest of the week, then you can use the schedule feature to have WP upload the posts for you.

Are there lots of people commenting on your posts? If so, you and other visitors might find it difficult to weed through all of them. Use a plugin to add page numbers. That way, navigation will be simpler, and your site is sure to be well organized.

Rank higher with the search engines by paying careful attention to the images that you upload. Make sure to give titles, as well as alternate text tags. When visitors pin your images to sites like Pinterest, the title you gave is what will be represented on their screen.

Provide a link that allows all your users to easily email themselves a copy of your articles. Not everyone has access to social media sites but may still desire to share your information with others. Try using a plugin like WP-Email.

Titles and targeted descriptions ought to be used. These are the first impressions that your readers see. Don’t overlook the importance of this fact. If you want more control, try using the SEO program, Scribe. You can use this to make edits on your pages in order to bring more visitors.

Organize that media library often. Uploading images without thinking of organization can cause havoc to your site. Set up your folders from the beginning, even if you do not have content for all of them yet. This makes it easier later on if you’d like to reuse images.

After reading this article, you now know a little more about the mechanics of WordPress. Start using the advice right now. You will get more traffic on your site. Plus, users will love it more. Be sure to bookmark this page to refer to it in the future. Once you put all these changes in, your site is going to be better for it.

Do you have a desire to run a blog or successful website but are not sure you know how? WordPress is the answer for you. This application takes the the difficulty out of learning how to create a website or blog, and you won’t need to learn coding. Read on to learn even more about this.

When you are using WordPress, get familiar with the tools and features available in the application. For instance, clicking on the visible Kitchen Sink button can offer more choices for formatting posts to make them more unique. There is also a Screen Options tab located on the admin pages of your site. You can make use of this to control many elements of formatting.

It is easy to use video blogging on your WordPress site. This will require you to spend more time prepping, but this is worth it. Most Internet users are very visual. Videos can convey things words cannot, so they are very useful.

Set a schedule when you’re ready to post. Having a schedule will assist you in getting your posts done on time. The schedule feature will also allow you to write several posts at once and have them uploaded at pre-selected times.

Eliminate comments and content that fail to add value to your site. You want to make your site as user-friendly as possible. An excellent plugin that can aid you in removing spam from your site on a daily basis is Akismet.

The URLs of your blog posts should not have special characters. This can hassle those search engines, so the characters are best removed. You can also make the URLs shorter so they do not overwhelm your visitors, so just use the keywords.

Do not automatically assume your changes were not retained when making adjustments to your site. This is probably not true. You might be able to solve the problem by clearing out your browser cache. Press and keep holding the Shift key as you refresh your browser, and you should then see your changes.

Bloggers of all types have leaned on WordPress. The rich array of features make this tool very user-friendly to beginners, yet powerful enough for professionals who want more advanced features to build a robust website. The sky is the limit with WordPress, and thus it pays to keep learning all about it.

The Google trusted store credential or Google trusted store badge is a way to tell your customers that your business meets certain performance requirements. And becoming a Google trusted store is something that ecommerce sites can benefit from. In fact, conversion rates increase 9.6 percent and increases order sizes up to 6.3 percent. Those are sizable numbers and by becoming a Google trusted store means being able to realize at least a portion or all of those increases.

Just as the Better Business Bureau logo, Verisign, and Triple A logo tell customers a business is trustworthy, so too will becoming a Google trusted store participant and installing the Google trusted store badge on your site. There’s no cost to join, but there are certain requirements your business must meet.

Google Trusted Store Requirements

Not surprisingly, the search engine giant doesn’t want just anyone to copy and paste the Google trusted store badge. That has to be earned. Sites which want to be a Google trusted store have to meet the following minimum requirements:

Shipping Metrics

Ecommerce sites depend on orders being shipped on-time and being fulfilled according to the customer’s requirements. And Google wants that to always be the case.

• Correct/on-target shipping estimates. Google requires a business being part of Google trusted store network to have a high percentage of on-time shipping. The partner business must ship orders within the time frame stated during the point of sale.
• Fast/expedited shipping. Google trusted store merchants must ship their merchandise quickly. And the quicker the products get to the customer, the better. Google wants merchants to maintain a low average number of days of shipping.

Service Metrics

Customer service is another criteria in becoming a Google trusted store. Here again, merchants will have to do more than provide quick shipping. Google trusted store sites will likewise have to effectively deal with customer complaints.

• A high percentage of customer complaint resolutions. Google wants merchants to resolve as many complaints as possible
• Quick response to customer complaints. If a customer has a complaint about a Google trusted store, it must be dealt with immediately.
• Low percentage of customer complaints. Of course every ecommerce store and not just Google trusted stores want their customers to be satisfied.

Google Trusted Store Badge Installation

If your site meets the above Google trusted store requirements, then you can become part of the network. Here’s how you can become a Google trusted store step-by-step:

1. Visit the Google trusted store sign-up microsite.
2. Carefully fill out the application, inputting your business information, sign the program agreements, and opt-in for data feeds.
3. Read the eligibility requirements thoroughly.
4. Allow the code to be generated, then copy and paste the Google trusted store code onto your site. You can put the Google trusted store badge on any page you choose and it can be more than one page.

Now your customers will have an opportunity to get a report card from your site’s Google trusted store badge. And if you’re thinking about spoofing the badge, you should know that there’s a security build-in verification system.

If you are interested in becoming a Google trusted store, then contact us and we’ll set it up. You can also take advantage of our free consultation offer and learn about ways to improve your site’s conversion rates.

The SEO Industry is definitely always changing.  The basic principles of search engine optimization remain the same.  Here are some of the SEO Tactics you should try to focus on in order to stay strong in the search engine results page.

One thing you should keep in mind is that SEO is a game.  SEO is a game that has to be played at least on a daily or bi-daily basis.  You will want to keep and maintain goals in order to rank #1.  After you rank #1 your goals will pretty much change to “Keeping the #1 Ranking”.

Build Domain Authority:

Every hyperlink to any page on your domain is counted as a basically a “point” by the search engines.  You should try and focus on building reputable links to your domain, or pages on your domain in order to build Domain Authority.  You don’t want to “purchase links” or use “paid links” because Google and other search engines know which sites are selling links and can penalize you for using services that promise PR8 and PR9 backlinks for a “price”.  While this tactic may work temporarily, soon your “price” will be getting ranked last in the search engines.

Build Individual Page Authority:

Although I mentioned this before, above, you need to build backlinks to pages within your domain.  Having a blog on your website, in your domain (www.XTELWEB.com/blog/) is an excellent way of building individual page authority.  If your blog does well, it will also build authority, and help your website move higher in the search engines.

Use the 80/20 rule when building individual page authority.  What this means is that you focus on building links on the top 10 pages that rank for the phrases you want in search engines. Before search engines started counting entire domains (domain authority) they were not really focused on the pages located within the domain.  This is why “Landing Pages” was such a big deal a year or two ago.  Now you want as many “Authoritive” pages as possible in your domain.  Once again, a blog will seriously aide you in this SEO Strategy.

Be smart enough to know when you are lucky:

Focus on winning, not losing.  What I mean by this is that you need to focus on the SEO Tactics that work best for your website.  If your website sells products on its site, then you may want to incorporate SEO into your website’s shopping cart or use social media marketing avenues such as FaceBook or Twitter to advertise prices and promotions.  If your website simply sells a service, then you are going to want to focus on “On Page Optimization” meaning that you have a solid SEO Friendly Website and SEO Optimized HTML Code.

If you focus on these few SEO Strategies, you will see results in the search engines.   These are just a few of the many tips and tricks when it comes to playing the search engine optimization game!  Check out the rest of my blog at www.XTELWEB/blog/ for more SEO Tips, SEO Techniques, SEO Strategies and more.  We also do website design, and all of our web design is SEO Optimized.

Wow, the folks over at wordpress have been really busy lately. I just performed update wordpress services for a client in which I updated their plug-ins, checked compatibility for some older plug-ins and updated their Headway theme from 1.7 to 2.0.8. This was considerably a large update for the client as they have not updated in about 1 year. You can imagine the CSS errors when the upgrade was finally done, especially because this client had some pretty large custom css files. The point of all this was that the update occurred on a Friday, when wordpress 3.1.3 was out and on Monday 3.1.4 was already out. This happened to be the day the client went into their dashboard to make sure the work had been done. Needless to say I had to explain to them that the update had been released that day, or over the weekend some time.

Anyway, all this talk about WordPress got me wondering…why so many updates so soon? So I headed over to the wordpress site to catch up on my reading. It so happens that wordress 3.2 is already out..at least in development phase. You have to be a beta subscriber to get the list of updates. Originally it was thought that the developers of wordpress were going to drop IE7 support. Suffice to say, it’s still supported in WordPress 3.2.

Here are some of the new features that can be found in WordPress 3.2. It was supposed to be released on June 30th to the public.

Have a look at the WordPress 3.2 dasboard looks like…It’s a little different, but not by much.

Here’s some of what’s new:

Performance improvements like you wouldn’t believe. What’s that mean? Things are faster!
Distraction-free Writing. The visual editor’s full-screen composing experience has gotten a major overhaul, and is now available from HTML mode, too. More than ever, WordPress allows you to focus on what matters most — your content.
Admin UI Refresh. The last major redesign of the WordPress admin was in 2008. This isn’t a major redesign, just a little facelift to keep us feeling young. WordPress turns 8 later this month, you know.
New Default Theme. Introducing Twenty Eleven, based on the popular Duster theme. Rotating header images, post format support, and more.
Browse Happy. WordPress is made to work with modern browsers. If you visit your Dashboard using an outdated web browser, we’ll let you know there’s a newer version available.
Admin Bar. We’ve added more links to the admin bar to make it even more useful.
Be Aware:
WordPress has new minimum system requirements: PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.
Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be supported.
The favorites menu has been removed. If you’ve written any plugins that use this menu, it’s time to switch over to an admin bar placement.
Known Issues:
We haven’t updated the blue admin color scheme yet, so do your testing in the gray zone for best results

1. Choosing Keywords

One of the first steps of any SEO campaign is choosing the keywords you want for your target audience.  In other words, discovering the search terms or words that potential customers are using to find products or services like yours, and then build your Web content around those words.  What complicates this process is that countless other websites are trying to do the same thing!

Understanding the competitive ratio: Generally speaking, the more popular the search term, the more websites compete to rank high for that search term.  Of course you want to rank high for popular terms but if you don’t have limitless resources, it is wise to aim for search terms in which you have a realistic chance at a high ranking on the search engine results page (SERP)

The best keywords to use are ones that are being search and search, but are words or phrases that are being overlooked by other websites.

There are a number of ways to find search terms.  One way to do this is to calculate the ratio of the number of pages a search returns to the popularity of the search term.

Do the math: First, create a list of the keywords, or better yet, keyword phrases – a potential client may plausibly search if he or she were looking for your product (A toy retailer, for example, might start with variations of toy, toys, action figures, stuffed animals; a specialty shop might also try collectible toys, antique toys)

Then see how often users search for these terms by entering them into keyword tracking tools such as Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) , Keyword Discovery (www.keyworddiscovery.com) or Google AdWord’s Keyword Tool (adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). The Google AdWords tool is free, and the website SEOBook.com offers a free, though not as powerful, version of Wordtracker.  Besides showing how many times these phrases are search on average in a day or month, these tools will suggest other relevant terms.

After you have researched your words, you are going to want to enter them into Google.  The more websites that are returned for a keyword or keyword phrase, the more competition you will have with that phrase. You should realize that you will have a better chance for a keyword or keyword phrase if the results that shown on the search engine results page (SERP) are less than one-million (1,000,000)

Finally, you will want to divide the number of indexed pages by the number of daily searches.  The lower the result, the more promising the term.  Try to aim for a ration of 500 to 1 or less.

Narrow your keywords: If your ratio is higher than 500 to 1, you will probably want to revise your keywords and use choose more narrower or more specific keywords. If you do most of your business locally, you would benefit from using a geographic term to each keyword used on top level pages. (antique toy shop becomes antique toy shop Tampa) These searches are less popular, but the competition to win it is less populated, and will likely generate a lower ratio.

There is absolutely no need to generate an exhaustive list of phrases.  In other words, you don’t need any more than a dozen or so keyword and key phrase combinations.  Because each web page has a different focus or objective, you should use keywords that are tailored to each page, rather than to the whole site.   When your keywords are broken down to a page by page criteria the chances of being found on search engines are greater.

This was Part 1 of 3 for “Back to the Basics of SEO” – Part 2 will cover “Placing Keywords Strategically” and Part 3 will cover “Building a Better Website”

So please subscribe to my Feed and you will see Part 2 “Placing Keywords Strategically” within the next day or two.

My schedule has been really hectic with website design and search engine optimization. I am still available for hire though. Thank you.

Read: Part 2 of 3