Keywords

Before you do any SEO, you need to figure out what your keywords and terms are. Be specific. Depending on the size of your site, you may only want 3-5 terms. A good place to start would be a list of no more than 10 terms. When choosing your keywords, make sure they are fairly specific, not vague. The main question to answer is “what would someone enter in a search engine if they wanted to find my site?” If you sell clothes, you don’t want to choose “clothing” as a keyword. Instead, choose something like “Nike Jerseys” or even target specific clothing lines. Targeting a particular region can also be beneficial (“addidas shoes richmond”).

Repetition

Now that you’ve got your keywords, you need to use those on your site. Your content needs to be readable and seem natural, but you’ll want to incorporate those phrases where they fit. Search engines look at what is repeated on a page. Think of a magazine article. The title is going to appear in multiple places, and should include the most important part of the story. Try to structure your pages like this. Whatever is repeated in titles, headlines, and paragraphs is adding relevance to your page.

Text, text, text

Although there is limited support through other means, SEO is really all about text. Re-read your content. Does it say what it should? Are your terms there? If your site consists of images that contain writing instead of selectable text, it’s safe to say that your site needs help.

Linking

Links are an extremely important part of SEO. You certainly want external sites to link back to you, but you also need to make use of internal links (link your pages to each other). If your site is about organic gardening tips, and you have a section on how to grow tomatoes, you should link the phrase “How to grow tomatoes” to the relevant page or article.

Fresh content

Update your site regularly and post new content. This is great for search engines as well as your visitors. People love to get something for free, and it gives you an opportunity to convey your own expertise. Blogs are excellent for this since they provide an easy way to create new content. They also have built in tagging systems, so you can begin incorporating your SEO keywords with a few clicks of a mouse.

For a more in depth look at your own site, contact me.

1. Security

Internet Explorer has an enormous amount of security flaws. Surfing the web in IE can open your computer up to viruses, adware, spyware, and other malicious programs. While you may not be 100% safe using any browser, Internet Explorer is the only browser that uses ActiveX and Active Scripting, two technologies proven to be extremely vulnerable to viruses. Due to Internet Explorer’s integration into windows, viruses affecting IE can effectively control your entire computer. Along the same lines, if IE crashes, it will often crash the entire Windows operating system.

2. Web standards

As a web designer, I frequently encourage people to use a browser such as Firefox because it supports web standards. Web standards are agreed-upon methods for designing and coding websites. They ensure the greatest compatibility for all users. Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera are browsers that quickly adopt support for new standards as they emerge. In contrast, Internet Explorer is almost always the last to conform to standards and still lacks the majority of new features that have emerged. For web designers, this means that once we have created a website using good clean code, we then have to add hacks, fixes, and custom pieces to accommodate for IE.

3. No extensions allowed!

With IE, what you see is what you get. While Firefox, Opera and Chrome all allow for incredible extensions, IE users are stuck with limited out-of-the-box functionality. With the power of extensions, users can customize their browser to add functionality and speed up their workflow. Extensible browsers can add features with ease, such as themes, re-organized layouts, PDF managers, multimedia plugins, e-mail integration, smart bookmarks, or additional security features.

If you want a richer, more secure browsing experience, ditch IE and grab one of these modern browsers:

• Firefox
• Safari
• Chrome
• Opera

Here are a few questions to help you in getting started.

How many products are you going to offer?
How much expansion do you plan in the next 2-3 years?
Do you need shipping quotes?
Do you want to process credit cards directly on your site?
Do you want to manage the site yourself?
Is product SEO important to you?

There are many different ways of getting your products online. For the ultra-cheap and simple solution, descriptions of products could be listed on a page, with a “Buy Now” button that takes the visitor to PayPal. While this is simple to setup, there are many drawbacks.

Simple pages with PayPal buttons

If you only have 20-30 products, this method is the cheapest way to get your products online. The drawback is that it doesn’t have the professional appearance of the other options. Any high-schooler can put paypal links on a website, which is not a great comparison to make if you’re a business. Buyers want to have confidence in the site they are purchasing from, so the more professional the site looks and functions, the more reassured the buyer will be.

This option also lacks a lot of the functionality that the more expensive platforms offer. If you are using PayPal links on a basic page, all changes to product listings must be sent through a webmaster. The method for calculating shipping is restricted to flat and table rates. The SEO benefits are also little-to-none. The last and possibly most important consideration when doing a store based on PayPal buttons is that if you want to upgrade to a more advanced system later on, you’ll be starting all over again.

Using an E-commerce platform

There are many E-commerce platforms available, and different designers will always have a tendency to promote the ones that they are most familiar with. For the purpose of this post, I’ll be talking about Opencart and Magento. These platforms create a shopping-cart type of site with lots and lots of features. Here’s a sample of the features:

• Shipping quotes from USPS, UPS, FedEx
• Tax calculation
• Advanced reports
• Easily add / edit / remove products
• Easy integration with Google Shopping
• Stock notifications
• SEO urls

These e-commerce platforms have powerful administrative panels that allow you, the owner, to easily manage the site. This means that you can add additional categories of products, have sales, update your contact information, remove products, change shipping methods, and more.
A complete feature lists for these platforms can be found here:
Opencart Features
Magento Features

How do you want to accept payments?

Answering this question will answer a lot of other questions for you.  If you want to process credit cards directly on your site, then you’re pretty much guaranteed to need a reliable e-commerce platform. If you only want to use PayPal Payments Standard, then you can go with any of the above options.

It is usually a more professional and seamless experience for the user if a site accepts credit cards directly on their site (as opposed to sending the customer to PayPal for payment). The drawback to this kind of checkout experience is that most payment gateways (Authorize.net, PayPal Payments Pro, etc.) have monthly fees, in addition to taking a small percent from each transaction. For some businesses, it may work best to start with PayPal Payments Standard (no monthly fees), and then switch to a seamless checkout once business picks up.

If you want to go with the seamless checkout experience (users never leave your site), you will need a dedicated IP and a private SSL certificate, in addition to your regular hosting. These make your hosting bill slightly more expensive, but if you go with HostGator’s “Business” plan it comes out to about $12/ month, with everything included.

Read the full article here

There are many  great social media networks, but not all will apply to your business, venture, project, etc. Here are some of the most popular sites. You will want to choose a few and focus on those alone. Go through the list and find a few that sound interesting or relevant to your business. Facebook & Twitter are a good place to start.

1. Facebook
2. Youtube
3. Twitter
4. Flickr
5. MySpace
6. StumbleUpon
7. Delicious
8. Tumblr
9. Digg
10. Reddit

After you have chosen a few outlets that suit your needs, you need to deliver continuous, fresh content to those channels. That means posting news on Facebook, Tweeting about events, or putting fresh content into your YouTube account. It is also important that what you are posting be of some value or interest to your target audience. If you are a small business that sells sneakers, you most likely shouldn’t post that you are “stuck in traffic”. If you keep delivering quality content on a regular basis, people will take interest in you, and you will develop a following. This is the basic concept of most social media. This is not to be confused with the “sell, sell, sell” mentality.

Below are a few useful articles & guides to successfully using social media:

• 9 Rules of Facebook Promotion Every Small Business Should Know
• Getting Started with Social Media Marketing
• The “Ultimate” Small Business Guide to Social Media Marketing
• How to Market Your Business With Facebook

A website designer tends to be a jack-of-all-trades, but his primary skills lie in visual design and creating a front-end experience for visitors. If you enjoyed a cool background or paused to look at a unique header on a website, give some credit to the web designer. The designer is usually the “artist” behind the layout of a website. Designers may work with graphic designers, or incorporate some third-party artwork, but they are responsible for how the page looks to the visitor. A web designer should be capable of launching a large range of websites, including e-commerce sites, blogs, CMS systems, and more. Custom development is not necessary if your website fits an existing popular model for a website (blog, shopping cart, etc.).

If web designers are the artists, developers are the programmers who work with the heavy code behind a website. Developers create the functions, while designers make things look pretty. Developers write elaborate custom features in PHP, ASP, Javascript, and so on. If you have an idea for an e-commerce site with a hand-crafted user experience, you’ll be looking for a website developer to write in the new features. Developers are called in to write features that don’t exist in the standard shopping-cart platforms, blogs, or CMS systems. If a script is not readily available for the functionality that a client desires, a developer will be needed.

Most designers have at least a few contacts who do web development. If your project fits a well-known model for a website, there isn’t going to be much custom work. For example, if you want to have an e-commerce site where you sell and ship products, this fits the standard shopping-cart model. If you want an e-commerce site that displays certain specials on different days of the week, you’ll need some custom development.

I typically describe myself as a website designer. While I know web developers, they are also freelancers and it may take additional time to quote for any custom features. As a client, you have a few options when gathering quotes. Feel free to contact your favorite designer; this is a great starting point. Designers will usually know which technologies or additional expenses will be involved, if not the exact amount of hours required to develop those features. If you know your project is very original or will require a lot of custom work, you may want to get quotes straight from developers. It is reasonable to have a front-end designer of your choice work with the developer of your choice. It is also possible to have the developer write the project before the designer works on it at all. It is not uncommon for a platform to be created in a bare-bones functional state, and then have a designer customize the front-end to the desired look and feel of the site.

A Content Management System (CMS) sounds complicated; it isn’t. Basically, if you want to update your content on your own, you are asking for a CMS. There are many out there–some simpler than others, but they basically take the technical side out of managing a website. Instead of going through a webmaster, you can use your own web browser and “log in” to your site, make changes to the text and images on pages, post news, and so forth. If it suits your project, a CMS can be a great solution and can make managing your website simple and convenient.

Not every project requires a CMS, but here are some ways to identify if it does:

1. You plan on posting frequent updates
2. You want to run a blog
3. You want the ability to change the content on your own
4. You plan on greatly expanding the content of your site

For sites that need a blog, I use the same platform to power the blog that I would for the rest of the site.  It is a very small additional cost to integrate the CMS into the rest of the site if you already need a blog.

However, if you have a small business and just want to list your services (which rarely change), directions,  contact information, and a short bio, you may not need a CMS. Content that will stay the same doesn’t usually require a content management system. Small changes can usually be sent to myself or your website designer with little hassle. This solution is cheaper, but is less flexible in the long run. If you decide later to add a number of pages and expand your site, it may end up being more expensive at that point than if you had purchased a CMS in the first place.

The moral of the story is: build your website with the end in mind. If you are sure that your content isn’t going to change and you want to keep your budget low, skip the CMS.

If you plan on making frequent updates, including news, events, or want to control your content directly, go ahead and get the CMS. It will be an asset in the long run.

1. A domain name
2. Website hosting

A domain name is simple. My domain name is “Mattdoesdesign.com”. Google uses “Google.com”. It is simply the name of your site. These are cheap, and cost about $10 per year. Most companies that sell domain names also sell hosting, but it is a much better idea to find a good HOSTING company, and then purchase your domain through your hosting company.

Paying for website hosting is like renting an office. It is the place where your website exists. It is a small amount of server space where we put your website. Hosts charge anywhere from $3/ month to $300 / month, depending on your needs. Most of my small business clients have reliable hosting and pay between $5/ month and $13/ month. The kind of site you intend to run determines the cost range of your hosting. If you are unsure about what kind of server you need, or what features your site is going to require, it’s a good idea to talk to your designer before buying hosting.

I refer most of my clients to HostGator, since they use wind power instead of coal, and they have the most reliable service I have found.

There are many other good hosts out there, but also many bad ones. Non-US residents will want to buy hosting from companies that are close to their target demographic. If you want to sell products to Germans, don’t host with a server based in  California. Get a German host, and your customers will have a much quicker load time.

How large is the site?

For this question, I am thinking in terms of pages. If you want to have a homepage, a contact page, some information about your company, and a page with photos of your employees, that is a total of 4 pages. If you have 20 employees, and want a personal bio page on each one, your total may be 24 pages. For an e-commerce site, I will want to know how many informational pages (contact page, shipping info, frequently asked questions) there will be, and how many products you intend to sell (roughly).

Do you want a Content Management System (CMS)?

Usually, the answer is yes. A content management system allows you to update your site and control the content without paying me (or anyone) for maintenance. The CMS allows you to edit text, post news, insert & edit pictures, and much more. Unless your site requires virtually no updating, it makes sense to pay a little extra and have this feature built in. It may save you a headache in the long run.

What is the nature of the site?

Is it a photography portfolio? A t-shirt store? An informational site for your small business? Each of these sites are designed and coded differently and require different amounts of work.

Will you be selling products? How many products?

E-commerce sites take more work to create than almost any other site. If you intend to sell three different products, there is no need for a full-featured shopping cart. A simple (and cheap) solution will work better and will quickly connect your customers with the product. If you intend to sell hundreds of products, we will set up a different solution that caters to the display of multiple categories, products, and information.

Ready to get started?
Once you have a basic outline for your site, you can send me the details for an accurate quote. I will also be happy to answer any additional questions regarding your project.