SEO Terms Defined

The language used in discussing SEO can confuse some people.  These are some traditional SEO terms and their typically accepted meanings:

* SEO – this stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a general term used to describe methods and strategies that will help your site rank better in the search engine listings.
* On page SEO- these are methods and strategies a site owner uses internally on their own site to help their site rank better.
* Off page SEO- this covers methods and strategies a site owner uses externally on other people’s websites and blogs to help his website rank better.
* Backlinking- this off page SEO method involves creating links on other people’s websites that point to your website. These links are called back links.
* No follow links- these are backlinks that do not carry the “power/authority” of the page rank of the site they are located on.
* Do follow links- these are backlinks that have the page rank of the site they are located on flowing through them to the back linked site.
* White hat SEO – these are ethical SEO tactics used by a site owner to promote his site, that are looked upon favorably by search engines
* Black hat SEO- these are unethical SEO tactics used by a site owner to promote his site, which are not desirable and may result in getting banned by search engines.
* Backlink profile – this refers to the mixture of the different type of backlinks a webmaster uses.
* Backlink Value- this is a calculation of the power of the backlinks a site owner has build. It equals the number of backlinks built  multiplied by the strength of each backlink( based on the page rank of the site where the backlink is built)
* Anchor Text- this is the clickable part of text within an article or other piece of content which when clicked will direct the user to another page or site.
* Page Rank – this is a search engines measure of a webpage’s authority on a scale of 0 to 10. Search engines rank individual web pages not websites as a whole.
* Contextual links – these are back links that are embedded within the text of piece of content and are surrounded by other content. They are the most powerful type of backlinks especially if they appear on a sites homepage.
* Keyword density- the number of times a keyword appears in a piece of content, expressed as a percentage. The ideal mark is 3%, but this is a very generic target number that can actually vary from one situation to the next.
* Outbound Links- these are links a website owner creates from his website to external websites as opposed to a backlink that links from external sites to his site.
* Indexing – a term used to describe when a search engine finds content on the web and lists it in its search results. Some content gets indexed faster than other types.

Learn more about SEO at DunnTek

How Press Releases May Help You Improve SEO

Small business owners sometimes overlook press releases backlinks in an SEO campaign mainly because not many small business owners have heard of them or understand how they can be of benefit. Press release web sites are just news release sites that operate online and despite their traditional offline definition, you don’t necessarily need to submit any breaking news like you may see on the front page of the news paper.  This is because people often think of sensational stories located on the first page, when in fact almost all of the news paper is significantly less sensational. Most of it merely describes fairly ordinary activities.  As one aspect of developing your small business' online brand, press releases may well improve general awareness about your company, which is what SEO is becoming about.

Here are some suggestions you may use to be able to generate press release content:
* New products or services
* Industry developments
* New employees
* Community involvement stories
* How you are staying competitive
* Run a holiday sale
* Run a webinar
* Start a podcast
* Implement new machinery or techniques
* Customer referral program
* Tour of your business
* Improving employee benefits
* Patent applications or awards


In most cases you are able to include what's referred to as a contextual backlink. Contextual backlinks an important aspect of your SEO and are characterized by being surrounded by terms or language related to your industry.  Utilize your main keyword as the text of the link.  Before selecting a press release service, ensure they enable you to include contextual backlinks.

Examples of Press Release Services:

* http://www.free-press-release.com
* http://www.i-newswire.com
* http://www.pr.com/press-releases
* http://www.prlog.org
* http://www.ecommwire.com
* http://www.1888pressrelease.com
* http://www.pressreleasepoint.com
* http://www.addpr.com
* http://www.ecommwire.com
* http://www.theopenpress.com

A key thing to take note of is that you shouldn’t submit the identical article to all the sites. Instead you could submit unique articles to each PR provider. One of many ways it is possible to speed up your press release submissions is for you to take one particular post and spin it into many different articles, and subsequently submit each spun article to a separate press release site.

A further thing to consider is the actual development of the press release itself.  Some services do this within the base services.  Some will perform it for an extra fee.  Some others will require that you send a fully-written press release.  Since this affects the charge, you will need to research this aspect.

Retain a record of all of your press release URL's so that you will be able to reference them later on.

Remember, if you are contemplating SEO your primary consideration is to give thought to your reader and growing your internet brand, creating awareness regarding your company and services while doing so in a way that makes it much easier for the search engines to comprehend how the services that your business provides are matched to the types of searches that individuals are making.  Search engine optimization isn't about any type of trickery; it's about making things easier for the search engines and simply being purposeful instead of throwing information out there and hoping they will be able to connect the dots for you.  Press releases are no different in this regard; they're really simply another kind of content marketing.  An SEO company (visit now) will most likely be able to help you with getting the most benefit from a press release with special consideration given to improving your brand.

Avoid Doing These 4 Things with Your Website Design

As a business owner, it's important to remember you only have a couple of seconds - literally - to get your visitor's attention in a good way, or they will click Back and you won't see them again.  First impressions are incredibly important in determining whether your website convinces someone to take a closer look, and, ultimately, call you.  There are a few things, though, that are just killers in terms of making an immediately negative impression.  What you have to realize is that it doesn't matter how good the rest of your website is, or how good your services are, if you fail this first test with your visitor.

In terms of what makes a "good" website design, that's a subject for many books since there is, in fact, a lot of research behind what design strategies and components convert visitors into callers.  That's not my subject today, though.  Today, I'm talking about some specific things that you should avoid.  If you have any of these things in your own website, you should definitely take some sort of immediate action to do something about it.

1. Auto-Play Music

Don't have your website set to automatically start playing any sort of audio as soon as someone lands on it, unless the entire page is either about music itself, or it's a landing page with a video as the main feature.  Otherwise, anything with an audio component should not be activated unless the user chooses to activate it.  As a whole, people tend to have a negative reaction to such automatic background music because it's seen as an unwanted intrusion.  Furthermore, there's the distinct possibility that whatever music you like, your visitor won't.  It's one thing to have a professional relationship with your website visitors, but that doesn't mean making them listen to your favorite song every time they come to your website.  It's also unnecessary bandwidth usage for mobile users and slows things down while the music file is transferred.

2. Tiny/Large Font Sizes

Your website should be pleasing to the eye, and either tiny or unnecessarily large fonts are sure to ruin not only the aesthetic quality of your website, but the actual usability.  If the font is so big that they have to lean back in order to take it in, then it's too big.  Conversely, keep in mind that just because you can read tiny text just fine, that doesn't mean that your visitors can.  Always remember that your website is there to represent your business in the best possible way to potential clients/customers, and not everyone can read tiny text easily.  You want them to have a good experience with your website right off the bat, because they are going to extrapolate from that experience what the rest of their relationship with you is likely to be like.

3. Pop-Ups

Although there are cases where pop-up windows can serve a useful purpose, such as letting a shopper know they still have items in their shopping cart they may have forgotten about, if you are running a small local business then pop-up windows are something you should avoid.  They just tend to annoy most people.  If someone is looking for either a landscaper, or a restaurant to go out to dinner, people want to feel like they are in control of their online shopping experience, and annoying them with a pop-up window is a sure way to give them a not-so-great experience with you right off the bat.  As a general rule, don't do it.

Why might you use pop up windows?  As I mentioned, one scenario is to let visitors know they still have items in their shopping cart.  Another potential use is to offer the visitor a discount when they are about to leave your website without having contacted you.  If they took the trouble to look at your website, but then leave, maybe they simply aren't convinced yet that you're the right vendor.  Giving them an unannounced discount offer can sometimes tip people over the edge into deciding to buy from.  You have to be careful, though, if you are serving a local area around you, because you aren't just talking about random internet shoppers browsing through your website.  You're talking about the same potential customer base, over and over again, so I do not generally recommend any sort of pop-up strategy in this situation.

4. Glaring Colors

Don't use a lot of glaring or high-contrast colors.  Your website should have a nice overall aesthetic flow, be easy on the eyes, and make it very easy for a visitor to quickly scan through your site and naturally have their eyes fall right onto your Call to Action (CTA), whether it's a Call Now button, contact form, etc.  Your CTA needs to 'pop' to catch their eye, but if you use a lot of strong colors everywhere else, it will be a lot more difficult for your CTA to do so.  I'm starting to cross over into some very technical aspects of neuroscience and how the brain works, which isn't really the purpose of this article, so just remember to be careful in your use of strong or contrasting colors.  It's very easy to use too much.

In closing, remember that you only have a couple of seconds to get a visitor's attention and convince them to stick around a little longer and see what you have to offer.  You can easily ruin that first impression with autoplay audio files, tiny text, pop-up windows, and glaring colors.  If you need help fixing any of these things, visit me right over here.

Be Legit & Pass Inspection

If you want your business website to both reach and stay on the coveted Page 1 of Google for your particular keywords, one of the things you need to know is that you'll probably be inspected by an actual human working for Google at some point once you make it there, so they can be sure that the site they're promoting high up is legitimate, offering information and/or services that people are really going to want.  And with the top 3 spots getting 80% of the clicks, and 90% all staying on Page 1, the last thing you want to do is fail to pass inspection once you get there.  Google wants to be sure people aren't just using a bunch of spam or other forms of trickery to get themselves ranked - and I think we can all agree that it's in everyone's best interest as consumers for them to do this.  What that means for your business is making sure your website has the 'right stuff.'

Here are a few things to consider:

1. You need to look like a real business.  While this may seem obvious enough, unfortunately there are so many people trying to make a buck through less than scrupulous means that you need to be sure your website looks like it represents a real, honest business.  A few things to consider including are:

* A physical address, and possibly a Google map of your location
* Mailing address
* Telephone contacts
* Special awards, certifications, accreditations, etc.

2. Have a nice, well-organized website that's easy to navigate and pleasing to the eye.  Be sure to include a privacy policy, about, and contact page, and give some thought to how you organize your site so it doesn't look like it was hastily thrown together.

3. Include customer reviews and/or testimonials, but remember that you may not have the right to just take them off of places like Google or Yelp.

4. Don't clutter your website with so many sales ads that it looks like your website content is just "filler" and the real purpose of the site is your ads.   That doesn't mean you can't have ads, but they should not be the dominant focus of the site.  Consider whether your site would be useful to people if the ads were removed.

5. Don't cram keywords into every nook and cranny.  While keywords are important so that Google can correctly determine how your website is related to searches, you don't want to over-do it.  Your website can up looking like one big spammy concoction designed to trick Google rather than make sense to visitors.  Everything should make sense from a human point of view.

6. If you don't mind the work involved and dealing with spam etc., consider permitting and encouraging people to actively engaged in conversations with you on your website, and especially include social sharing in such case.  This shows that you're a real person offering real services.  It's also a terrific way to grow your brand, since if people ask you questions, you can take that as an opportunity to create and post new content in response, both solving their issue for them while creating new quality content at the same time.

In summary, remember that if you make it onto Page 1, Google is going to have an actual person come look at your website.  They want to be sure that you're a real business offering quality services and content - i.e. that you actually *deserve* to be on Page 1.  The main key to passing this evaluation is just to always keep your reader in mind.  Spend less time worrying about Google and more time worrying about the people who will visit your site.  If you design for the end-user in mind and ask yourself what would a visitor to your website want to know about you then you'll probably be okay.

If you need me to take a look at your site and talk about protecting your ranking, contact me over at my website.

Tell Them How You Can Help

As a business owner, you know your business inside and out.  In fact, your products and services, and how they can potentially help people, are things you know so well that you probably don't give them much thought.  When it comes to your website, though, it's important to realize that what may seem obvious to you may not be so obvious to someone who visits you online.

People come to your website with some type of life situation.  Whether they've just moved, or are about to move, they're getting married, going out to dinner, or a plumbing fixture just broke, they want to know whether your business has the answer to their life situation.  They don't just want information about your products and services.  They want to know if you're the kind of vendor who's going to be able to do what they need done, when they need it, in the way they need it done.  Your story as a vendor needs to match up to their story as a person to get them to call or contact you.  And it's not just information they are scrutinizing; people are evaluating other signals about your company in order to determine whether you are the KIND of vendor they want in their life - and those decisions are made in a fraction of a second when they land on your website.

You convey these messages to your website visitors in several different ways that all need to work together.  It isn't just one thing; it all of the individual things, both each on its own, and how they all work together, in order to convey the right message.  Let's walk through some of these things.

As soon as new site visitors arrive at your website the first thing they need to know, before anything else, is what you do, and you convey this in two primary ways. 

PAGE TITLE

Your page title doesn't just say who you are; it tells people what you do.  For example, you wouldn't want to just say "Raleigh UCM, LLC".  Instead, you go with something like, "Raleigh UCM LLC - Custom Home Builder".  Always use plain English rather than any industry technical terms, unless your normal customer is highly technical and knowledgeable in your field and that's who you primarily market to.

Your title is very important to the search engines in determining your search ranking for different terms, so it needs to both have proper SEO quality while also engaging a visitor's interest.  This is part art and part science to put them together.

IMAGES

You want an image on your website to quickly capture the essence of what you can do for your customers, or how you can help them.  In practice, I see this done several ways, but I recommend some of them over others.  Let's walk through them, and I'll explain my thoughts about each.

1. The End Result.  This type of images displays the end result that you give your customers, whether it's a beautiful lawn, a gorgeous house, or delicious mouth-watering food.  This is my #1 top recommendation for the first picture that a visitor to your website should see.

2. The Emergency.  Sometimes people have a real crisis on their hands, such as an exploding faucet.  A picture that captures the essence of their disaster can help convey that you're the right one to help.  A picture of this sort also needs to be accompanied by language that speaks to your being able to address it and restore peace and order back to their life.

3. The Work.  This type of picture conveys someone actually doing the type of work you perform.  I think these type of pictures are very useful in parts of your website, but I wouldn't make it the very thing your visitor sees.  The last thing you want to do is show them a bunch of pictures that will create angst over their house being turned into a disaster zone, even if it's just temporary while you're doing the job.  That's because you aren't selling work; you're selling results.  Save pictures of this sort for interior pages where you talk about your work processes, and accompany them by re-assuring language.

TAGLINE

Your tagline helps convey what you're about - the mission or character of your company.  What makes a good tagline is a little beyond the scope of this article, but it can make a difference in the mind of your website visitor.  It also has SEO value.

MAIN HEADING

You want to quickly convey the essence of what you have to offer.  This is one of the first things that's going to catch their eye, so it's important real estate on your website.  You want it to resonate with them enough to make them want to read more about you. 

TEXT CONTENT

Just as the point of the main heading is to capture your visitor's interest and prompt them to read a bit further, the same thing is true of the very first sentence - and paragraph - on any of your pages.  A bit of mystery or intrigue can work, depending on your website and services, but you need to simultaneously provoke their curiosity while creating resonance between your story and theirs.  In other words, you need to sell them on the idea that you can help, and get them to read further.

The biggest trick to engaging content is not talking about all the technical details of your services, equipment, or capabilities.  You want to have such information available, but you don't want to stick it in their faces.  Rather, you want to talk about results and how what you can do can help with the story of their life.  For example, if you're a wedding planner, they don't just want a cake and a dress.  They want a smooth, peaceful and well-coordinated wedding experience.  This exact same idea applies to any other trade or service.

CONCLUSION

I outlined above a few considerations for a small business owner on content for their website.  Most people decide in less than a second whether or not they want to read any further into your website based on whether the things they see and read are what they're looking for.  You have to tie all of the pieces together so that you can capture your visitor's interest enough to get them to call or contact you.  I tried to give you some solid principles to go by, but there's a lot more to it than I layed out in this article.  If you aren't getting the results you need from your website, it might be time to get help.

Mobile Websites (Part 3)

This is the third and final part of a mini-series about mobile series, to help small business owners understand some of their choices.

Things to Consider

The size of your visitor’s screen is something you need to consider when you think about the layout and content of your website.  What they see when they first land needs to resonate with your typical viewer.  With the much larger screen that a desktop has, you have more places to put more things, such as sales advertisements or seasonal specials.  With a mobile device, you have fewer places to put things, but you still need to be able to quickly qualify yourself to the viewer that you’re who they’re looking for.

Checklist for Your Mobile Friendly Site

Run through this quick checklist on your own website by viewing your website on your smartphone, and ask yourself these questions.  You don’t have to be scientific – just be honest about your own reactions.

1. Did your website load quickly?
2. Is the nature of your website clear?
3. Can you easily read the text?
4. Can you navigate easily?
5. Is there a clear call to action?
6. What sort of user experience rating would you give it?
7. If it wasn’t your own website, would you come back?
8. Can you easily click on any links?
9. Are things spaced well?

If your website didn’t make the grade, that’s exactly how other people are going to feel – and it’s going to affect your reputation with them.   This may be their very first experience with your company, so it needs to be a good one.
Equally important, it will improve your online search visibility and rankings, which is important because a great website that nobody ever sees isn’t doing you much good.
It’s also a great opportunity to give your website a makeover, modernize things, and maybe include some newer, higher resolution photos that better showcase your work.  This will demonstrate to your viewers that you keep up with the times.
Also, while you may or may not engage in social media much yourself, many people do, so with a nice site this can be free advertising for you when people Share, Like, or Re-Tweet your page.  

What About Mobile Apps?

Don’t overlook mobile applications, usually simply called Apps.  Some companies are embracing them as the ideal way to engage mobile users because you have very precise control over the experience.  Some people speculate that at some point in the future, all mobile website interaction will be with apps, but this is likely many years in the future because it would require uniform standards that are unlikely to emerge between device and operating system manufacturers anytime soon.
Regardless, there are many benefits to having a mobile app for your business:

1. Ease of use.  The typical rules for app stores are more likely to ensure a good user experience than may be the case with a mobile website, since there are no rules about mobile websites.  Programmers can code websites to do whatever they want, with or without good forethought and quality assurance – which could be the reason why many plugins aren’t that well rated.  Mobile apps are more likely to be easy for your user to engage with.
2. Apps can provide additional functionality that your mobile website may not be able to achieve.  Facebook is a great example of this.
3. Credibility.  Having an app can increase your perceived level of credibility and professionalism, as long as the rest of the stage has been set correctly.  It can’t necessarily fix other problems, but it might be the thing that puts users over the top for choosing you over another vendor.
4. With time being one of our most valuable resources, an App can make your audience appreciative by streamlining common activities they might do in connection with your business, such as making payments, online ordering, and scheduling appointments. 
5. Real-time engagement.  With an app, you can perform message push notifications to users, which can be a huge business boost by letting them know about unannounced specials.  Examples might include discounts on a home service that’s booked within the next 72 hours, or perhaps an evening special at a restaurant.  

What Lies Ahead

The mobile world is constantly evolving as people seek new ways of making their lives easier and maintaining social connections in ways they might not otherwise have had the time for.  The latest smart-watch that we’ve all seen on television is a great example of mobility being taken to even greater levels as technology experts find ways to make common tasks easier.
As for what this means for your small business and search engines, one thing we know for sure is that they will continue to constantly make changes in their search algorithms – although I’ll stop short of calling them improvements, since people who’s search ratings change may or may not consider them improvements.  What we do know with certainty is that we can continue to see more changes, more often.  Consequently, it’s important to stay up to date with what Google is doing because what we do know for a fact is that they penalize you if you don’t.
The world of mobility will continue to change, and for a small business this will mean a big competitive advantage for small businesses that embrace these changes early since they will enjoy improved online rankings, while those who delay may see their rank suffer as a result.  This can be a difficult landscape for a small business owner to navigate on their own, since they may not have the time needed to keep up with what’s really important.  In fact that’s the reason for my business model of partnership. 

Conclusion

I see, unfortunately, lots of people advertising they’ll design a website dirt-cheap, but what so many people end up with is what I described early on in this article series: a website that might seem nice at first but doesn’t actually serve your business as your #1 sales machine.  If you need help, please contact me.

Getting Your Website Responsive

In the last article, I revealed that I think the best option for most small businesses is to use a good Responsive Theme.  If you have an older HTML website, you could convert your HTML site to a responsive HTML design, but I will warn you that from my own personal testing, I was not happy with how they behaved.  More specifically, the way the ones that I used worked is that the mobile screen was not horizontally “fixed” the way it should have been and would slide left or right – at times you would think that it ought to be locked in place.  So, at present, HTML responsive layouts get a big thumbs down from me.  If I happen to find some I like that work the way they ought to, I’ll let you know.  In the meantime, if you are stuck on HTML for some reason, I would lean toward dynamic serving with a completely separate set of pages.  Done right, such pages can have a very "app-like" feel to them.

If you’re using WordPress, which most small businesses really ought to be doing these days, then you have tons of options.  As a bit of an aside, one of the main reasons for using WordPress is that you can add and remove things from your, including new posts, blog content, plugins, additional capabilities, etc. without a big development cost.  And since Google very strongly favors websites that show growth and development, you can see how maintaining a competitive advantage over time will be easier if your website has the right stuff under the hood to help you do that.

So, if you’re on WordPress, your best choice is to move to a Responsive theme.  There are about a million of them, though.  I’ll share some places where they can be found, and then I’ll tell you my own preferences.

Here are some top theme providers that are currently mobile responsive:

1. Thrive Themes - http://thrivethemes.com/
2. Studio Press Themes – http://my.studiopress.com/responsive-wordpress-themes/
3. Theme Forest - http://themeforest.net/collections/3226617-responsive-wordpress-themes Theme Forest also has designs for HTML and Joomla based sites.
4. Elegant Themes are a very popular choice, with over 20 Wordpress responsive themes available including their most amazing work, Divi.  http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/category/responsive/
5. If you are looking for free themes, here’s a list of 30 designs. http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/30-free-responsive-and-stunning-wordpress-themes/
6. Then there are the themes from Wordpress here: https://theme.wordpress.com/themes/features/responsive-layout/

Now, if you read any of my other posts, you’ll know that I very, very strongly recommend that you do not simply pick a theme because you think it looks pretty, you like the colors, etc.  That’s a great way not to get many calls.  The reason I say that, and take a bit of a tough stance on the subject of website design, is that you have a website for your business because you want to convert visitors into customers so you can make money for your business.  It’s not a hobby or an art project.  I’m going to be as serious as I can here.  You need to decide which is more important:  making money for your business, or having a website like one you may have seen.  The reason I am prompting you to consider this question is that there is a tremendous amount of research into neuroscience and website design factors that convert people from visitors to callers.  So, as a developer, I want to help your business succeed, which means putting those things into play on your website, while trying to incorporate as much of your personal tastes and preferences as possible.  Some developers will quite happily just install any theme you want and take your money, but my point here is that they aren’t doing you any favors.

The second thing to consider is that, in many of those places, the developers come and go, and the support for their themes may go with them, leaving your website with buggy code that nobody is ever going to fix.

I am personally quite picky about the themes I use, because I want to be sure that both myself, and especially my customers, can count on having active support for a long time to come.  For most sites, I either use Divi by Elegant Themes, which can do practically anything you might dream up, or one of a couple of proprietary themes along with Visual Composer, the go-to industry standard for custom layouts.

Keeping Your Current Theme

With WordPress, you can use one of several plugins to create a separate mobile version of your website right from within WordPress itself.  I don’t recommend this approach for anybody that I typically work with, but there are certainly instances where it might make sense as a short-term measure just to get you back into compliance with Google while you then work on fixing the bigger problem with your website design.

HandHeld Mobile Plugin by Elegant Themes lets you create a separate mobile-friendly version of your existing site.  This plugin comes straight from the manufacturer, so it does not have a rating on WordPress.org.
Jetpack helps site owners by giving you the mobile-friendly features of hosted wordpress.com with your self-hosted site.
WPTouch is a plugin solution that will allow you to create a separate, mobile-friendly version of your website. Your desktop site will stay unchanged.  When visitors view your site from any mobile device, your website will display a different theme that you configure. You can select from various themes that the plugin offers. Currently rate 3.5 out of 5 stars.
WP Mobile Detector, works similarly, allowing you to select from different themes and create your mobile friendly website. This plugin only has 3.4 out of 5 stars.
Device Theme Switcher is a more complex plugin that allows you to even give a different version to not only phones, but tablets.  This gives you quite a bit of flexibility and more granular control, which may sound nice, but with complexity comes cost.  Although the plugin is highly rated with a full 5-stars, most small businesses that I work with are cost-conscious, so I would not tend to go this route.  Although the plugin seems quite nice, I have concerns about the longevity of support since there is only a single developer who has no other plugins.  We can only hope that since he seems to be doing good work that he'll survive the test of time.

The thing to be cautious about with plugins is the same issue as with themes themselves.  Developers come and go, so you want to use mainstream, major brand plugins so you can be reasonably assured that they’re going to be likely to continue providing support.  The other main issue is that you may not be able to brand your website for a consistent viewing experience.  In general, I do not recommend the route of plugins to accomplish a mobile website due to both reliability and support concerns I have.  Is it easy to install it, charge a client money, and then walk away?  Sure.  But I can’t begin to tell you how many websites I’ve run into where a website developer installed a cool plugin that seemed a good idea at the time, but when I’m in there fixing things, the plugins are badly out of date with bugs but the person who wrote them is nowhere to be found, leaving the client to have to pay for me to move them onto something more reliable.  If you are going to use a plugin, I would lean toward Elegant Theme’s HandHeld Mobile since you will likely get more consistent support over time.

We’ll continue talking about responsive website design next time; until then feel free to contact me if you have any questions at DunnTek web design.

Types of Mobile Website Design

You really have three choices when it comes to an approach for your website’s mobile version. From a Google perspective, neither is necessarily any better than the others just from the standpoint of gaining their favor. However, each does have both its advantages and disadvantages. I’m going to walk through these three choices, and then tell you which approach I generally recommend and explain why.

Responsive Website Design

Perhaps the most common approach, a responsive website design is one which automatically adjusts the size and position of different components of your website based on the visitor’s device. Some of the things that a responsive website may do include changing the font size, displaying smaller pictures and videos, spacing links further apart so they are easier to tap, and re-ordering the content so it fits well onto the screen and flows well as you can then scroll down to see the same content as if you were on a regular desktop PC, but it’s been re-formatted so you can now see it easily on your smartphone or table.
One advantage of a responsive design is that you have a built-in consistent look and feel to your website, regardless of how your visitor choose to visit it. This feeling of familiarity and comfort is a factor in website conversion. Additionally, since you only have to maintain one website, your overall cost will probably be lower than other options.
The downside to a responsive design is that you may be showing visitors more than they needed. For example, if you consider the scenarios in which a person is likely to visit your website and think through what they really want to know about you if they are using their phone to look you up, do they really want to read all of your articles and detailed explanations? Maybe, maybe not. Plus, all of that content has to load on their device.

Dynamic Page Serving

This approach to a mobile website will redirect mobile users to a different URL if they are on a mobile device. The methods for making this determination vary, but the most common result that you may recognize is visitors being sent to a “m.” version of the website. In this scenario, you essentially built a duplicate version of your website, including some pages while leaving others out, and tailoring the content of those pages to better suit mobile viewers.
The two main advantages of this approach are that you don’t have to make much modification to your existing website, and achieving a highly-optimized mobile viewing experience with streamlined or summarized content and less options for the viewer, so they are more strongly directed to a particular outcome, ex. calling you, as opposed to other things they might do on the desktop version of your website such as read PDF's or special reports you may have.
The disadvantages include having to now main two different websites, and the attempt to tailor content for mobile viewers may leave your existing customers in a flux since they are used to looking for certain things in certain places, but now you’ve gone and moved things around on them which can be frustrating for your existing customers. Additionally, since you have two websites, you need some technology to decide which version you’re going to serve up to your user, and that technology may or may not work the way that you really want it to – a situation which is becoming more problematic as newer smartphones emerge on the market with extremely high-resolution displays. You also carry additional cost associated with maintaining more web pages.

Different Mobile URL

In this scenario, mobile visitors are sent to a completely different URL where your mobile website is housed.
The advantages are essential the same as dynamic page serving, in that you can deliver a highly mobile-optimized experience for your user with summarized content and simple navigation. Sometimes the term “web app” is used to describe this type of website, in that it functions almost more like an app on your smart phone rather than looking like a web page. In some cases it is cheaper to launch a new “web app” than to convert your website to a mobile responsive design, so some business owners may see it as a short-term cost avoidance so they don’t have to redesign their whole website.
The reality is that any cost-savings is very short-lived, because you’re going to be paying additional hosting and maintenance costs, plus you have all the same disadvantages as dynamic page serving.

Summary

You have three primary choices for how to approach the mobile website for your business, and I’ve done all three. First you have the responsive design, which maintains a common look and feel regardless of how someone access your website. This is what I do the most of. Second, you have dynamic page serving. I’ve hand-coded custom HTML websites in this format for some clients. Finally, you have what I call the “web app” which is essentially a completely separate website. I’ve done these as well. Overall, I steer most small businesses toward a responsive design because:
1. It maintains a consistent look and feel for your website;
2. Lowest overall cost;
3. Most future-proof as device resolutions change;
4. Less headaches with having to deal with multiple websites.
So there you have it – my general recommendation for most small business owners is a responsive website design. That said, there may be cases where one of the other options is a better choice for your particular situation, so feel free to contact me on my website at http://dunntek.com/webdesign/ and we can talk through which option might be best for you.
We’ll continue the discussion about mobile websites in the next article.

Why Your Small Business Needs a Mobile Website

If you want to get more customers online, then you probably know that it’s important to comply with search engine requirements about the things they want to see on your website.  If you don’t follow their rules, you’ll find yourself gone from their listings.  That means people aren’t going to be calling you as much.  What this means for a small business owner is that you can’t just create a website and forget about it; you have to keep up with these changing requirements by Google.  Just like a house requires maintenance and upkeep over time, fixing and replacing things, painting, and regular yard maintenance, so does your website.

Over the years, the volume of online searches conducted from mobile devices has exceeded 50%, meaning that now well over half of all searches are being made primarily from smart phones.  This is particularly true with online shopping specifically; if your shopping cart isn’t mobile friendly it’s estimated that you can be losing 30% of your potential sales on that item alone.  But the main point here is that when people search on their phones for a local service provider, much of the time they aren’t idly cruising the web.  Rather, when people use their phones to conduct a search for a local service provider, they’re usually doing so with an intent to buy.  Think about that.  Most of the time when people are using their phone to search for a plumber, they’re going to call one for service.  If you’re a plumber and you don’t have a mobile website, you’re now letting all that traffic just pass right by you.

Back in April, Google instituted changes in their search algorithm.  Whether or not you have a mobile-friendly website design is now part of what people see when they search from a mobile phone.  If you think about it, it makes sense.  People on mobile phones would rather see a mobile-friendly site that’s easy to navigate, than one with tiny text or where they have to pinch and zoom to find their way around.  This means that if your website isn’t mobile friendly, you’re going to get less calls.

If you don’t know whether or not your website design complies with the latest requirements, go to Google’s online testing tool, type in your website address, and it will tell you:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly

How Online Searching Has Changed

One of the factors to consider about your local marketing is the manner in which searching has changed.  For example, once upon a time, you might make a search like one of these:

Pizza + Chicago
Plumbers in Seattle

However with the rise of location-detection technology, that isn’t really needed most of the time anymore.  Search engines can detect where you are, and deliver results that are determined to be nearby based on your location.  That assumes, of course, that your device supports location detection and that you have enabled it for your web browser.

Understanding Mobile Users

The first thing you need to do is think like a mobile user and put yourself in their shoes.  One common scenario is a person doing some quick shopping, in which case they want a simple, streamlined buying process without a bunch of steps, so it’s fast and easy to buy.  But for a small local business, the more important scenario is when they just had a major plumbing disaster and need someone NOW.  They want to do a quick search, see top-rated professionals, and be able to do a quick tap to call.  People want things to be quick and easy.  If your website isn’t set up so it’s just a matter of a click or two for them to either call or contact you, they’re going to call someone else.  If you’re a restaurant, your exact location with a map link and your menu should be easy to use.  (Tip for restaurants: Include pricing on your online menu, and allow online ordering for pickup customers.)

With over a billion people now browsing the Internet from a mobile device, the simple fact of having a mobile website means you should see an increase in traffic.  Conversely, not having one means your traffic will go down.

This is the first article in a series.  Next time, we’ll discuss some of the different types of mobile websites that are available.  As always, if you have any questions feel free to contact me at Web Design Raleigh NC

Creating Content for Your Website or Blog

It happens to all of us. You're either trying to write the text for a page on your website, or write a blog article. Maybe you've allocated a special time and sit down with a cup of tea or a hot cup of coffee. Then you log onto your computer, put your fingers to the keyboard, and… nothing. The fountain of words that normally flows forth seems to have dried up into nothingness. You've got writer's block.

Here are a few tips that can help when you find yourself in this situation.

1. Take something complicated, and simplify it. Just think about how many times you may have wanted to learn something, but didn't have the hours needed to read a complicated manual. Think about who your readers are, and, knowing that, identify something that they are likely to want to be able to do, but may have never been properly instructed about. You can also draw inspiration for this type of article from a recent customer interaction (but be careful not to get into any details about that. You don’t want your customer getting mad at you.) When you begin, getting people’s initial interest with an eye-catching fact is always good.

Example: If you wanted to talk about proper shoveling technique, you could start with a statistic about how many injuries occur each year while using a shovel. Now turn this into a problem statement: You need to know how to shovel correctly in order to avoid hurting yourself or someone else.

Next, map out the series of high level steps involved in performing whatever the task is. For example, first picking the right shovel for the task. Calling for utility locates. Ensuring a safe work area. You get the idea.

A general sort of high level format that works well in many situations is:

• Explain the problem and why it’s important to learn to do the task correctly
• Defining the actual task and reason for doing it
• Advantages and disadvantages of doing it yourself (it’s always a mix!)
• Preparing for the job
• Choosing the right tool for the job
• Getting the tool – buying, renting, borrowing – explain any special economics
• Ensuring safety
• Performing the task (Stage 1)
• Performing the task (Stage 2)
• Performing the task (Stage 3 etc.)
• Assessing & refining
• Cleaning up
• Storing your tools properly

Then, once you have the overall structure right, go back and fill in the details.

2. Compare the pro’s and con’s of two different choices. For example, you might compare granite and marble countertops, or two different types of grass for a North Carolina lawn and how each does in the different regions with differing soil types. You know a lot about these things; this is just taking something that you already know and putting a different spin on it that people will actually benefit from reading. Just be careful not to name any actual products or brands, since that might get you into legal trouble.

3. If you favor a particular brand that you sell, and you have the legal rights to do so, perform a case study in which you talk about how and why that brand was the perfect fit for a particular situation that you encountered. In doing a case study, tell the story of the person that you did work for and demonstrate how the product made a difference in their life.

4. Read the news. Get ideas from local and national news, as well as any industry trade publications.

5. Follow other bloggers just to get an idea about what’s interesting enough not just to write about, but to see what sort of topics get people engaged.

6. Review a product or service, but again, you need to research and understand any legal implications.

7. Look through the table of contents of related books online just to get ideas for the structure of an article or post. Don’t plagiarize, but looking at what other people are writing about will very often cause an idea to pop into your head out of nowhere. It works extremely well!

I hope that gives you some ideas on different ways of coming up with things to write about for your website or blog. If you need help with managed website content solutions, contact me on my website at http://dunntek.com.

Preparing for Your Website

As you prepare to launch a new website, there is some prep work you should do. I’m going to walk you through some hands-on things you need to actually do, and some things for you to think about, to help you make the most of your time and end up with a great website.

COMPETITION ANALYSIS

One of the first things you should do is some online research of your own. Go to Google and search for your business-related keywords. An example might be “tree service Charlotte”.

Now, go study the top 5-10 websites. Find out what services they provide, the type of information they have online, how their website is organized, etc. Keep in mind, just because a lot of them are doing something doesn’t mean they are really doing it right, but the first page of Google is always a great place to use a reference, since they’re obviously doing something better than most.

QUESTIONS

Next, try to work through some of these questions. Takes notes, since this will help your website developer later.

• What things are they missing from their websites?
• What can I do better than they did on their websites?
• What services do I offer that they don’t?
• Why should someone choose me?
• What are my advantages over other companies?
• Are those advantage related to a specific market segment?
• What is my brand message?
• Is my quality higher? If so, what, specifically, make it that way?
• Am I cheaper? If so, how do I still deliver a great result for my customers?
• Who is my ideal customer? Think in terms of age, demographics, location, etc.
• What matters most to that person?
• Time? Money? Or Quality?
• What kind of language does my ideal customer use?

That’s just a short primer on how to differentiate yourself, but should give you more than a little to think about. It all plays into what sort of message you convey on your website. Once you identify your ideal customer, it’s a lot easier to put together content that resonates with them. If your message is that you’re the economy provider, everything should reflect that. If you cater to high-end clients, again, your language, pictures and video should be something that’s going to make them feel right at home with you.

INVENTORY YOUR SERVICES

Make an inventory of all your products and services, and then break each one down on a separate piece of paper and write down as many details as you can think of. Then, go back and see if there are any logical groupings to your services.

Your website designer should be able to help you group them in a way that’s going to use good language that search engines will like. My recommendation is to follow their lead on how to structure things for best search engine results. You may have to make a trade-off between using language that you just personally like, and what’s going to get your website rated higher, so you need to decide which is more important to you.

CONTENT PAGES

Now that you’ve both answered some of your branding questions about who you are as a company, and taken an inventory of your services, you can now put these together to write your content pages. This is where you take the nitty gritty details about different aspects of your service, and explain how your business delivers those things with your unique value proposition, using language that’s going to resonate with your ideal customer.

PICTURES

Old pictures may not be sufficient in this day and age, but I run into people with tiny little pictures they want to look good online – and sometimes there’s just no magic I can do with a tiny little pic. Get all your digital pictures together. You are going to want pictures that are at least 1600x900, and that’s a bare minimum. The reason for this is that your designer needs to be able to chop them down to size for different purposes throughout your site, so they need a good sized picture to start with. If they happen to be much bigger, don’t worry about trying to downsize them yourself.

Now, organize your pictures into folders that relate to your services. This will help you figure out which of your services that you do not have any pictures for. Often, stock photographs can be found and used, but it’s always better to showcase your own work if you can.

If you don’t have suitable photographs, see if you can take pictures of some of your recent work with a digital camera. Pick a time of day with good, bright sunny lighting in that location, and be mindful about how you frame the pic – i.e. how close you are, what’s in the picture, things getting cut off, etc. Remember you cannot use other company’s trademarks in your business website, so try to eliminate any such things from the picture before you take it.

MARKETING TIP

Your website may be the very first time someone forms an opinion about your company. The most important thing about a website is for people to see it and immediately get a sense that you're the right company to help them.

Remember, though, that if you are a small local business, you are most likely not selling to anyone and everyone. That is not to say that you wouldn’t do so, but rather that there’s probably a certain demographic that is most likely to do business with you. The better you can identify who your customers are, and the typical “life story” for them at the time they are going to be visiting you online, the better you can do at tailoring the language on your pages so that your story about your business just naturally meshes right into their own life story, and they see you as someone who understands what they need.

If you need help figuring out how to tailor your website to better suit your target audience, drop by my website and connect with me there.

Why's It's Important to Customize Error Pages

How many changes have you made to the structure of your website? 10? 100? Maybe a lot more? Over time as your site grows, this number will increase, especially if it's a dynamic site like WordPress or other CMS.

Now, how often have you typed the wrong thing by accident when entering code? It happens all the time, no matter how careful you are – and we’ve come to the point that a lot of people rely on spell-checking. But those programs just make sure it’s a real word, not necessarily whether it’s the right word for the context. And if you’re creating an entire website, is it realistic to think you are going to catch ever single such possible error yourself? You certainly hope to, by going through the website, but there’s always a chance you’re going to miss something that leads to a link not working correctly.

When that happens, and someone clicks on that broken link, they are sent instead to an error page – most commonly with a 404 error. We’ve all seen this page before; it lets you know that the server can’t find what you wanted. This will make the user think that you aren’t keeping your website up to date, but even worse, there’s no way for them to tell you about it. So you have no idea about this problem.

Hosting providers now very often take advantage of this and actually make money off it. I know this might surprise you, but it’s true. If you have not created your own error page, then they have the server set up to send *your* website visitor to an error page that advertises *their* services. Now why would you want to give them free advertising on your real estate like that? You may be surprised to hear that’s a 7-figure industry.

How can you not only stop them from stealing way your website visitors and recapture that potentially lost traffic? It turns out to be quite simple, but you need to be a bit technical to do it.

With most web hosting providers, you can at least partially customize some aspects of the server configuration. I’m going to show you how to do this for Apache, which is the most common web server software in the world. You can also do this with IIS or other web server software; you’ll just have to look up the exact details.

First, you need to develop an HTML template page your error pages. To maintain consistency with the user so they still feel like they are on the same website, you want it to look similar to your main pages. You may not be able to make it exactly the same; the important thing is that it clearly belongs to you.

Next, you will need to decide what content to display on the page. You should let your visitors know that they have stumbled across a dead link, but you also want to provide a streamlined method for them to find their way back to your site. I recommend using the appropriate error message in the page title and at the beginning of the page using h1 tags. You should append a description of the error message to your page title and display this description using h2 tags in your page.

Example:

<html>
<head>
<title>Error 404: The page you are looking for was not found</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Error 404</h1>
</h2>The page you are looking for was not found. Please check the URL and try again.</h2>
</body>
</html>

Now you need to provide a easy "one-click" path to your website. This can be accomplished using a simple text link in the page footer.

Example:

<html>
<head>
<title>Error 404: The page you are looking for was not found</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Error 404</h1>
</h2>The page you are looking for was not found. Please check the URL and try again.</h2>
To return to the [Company Name] homepage, click <a
href="http://yourdomain.com">here</a>. </body>
</html>

Now, upload your template as error404.html to your website's root directory (usually public_html).

To get this new template to be displayed whenever a website visitor tries to access a non-existing page by clicking on a bad link, you just need to create or modify your a .htaccess file, using your favorite plain text editor, put this line into it, and then put the file in the root directory (usually public_html) of your website. Most of the time, you will probably already have an .htaccess file.

ErrorDocument 404 http://yourdomain.com/error404.html

(WARNING: Only experts should ever try to change their .htaccess! You can end up taking your site down completely.)

Now you just repeat this process for each type of error that you want to provide a custom page for. Adjust the filename and ErrorDocument statements appropriately for each error page. To gather a complete list of server response codes, search Google™ for "Apache error codes". (Adjust as needed for your server software.)

If you are using WordPress specifically, one of the best ways to accomplish a good 404 error page is to first make a backup copy of your old 404.php, make a copy of your index.php file, name it 404.php, edit the guts of the file to get rid of any normal content and instead supply special text for your user. This will give you 100% consistent branding for the page, so your user is less alarmed when they see it, while asking them to let you know about it. Now, you might be thinking, why don’t I just have the system notify me when someone hits that page? The reason you would not want to have this page notify you ever time somebody hits is that, although you may not know it, web robots are crawling through website all day long, and you’d be getting tons of pointless emails.

As you can see, this process is extremely simple and only takes about five minutes. If you are good with HTML and you have a Google AdSense™ account and other affiliate accounts, you can easily customize your template to include your AdSense™ search box and your affiliate links.

If you need something special on your error pages, let me know.

For the Love of CSS!

CSS, an acronym for Cascading Style Sheets, is a way of separating the programming code of a website from some of the design components. There are tremendous reasons for doing this, but I still see professional designers deviating from these principles and it causes nothing but problems. For a long time, web programmers relied on tables heavily to do some of their layouts because it was just the best tool available in many situations. However as HTML and CSS have evolved, there are now often better ways of doing things but it requires people using to classic methods to put aside old techniques and adopt the new way of doing things. One of the best resources for information about CSS3, the latest version, is w3schools.com, a site which I use quite regularly myself in the course of working on projects.

The primary audience for this document is small business owners concerned about their overall total cost of ownership with their website.

1. EASE OF EDITING
By separating HTML and CSS into separate files and using classes correctly, you can change multiple instances of something by making one simple change in the CSS file, instead of having to try and do large numbers of search-and-replace inside your HTML. This translates directly into less time.

2. FLEXIBILITY
CSS3 provides tremendous flexibility and the ability to do things natively that once required using external scripts, plug-ins, and graphic design. This lowers the total project cost, enables faster delivery, and makes future edits faster and easier. It also increases compatibility across multiple types of devices and reduces the number of places for something to go wrong.

3. WEBSITE SPEED
With less plug-ins, your website will also load faster. Additionally, by using classes and a separate CSS stylesheet, there is less code overall, i.e. smaller file sizes, so your website will load even faster. Page load time is a critical factor in whether someone sticks around to browse your site, so this should not be underestimated in its importance.

4. TASK FOCUS
By separating code and design, when you are working on the website you can keep a greater focus on the actual task at hand, which will improve your overall speed of execution on website design.

5. CONTROL
You have more control with CSS3 than you have ever had before.

DISCUSSION

In using CSS, regardless of whether you have a straight HTML website, WordPress, or anything else, to the maximum extent possible you want to completely separate your HTML code from the CSS. Your CSS should be referenced with classes, and all of the actual CSS code contained in a separate CSS file which is simply referenced in the HTML. There are times and cases when you need to perform "in-line" styling, where specific CSS code is used inside the HTML. It is sometimes unavoidable. What I have seen time and time again, though, are cases where badly designed themes did it completely unnecessarily, and the result was that I couldn't make the website do what the client needed with that theme without rewriting part of the theme itself. At that point, what you need is a new theme that doesn't have those sorts of problems. It's possible to make these sort of changes, but the problem is that you will have a problem with future updates and your custom code, causing the website to continue costing you even more over time. Choosing a theme that doesn't do this will lower your overall total cost of ownership.

So, having said all of this, for the love of CSS, please don't do any in-line styling unless it's 100% absolutely necessary - and it's almost never necessary unless the website theme you are using is badly written. In fact, I would say that 95% of the time that I have to do manually-inserted in-line CSS inside the HTML, instead of using classes like you should, is that the theme was poorly designed. When you use a poorly designed theme, it creates a situation where things might look good to start with, but the when you want to change something about the way it looks, you might not be able to do what you want because a programmer took a short-cut in the code and now you can't easily fix it by just changing the CSS file. Instead, you have to spend time digging around inside the website to find out where all the different instances of inline CSS are, and then change (and test!) every single one of them. That adds up to a bigger bill for the client.

If you are going to do your own website, pick and set up your own theme, etc., please - do some research, check with the developer, and try to confirm that any inline CSS is kept to a bare minimum. In the end, it's cheaper to pay a web developer to do something for you right the first time than to come back and fix something that's a bad setup.

PRO-TIP: Minify your CSS for a better Google website rating!

If you're struggling with getting your website to look 'just right' or not sure which way to go with something, by all means please reach out to me.

Important Design Considerations for Your Business Website

Most people understand the importance of having a website for their business, but high quality professional websites weren't always as obtainable as they are today. Thanks to innovation, website designers are now able to spend more time working with business owners on the content and message, and less time having to tinker with technical details, so they can now deliver even higher quality sites for a lower cost than ever before. Still, many business owners may have had websites they created themselves or by a friend and just want to make some basic improvements. This article is non-technical in nature, since it purpose is just to convey a few key ideas that will help keep you on the right track of not only improving your website, but the role that it plays in your business.

PURPOSE

For a business, the primary purpose of your website is to help produce income by connecting you with the people who need your products or services. Your website fulfills a number of functions; it's the hub of your online presence because it won't come and go. All of those other things, though, all boil down to growing your online brand, and your website is where it all needs to come together so you can achieve your dreams. So, as you decide what things to include on your website or where to put them, ask yourself how if it will affect people's decision to do business with you. To do that well, you have to start by realizing they may not think about your field of expertise the same way you do, so everything that you do needs to be tailored to suit your typical buyer.

In designing your website, you also may want to drill down into your purpose a little further so that you don't fall prey to some common temptations. For example, if what you really want is for your website to generate phone calls, that end result should drive the design, either other forms of contact being not as obvious. It's very common to advertise every form of contact all over the place, but this is not always the best idea. It is better to guide your visitor to whatever it is you want them to do, whether it's call you, fill out a contact form, schedule an appointment, or buy something. Keep this end-result in mind as you think about what to include, and where to include it.

PRESENTATION

Your website should have a neat appearance. This is your store front - their very first experience with your company. A visitor should be immediately impressed with a sense of order, balance and professionalism. Subconsciously, they will infer from that what kind of experience they are likely to have with you if they contact you for service. To illustrate this, suppose you are walking down the street and there are two hardware stores next to each other. One is well lit, orderly, things are organized with signs to guide you, and inventory is in its proper place with related items logically grouped together. Next to it is another store, dimly lit, not so clean, and with stuff all over the place. Personally, if I'm working on a project, I'm going to choose the first store that I described because I will expect to be able to get in and out quickly with what I need. The same idea applies to your website. First appearance matters.

A few key considerations with presentation include:

1. Positioning should be based on research as to what converts well, not what you think is pretty. If you're making an art site for your hobby, design it however you want. But if it's for the business that feeds your family, focus on the results. If your website is there to make money, stick with high-converting designs until you are sure you have the knowledge to deviate and still have a well-converting site.

2. Spacing should be "just right." I realize that's quite subjective, but you don't want too much unused space, nor do you want things to be jammed together. This takes both an artistic eye and the technical skill to get things sized correctly.

3. Colors need careful use. You want to reflect your own brand, but you have to be careful in how you use color because too much bright color or glaring contrasts can turn people away. While it's your website, your customers will take your website as a representation of your ability to deliver a quality product. If you do painting or remodeling and the colors and spacing of your website are wild, they'll translate that to what kind of job you're likely to do inside their house.

It's important that where you have a Call to Action, such as a call now button or similar special purpose button, that the visitor's eye naturally gravitates toward it. This is part art, and part science, since this has received quite a good bit of actual research. The important thing with color is not to overdo it, and be sure the visitor can easily identify what it is that you want them to do.

4. Stick with simple, basic non-serif fonts for your main page text, for most applications, and keep special formatting such as bold and italics to a minimum.

NAVIGATION

Visitors should be able to easily find their way around your site without having to dig too hard for what they want. Think like someone who does not know your industry. Most people don't think like you or speak the language of your industry. In deciding on how to structure the navigation of your site, design it for the typical consumer. Make it fast and easy for them to find things.

ECOMMERCE

If you are building an eCommerce website with a shopping cart, your product categories need to be organized from a regular consumer point of view, which may not be the same as how you might categorize things in your inventory system. Make it easy to edit the shopping cart, and reduce the number of steps involved in making a purchase. Consumers want to be able to buy things fast & easy, not click through a complicated multi-step ordering process.

People very often want and/or need things they may not have initially had in mind. Your eCommerce site should present related products, upsells, and product reviews, to both reassure visitors and offer more opportunities to buy. You aren't trying to trick anyone here; you are simply making an effort to connect them with products related to things they are likely to be interested in based on other products they've already looked at. As an example, if a person ordered a printer, they will likely need paper, and might be incented to buy an additional ink cartridge or specialty photo paper with a special one-time offer, that they might otherwise not have bought.

PURCHASING SUPPORT

You may conduct your primary business activities during typical business hours, but when do most of your customers do their shopping and purchasing? If they have a problem during an attempt to make a purchase, you may completely lose the opportunity as they go shop somewhere else. After-hours support for purchasing is important for an eCommerce website, so you should offer multiple methods by which they can attempt to contact you for help based on the urgency of their need. This may have a cost to provide such support, but if you look at your website statistics and your abandoned cart rate, these may be clues that you are losing sales.

There are also completely outsourced solutions that offer purchasing assistance. This may not, at first, strike you as something you need, but you need to consider the type of services that you provide and when people are most likely to be trying to buy them. The trick to this is to first identify who your typical customer is, why they would be visiting your website, and what they would hope to accomplish in their visit to your site. Do they want to buy something with overnight delivery? Book an emergency appointment with you tomorrow? Or do they need someone at their house right now because of an emergency? Think through the scenarios in which people are going to be contacting you, and you will be able to tailor your purchasing support to support that.

CUSTOMER CONTACT

Your website is always there, working for you 24/7/365. Customers may shop at any time. Be sure to monitor any email boxes or other contact methods at least daily, and preferably more often. Even if you don't have the answer, write people right away to let them know that you got their message, are investigating the issue, and give them a time frame in which they can expect to get back to you. By the time someone attempts to purchase, they are already invested in the decision and will be willing to wait, provided that they know how long it's going to be and the period of time is not unreasonable. Keep your customers well-informed and handle any issues promptly.

I've only just barely scratched the surface on website design considerations, but I hope if you're a small business owner that this gave you a few things to think about. If you need affordable website design Raleigh NC has you covered.  

Raleigh Web Design Company - DunnTek Talks about Effectively Incorporating Science and Art

Introductory HOA that touches on addressing neuroscience marketing principles in the design of your company blog or website:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed5B48JGyFY

To find out more drop by online.

Avoid an SEO Penalty: Don't Game Google

This is not so much a technical or how-to type post, as much as a quick statement about philosophy because I want to state where I stand on something.  I've been doing a series on SEO backlink building.  This is a legitimate practice when approached with the right mindset, because all you're doing is making a point of interacting in appropriate places, while making sure good credit goes back to your own website.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.  When done wrongly, though, you can think everything is just going beautifully, only to come in one morning, look at Page 1, and realize you're not in there.  In a panic, you begin looking at Page 2 - nope, you aren't there either.  And so on you go, page after page, and you aren't on any of them.  What happened?  You may have been hit with a big SEO penalty from doing things you shouldn't have.
Don't Game Google
Where you run into trouble is when you start trying to game the system.  Yes, there are ways to go about automating various things, and that is not necessarily bad.  For example, if you look at the practice of news article syndication, you don't think everything is transferred manually between all those news websites running the same stories everywhere, do you?  Of course not.  Automation can be your friend, when your intent is correct.  So when you approach things from the point of view of trying to deliver legitimate value with content creation and distribution, that's generally a fine practice as long as you respect boundaries.  Authors and experts in their field are going to make statements that are going to be repeated across the Internet.  That's completely normal, as long as it's 'normal' - and in the nuances of that word lie the secret of staying above-board and getting good SEO value from your online activities, or crossing a line that gets you into trouble at some point.
Listen.  Google is smarter.  You can search the Internet and find all sorts of methods that promise to put you on Page 1 overnight.  Sometimes those things will work - for a year or so - until Google updates their algoritms, and then you go from Page 1 to Page 76.  Just do some reading about the Google Panda and Penguin updates, and you'll read all sorts of stories about companies losing their ratings.  I am absolutely saying this 100% to scare you.  Unless eating, and living under a roof, are just things you do for amusement, rather than because you need them, don't treat your business' online presence like a game of roll-the-dice-and-see-what-happens.  Be careful - everything you do is going to have consequences of some form.  Deliver legitimate value in legitimate ways, and you should tend to receive positive results.
The Case Study
The reason to take a straight-up approach is that while there are places you can buy thousands of backlinks for a few bucks, most of the time they are not websites you would really want to be associated with.  I have done tests - trust me on this - don't do it unless you really know what you are doing.  One of these supposed cheap miracles promised to create backlinks on high-authority sites like Facebook and others.  Instead, they created a bunch of spammy articles in robotic, artificial English that were unreadable by a human, on Russian websites.  And this particular seller/gig was very highly rated, i.e. 5 stars.  If you happen to be in Russia, that might be just fine.  I work almost exclusively with North Carolina small businesses, though.  Is it normal for 90% of a NC-based business backlinks to be coming from Russian websites?  This seller promised one thing and delivered another.  Maybe he gives you a refund for the $5 you spent with him/her - and leaves you with 25,000 Russian backlinks.  This person doesn't even live in the US.  How are you going to get rid of those links?  (HINT: It won't be cheap.)
What To Do Instead
1. Create and distribute real content that somebody might find helpful.
2. Give yourself credit (backlinks) in the process.
3. Focus on being in a handful of quality, relevant places, where others like yourself are found, rather than hundreds or thousands of places that really don't have anything to do with your business or industry.
4. Leverage automation responsibly.
5. Use video.
6. Have a legitimate social presence.
7. Give something away for free.
8. When in doubt, get professional advice from someone vested in your success.
Thanks for reading!

Building Social Bookmarking Backlinks

Social bookmarks are another form of creating backlinks to your website.  To explain this idea I will use a real world example.  You can use special social bookmarking websites that let you do something similar with a website as with a book you might be reading and want to also let others know about, thus the term social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking sites have changed in value over time.  Their value has gone down a bit from what it used to be due to abuse.  However they are still a good source of backlinks for quantity, relevance, and diversity.

Examples of social bookmarking sites include:
* Digg
* Del.icio.us
* Technorati
* Reddit
* Slashdot
* Tagza
* Newsvine
* Connotea
* Sphinn
* Fark
* Wsik
* LinksMarker
* Blinklist

You can create social bookmarks either:

[EDIT] This post was edited and some text removed in order to clarify that I do not recommend attempting to obtain any sort of paid bookmarks or automating their creation.  Create good content that people want to share and you will get them naturally.

Remember that, by themselves, social bookmarks are not something you should rely on, so you may want to consider hiring a Raleigh SEO company.

Disclaimer: Information in this article subject to my terms as posted on my website

Building Backlinks for SEO from Commenting on Blogs

The idea behind commenting on blogs to create more backlinks is to pick blogs where you can to include your own URL as part of the blog post, and make helpful comments within the blog.  There’s probably more to it than you might think at first, though.


Some of the advantages include:


* Countless blogs provide an endless supply of backlinks
* The diversity of IP addresses from which the backlinks come will be very high.  Your backlinks should come from multiple places for a natural link profile.  Backlinks will original from all sorts of places if people are truly interested in your website.
* With some work you should be able to find good quality blogs in a related niche that have high page rank, giving your backlinks more value.


3 Tips for Good Quality Blog Backlinks


* Use the Mozilla Firefox No Follow Plug to examine the backlinks on the potential target blog to see whether they are do-follow or no-follow. You want a natural mixture of both do-follow and no-follow included in your total backlink profile.
* Check the Page Rank of the page you want to comment on.  This may be different than the page rank of the website. Search engines assign page rank to individual pages within a website, not the website as a whole, so even though a website’s home page is a Page rank of 4, if the page you are posting a comment on is page rank of 1, your backlink will only draw value from the page rank of 1. To find out the Page Rank, you can use the Mozilla Firefox SEO Quake plugin.
* Make an effort to enhance the quality of the Internet as a source of meaningful, helpful information.  My advice is to make quality, meaningful comments to improve the odds of your commenting being approved.  This approach can only improve the quality of your brand.  Use your personal expertise to say something that adds value.


Finding Blogs to Comment On


One method is to use the following search operators in the Google Blogs search box:
* “keyword” + “add comment” E.g. “real estate” + “add comment”
* “keyword” + “post comment” E.g. “foreclosures” + “post comment”


A Word of Caution


The idea of more for less appeals to basic human nature, but can you in real trouble with backlinks.  It’s important to focus on quality over quantity with backlinks.  You need to think about the likely quality of the links you’re really going to get.  A sudden huge spike in backlinks, all from known spammy sites, is likely to earn you a nice big penalty with Google, and you’ll spend a whole lot more money trying to fix it.  When it’s time to get your business in front of more people online, find a local SEO company (http://dunntek.com/seo) with a vested interested in your overall long term success. 


DISCLAIMER:  This post subject to my terms as posted on my website

SEO Backlinking from Article Directories

Using article directories, sometimes called article marketing, is among the easiest and most common ways of building backlinks to your website. They are not quite as powerful as they used to be after the Google Panda update, but good quality article directories can still provide decent backlinks if done correctly. The main factor is to provide good contextual content for the backlink, which means that it isn't just a link randomly inserted on a page, but rather is in the midst of associated text where it would make sense to be. Contextual links are generally considered to be among the most powerful.

ARTICLE DIRECTORIES

* Ezinearticles
* ArticleBase
* Buzzle
* Goarticles
* Articlealley
* Articledashboard
* Isnare
* Helium

There are many others, but those are just a few to get you started.

LINK PLACEMENT

The rules for each article directory are different, so you will need to read their rules and be sure you place your backlinks properly for that site. Many directories only permit placing a backlink in the author's bio information or resource area for the article, or at the end of the article.

GETTING STARTED

It's much easier than you might think to get started in article marketing, since all you have to do is write about things that you already know about. And if you are at a lack of ideas, you can always see what's recent in the news or find things that other people are - or are not - writing about. Sometimes it's easy to hop on the bandwagon of what's trending, but in the long run it's best to find an unmet need and fill it because you are now providing value and solutions that nobody else is.

TITLE & META INFO

If you operate a bakery and your Keyword is “bakery in New York”, you might write an article called “Why Does Everyone Love These 10 Sourdough Breads?” and then, in your resource box in the article site, write it as “Looking for a local bakery in New York? Susan James runs the Bistro Bakery, an upscale bakery on 43rd Street. She is a graduate of Such-and-Such Culinary School and has been baking since she was 8.” The keyword “bakery in New York” is the anchor text that will be hyperlinked to your main website.

CONTENT CREATION

Whether you write your own articles or outsource the writing to a professional writer, each route has pro's and cons. As the subject matter expert in your field, you're ideally suited to decide what an article could/should be about and make sure the content is technically correct. The advantage to using a writer is that it saves you time, but you need to be sure that anything they write for you is something you feel comfortable talking about. In other words, don't ever have someone write an article about a topic you know nothing about, since people might ask you about it. If you aren't a writer, though - and many people aren't - there's nothing wrong with taking your idea for an article and letting someone else do the word-magic to make it read well. Just be sure the overall tone and character represents you and your business.

Re-using existing content is one the best ways to optimize your use of time and money, but you need to do so correctly or you can be penalized. Ideally, you want any articles to be first published on your website and indexed by the search engines, before you ever put them in article directories. The reason for this is that although having the same content on different sites isn't necessarily bad - consider news websites with the same stories, for example - original content gets higher authority than this syndicated content. You always want your website to be seen as the #1 authority source, not the article directory. Another common technique to help avoid the syndicated content issue is to rewrite your article. You can either do this manually, pay someone to do it, or use automated software to "spin" your content, although most such software still requires manual editing afterward to make it sound natural.

AFTER THE ARTICLE

Finally, after you write and publish your article, think about how you can re-use this information such as creating a video about it, or turning a collection of related articles into a book. In fact this approach is very popular, and the idea is to first map out the table of contents of your book, write and publish articles on each section to build your online presence, and then once the articles are all done, come back and bundle it all up as a book which you can either sell or offer on your website to help create authority for your brand.

DISCLAIMER: This information subject to my terms as posted on my website.