Category: Design
SEO Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization aka SEO is rather important for your website to be found in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other similar website.
These websites have specialized programming to get the best results to their clients. There are many ways to optimize a website, and these methods are either black-hat or white-hat, going back to the early days of 2 color TV (you guessed it! Black and White!) when the bad guys wore black and the heroes wore white.
Search engine programming has become pretty good at finding and defusing the cheaters’ methods, so the good guys can finally be at the top of the results page. Of course, we are the good guys too, right? So we won’t even try to cheat. You and I will just provide what your clients are looking for, clear and concise content, products and solutions for their problems, with no tricks, gimmicks or plain old lies. Your key words and phrases will be located in the content and titles how the search engines want it, how it should be.
10. Social Media
Linking your website to social media, including but not limited to, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and Google+ is a great way to magnify the exposure of your products, blog posts or any other content on your website.
Social media sharing is the easiest and cheapest way to get the word out. They say the best advertising is word of mouth, well that is just what social media sharing is!
10 Steps to plan your website
You will need the following to set up your basic website:
- The first step is to select a domain name. It should reflect the name and nature of business and your goal(s) as well as your reason(s) for being online. If you give me the desired keywords, I can look this up for you and/or obtain it for you. You will also want to check social media to be sure the account name matching the domain name you want is available. I can do the social media set up also.
- Obtain a hosting plan, or I can provide one for you.
- Design your branding for the site, which means your fonts, logo, tagline and color scheme. Fonts should contrast well against the background for easy reading. (One of my biggest peeves: when the font is barely grey on white background. I struggle to read it, and I’m not old yet!)
- Map out desired visitor actions, then share this map with others to see if they agree it is logical.
- Prepare your mission statement (keep concise, compare/align to other businesses).
- Collect data needed for the site such as business name, logo, contact info, media (photos and videos) you will use. Plan for a schedule of posts to keep the information on the site fresh, so visitors will return often!
- Prepare text of testimonials/reviews from actual previous clients. If the clients allow it, include their name or initials and a photo or avatar so that it is more personal.
- Gather frequently asked questions and their answers for a FAQ.
- Decide what look your site should have. There are many trending styles: parallax scrolling, magazine style, portfolio, etc.
- Decide which social media accounts you will use, and plan out how often you will post/update. The nice thing about using social media is that they can be synced with your website to auto-post any new posts on the website. I call it double dipping on promotion!
For add-ons, you will need also:
Data: Gather up information on your products/services for your e-commerce store including title, pricing, description, photos, sale dates, variations of color, size, service plan features etc.
Now what?
Once your website is up and running, you will need training on how to keep it current.
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Website Design Inquiry
In order to help small businesses prosper, we will design and implement a basic website for your e-commerce or service based business, blog or other type of site at very low cost! $250.00 US covers the design and implementation of a basic website to help meet your goals.
Costs not included in this product are: domain name, which is a yearly cost of approximately $15 for most domains, and site hosting, which is usually a monthly or yearly fee. We can obtain these for you, but you will need to select them as add-ons.
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