Websites | Web Design | SEO Marketing

 

 

Skills and techniques

Marketing and communication design

Marketing and communication design on a website may identify what works for its target market. This can be an age group or particular strand of culture; thus the designer may understand the trends of its audience. Websites | Web Design | SEO Marketing. Designers may also understand the type of website they are designing, meaning, for example, that (B2B)business-to-business website design considerations might differ greatly from a consumer targeted website such as a retail or entertainment website. Careful consideration might be made to ensure that the aesthetics or overall design of a site do not clash with the clarity and accuracy of the content or the ease of web navigation,[9] especially on a B2B website. Designers may also consider the reputation of the owner or business the site is representing to make sure they are portrayed favourably.

 

SEO strategize with Techsonduty

Search Engine Ranking

SEO is short for “search engine optimization.” To have your site optimized for the search engines means to attempt to have top placement in the results pages whenever a specific keyword is typed into the query box. There are many search engine optimization services to choose from, so here are some things to keep in mind when seeking  SEO services or developing an SEO strategy of your own.
Search engines have two types of listings: those that are paid for, which are usually distinguished as “sponsored links” and those that are organic.

To the right is a screen shot of a Google search results page. The listings in red are paid ads, and the listings in the green area are organic results.

Organic Listings
Organic search engine listings are those that appear down the middle of the page. Search engine optimization services are devoted to optimizing sites to appear in the organic listings space. See the diagram above to see where organic listings and paid listings appear in the Google search engine results page.

Spider-driven search engines such as Google®, Yahoo!® and MSN® use “robots” or “crawlers” to score websites across the Internet. Robots “spider/crawl” each site and “score” pages based on how relevant they are. A website’s score or placement within a spider driven search engine is derived from hundreds of variables such as link popularity, density and frequency of keywords in page content, HTML code, site themes and more. You will want to focus many criteria in your SEO strategy to position yourself well among the major search engines. Here are two of the most influential factors:

  1. Link Popularity
    Spider-driven search engines use robots to spider websites across the Internet by traveling through links from web page to web page. A website’s score or placement within a spider driven search engine is derived from hundreds of variables such as, link popularity, click popularity, keyword density, website themes and more.Google is the most popular spider-driven search engine. Its database currently has about 4 billion pages indexed and is known for finding the most relevant information. When Google spiders the Web, it finds sites by traveling through links. The more sites that link to you, the more important the engines believe your content to be. You should focus on getting many important sites to link to your site. You can do this in many ways: submit to online directories, exchange links with business partners and industry-related sites, or participate in Link Building.
  2. Page Content
    Search engine spiders can only spider through text. They will use the content on your site to determine what your site is about, which in turn will help to decide how highly your site will be ranked for specific keyword phrases when visitors type them into the search engines. For this reason, keyword research is critical to obtaining natural search engine placement and should be at the top of your list when mapping out your SEO strategy.You will need to know how many people are searching for your keyword phrases and what kind of competition you are facing when attempting to obtain a top spot in the search results. Keyword research, text writing, submissions and site analysis are all included with our search engine optimization packages.

Why Search Engine Optimization?
Studies have proven that top placement in search engines generally provide a more favorable return on investment compared to traditional forms of advertising such as, snail mail, radio commercials and television. Search engine optimization is the primary method to earning top 10 search engine placement. Learn more about the search engine optimization process and discuss an SEO strategy for your site when you contact a search engine specialist today.

Paid Listings
Yahoo!’s Pay-Per-Plick (PPC) Program shows paid ads at the top and right of the results pages. websites that show up here bid on keyword phrases and pay Yahoo!® a small fee each time the ad is clicked on. The more you bid per phrase the higher your ad will appear on the results page. Yahoo! PPC is a great way to help drive traffic quickly to your website. You can set a daily budget. When you max out your budget, Yahoo! will pull your ad for the remainder of the day.

A comprehensive search engine marketing campaign may encompass both organic optimization for long-term success and a pay per click campaign for immediate results. Feel free to contact a search engine marketing consultant at 516-360-0757. We can help put together a marketing strategy for your site’s needs.

Each organic search engine ranking places emphasis on variable factors such as the design and layout, keyword density and the number of relevant sites linking to it. Search engines constantly update and refine their ranking algorithms in order to index the most relevant sites. Other variables that have an impact on search engine placement include the following:

SEO Keyword Research: Choosing the right keywords is critical to SEO success.
301 Redirect: The primary search engine friendly way to redirect your domain name.
Link Popularity: Work to increase traffic by exchanging or achieving links from many high-ranking sites.
Web Themes: Create a content rich site broken down into “themes.”

User experience design and interactive design

Users understanding the content of a website often depends on users understanding how the website works. This is part of the user experience design. User experience is related to layout, clear instructions and labeling on a website. How well a user understands how they can interact on a site may also depend on theinteractive design of the site. If a user perceives the usefulness of that website, they are more likely to continue using it. Users who are skilled and well versed with website use may find a more unique, yet less intuitive or less user-friendly website interface useful nonetheless. However, users with less experience are less likely to see the advantages or usefulness of a less intuitive website interface. This drives the trend for a more universal user experience and ease of access to accommodate as many users as possible regardless of user skill.[10] Much of the user experience design and interactive design are considered in the user interface design.

Advanced interactive functions may require plug-ins if not advanced coding language skills. Choosing whether or not to use interactivity that requires plug-ins is a critical decision in user experience design. If the plug-in doesn’t come pre-installed with most browsers, there’s a risk that the user will have neither the know how, nor the patience to install a plug-in just to access the content. If the function requires advanced coding language skills, it may be too costly in either time or money to code compared to the amount of enhancement the function will add to the user experience. There’s also a risk that advanced interactivity may be incompatible with older browsers or hardware configurations. Publishing a function that doesn’t work reliably is potentially worse for the user experience than making no attempt. It depends on the target audience if it’s likely to be needed or worth any risks.

Page layout

Part of the user interface design is affected by the quality of the page layout. For example, a designer may consider if the site’s page layout should remain consistent on different pages when designing the layout. Page pixel width may also be considered vital for aligning objects in the layout design. The most popular fixed-width websites generally have the same set width to match the current most popular browser window, at the current most popular screen resolution, on the current most popular monitor size. Most pages are also center-aligned for concerns of aesthetics on larger screens.[11]

Fluid layouts increased in popularity around 2000 as an alternative to HTML-table-based layouts and grid-based design in both page layout design principle, and in coding technique, but were very slow to be adopted.[note 1] This was due to considerations of screen reading devices and windows varying in sizes which designers have no control over. Accordingly, a design may be broken down into units (sidebars, content blocks, embedded advertising areas, navigation areas) that are sent to the browser and which will be fitted into the display window by the browser, as best it can. As the browser does recognize the details of the reader’s screen (window size, font size relative to window etc.) the browser can make user-specific layout adjustments to fluid layouts, but not fixed-width layouts. Although such a display may often change the relative position of major content units, sidebars may be displaced below body text rather than to the side of it. This is a more flexible display than a hard-coded grid-based layout that doesn’t fit the device window. In particular, the relative position of content blocks may change while leaving the content within the block unaffected. This also minimizes the user’s need to horizontally scroll the page.

Responsive Web Design is a newer approach, based on CSS3, and a deeper level of per-device specification within the page’s stylesheet through an enhanced use of the CSS @media pseudo-selector.

Typography

Web designers may choose to limit the variety of website typefaces to only a few which are of a similar style, instead of using a wide range of typefaces or type styles. Most browsers recognize a specific number of safe fonts, which designers mainly use in order to avoid complications.

Font downloading was later included in the CSS3 fonts module and has since been implemented in Safari 3.1, Opera 10 and Mozilla Firefox 3.5. This has subsequently increased interest in web typography, as well as the usage of font downloading.

Most layouts on a site incorporate negative space to break the text up into paragraphs and also avoid center-aligned text.[12]

Motion graphics

The page layout and user interface may also be affected by the use of motion graphics. The choice of whether or not to use motion graphics may depend on the target market for the website. Motion graphics may be expected or at least better received with an entertainment-oriented website. However, a website target audience with a more serious or formal interest (such as business, community, or government) might find animations unnecessary and distracting if only for entertainment or decoration purposes. This doesn’t mean that more serious content couldn’t be enhanced with animated or video presentations that is relevant to the content. In either case, motion graphic design may make the difference between more effective visuals or distracting visuals.

Quality of code

Website designers may consider it to be good practice to conform to standards. This is usually done via a description specifying what the element is doing. Failure to conform to standards may not make a website unusable or error prone, but standards can relate to the correct layout of pages for readability as well making sure coded elements are closed appropriately. This includes errors in code, more organized layout for code, and making sure IDs and classes are identified properly. Poorly-coded pages are sometimes colloquially called tag soup. Validating via W3C[7] can only be done when a correct DOCTYPE declaration is made, which is used to highlight errors in code. The system identifies the errors and areas that do not conform to web design standards. This information can then be corrected by the user.[13]

Homepage design

Usability experts, including Jakob Nielsen and Kyle Soucy, have often emphasised homepage design for website success and asserted that the homepage is the most important page on a website. However practitioners into the 2000’s were starting to find that a growing number of website traffic was bypassing the homepage, going directly to internal content pages through search engines, e-newsletters and RSS feeds. Leading many practitioners to argue that homepages are less important than most people think.[