Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Web Design for the Web 2.0 Age

A well crafted website is vital to the success of any new business these days. Launch parties have replaced ribbon cuttings and websites often precede the opening of store doors. Giving your business a well developed and targeted “face” or website is the first step to getting customers to sign up and buy your product or service.

Web 2.0

Internet users have changed their expectations when it comes to visiting company websites. A new evolution of website expectations has been greeted with creative designs and developments. Whereas websites used to exist as a billboard, they are now a conversation starter and continuer, so to speak. This evolution has marked the change from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. A company’s website must not only provide information, but also draw people to their site with various strategies like blogs, social media and other user generated content providers.

Web 2.0 web design has opened up a whole gamut of ideas and creative solutions for business problems. By initiating their own conversation and integrating sales goals, websites can provide their target audiences with a place to voice their onions, but also a place to build brand loyalty.

Brand Loyalty – Everyone Has a Voice

When customers feel that your company cares about their thoughts and ideas, a relationship is born. This goes a long way to handling customer service issues as well as gaining long-term customers.

SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid !!!!!!

The key to understanding which SEO mistakes to avoid lies in understanding what big search engines like Google likes and does not like. In other words, the key to SEO traffic is to make your site more "likeable" to Google. Here are 6 mistakes which gives a negative effect on your SEO efforts.

1) Image headers and extensive image use.

Google spiders cannot read images like text. Therefore, your header cannot be quantified by Google's search engine and as we all know headers are extremely important for SEO. Therefore, use a text header with the "[h1]" tag instead. If you must use images, include keywords in the alt text.

2) Splash pages

Probably the biggest mistake anyone can make is by having a splash page. The first thing Google reads is your main page and if your main page is one big hunk of flash videos, you will be losing out on tons of potential free traffic. Besides, nobody is interested in your flash video, they are just interested in the content.

3) Too many keywords

If the keyword density of your site is over 5%, your site will come across as spam and that will have negative effects on SEO. Instead, use stemmed keywords. (key phrases related to your targeted keyword)

E.g. internet marketing tips and online marketing advice.

4) Too many backlinks from low quality sites

Getting too many link exchanges from low quality sites or link farms can have a serious negative effect on your website. Not only will you lose credibility among Google and your readers, your site will come off as a link farm or spam site. They solution: Get links from authority sites in the related niche. In other words, use google toolbar to check for pages with high ranking in your niche and try to get links from them.

5) Bad language or profanity

Did your mother used to wash your mouth with soap whenever you said bad words? Google hates profanity and bad language. Therefore, stay away from it, unless you are running an adult website.

6) Black hat SEO

This is something that came about a few years back by internet marketers who understood Google too well and tried to exploit their search engine mechanisms. What they did was use software which produced 1000 mini blogs filled with keywords and linked to one another. This is a huge no-no. Google's brilliant engineers have found ways to overcome these practices and have banned all sorts of black hat SEO sites.

Google search engine is always upgrading their algorithm to prevent from SEO abusers and thus, it is always good to stay on top of the SEO trends so that your site will not lose traffic.