SEO: What You Need To Know

I figured it’s about time that I update this blog with a simple blogpost about SEO.  I’ve been gathering up so much new information over the past year or so that its just hard to decide what to write about and actually take the time to write it. Many people have websites that are just sitting out in cyberspace.  Having a website that people can’t find is like having a billboard advertising your business out in the middle of a cornfield. So SEO is important if you ever want your website to actually be found by search engines.  People no longer pull out the big yellow telephone book to look for goods and services (at least I don’t know any).  My grandma still might do it!  Anyway, most people are searching online for what they want. So make sure your website is up to par with at least some basic SEO.

1. Title tags are most important to search engines. Title tags are that little bit of text up in the chrome part of your browser.  This can usually be found in the “head” tags of your website. (ask your web buddy)

2. SEO is all about relevant keywords. Find out what search terms your target market is using on the web to find items or services your offering. You can use a nifty Google Keyword tool to figure this out. Build your website content around these keywords.

3.  Stay away from pay-per click for now. Unless you have a large marketing budget and money to burn don’t use pay per click. I’ve used it briefly in the past and it didn’t give me much business or traffic.  Pay per click is a art in its own and if you do decide to use this to drive traffic to your site, hire someone and have a specific plan.

Of course all this means nothing without a website. If your looking for a standard website design package contact me through our website and lets discuss your web marketing goals!

Elements For A Successful Blog

Great Article For You Bloggers Out There!

http://www.designyourmarketing.co.uk/2010/01/elements-for-a-successful-blog/

Pepsi Smartly Shifting Ad Dollars Online

Pepsi Smartly Shifting Ad Dollars Online.

JW Landscapes Chicago, IL Website Review

2010 will bring you various website reviews from Severity Design. Don’t worry…I’ll try and be as positive as possible. There IS a lot of crappy design out there, but I’m going to highlight both the good and bad aspects of the websites I’ll review in the hopes to give some “eye education” on what businesses need to know about attracting more clients. It’s one thing to have a website with text and pictures online, it’s another thing to utilize your website to the fullest and take full advantage of what’s available to you.

JW Landscapes (http://www.jwlandscapes.com/) is a landscape design company owned by John West in Chicago. The website is lacking in company information, but after another google search I found a short snippet about what the company actually does from Chicago Home Mag online.  Your website should at the very least tell us a little history about your company. Maybe a little about the owner, how long you’ve been in business, and here is the clincher: testimonials. In this case, if I was a first time customer visiting the website I may not make that “trust” connection with JW. Also, if you notice, none of the text is selectable. This is probably because the site is flash based and is not good for search engines.  Search engine spiders are hunting for useful information. I’m not aware that search engines are able to select images or flash images yet for search rankings. Colorwise, I love the choice. The green and khaki colors give me the earth tone feel that is appropriate for a landscape design company. When I load the website, this annoying music loads automatically. BIG NO NO. To their credit, they DO provide a on/off function to turn it off. But when I visit websites that force music, video or other things on me I usually go straight for the X button.

They have a very nice gallery of work. Very important to display photography of your work if you are in a service field that involves construction or products. I might suggest “before” and ”after” photos to let us know your particular contribution to the project.  Also I noticed in the gallery that when you click on the sub navigation categories instead of going straight to the photos it takes me to a “intro slide” that is kind of redundant.

Finally, I’d like to see a call to action either on the home page or somewhere in the site. What do you want your visitors to do? Maybe this could be displayed on the side left bar. The logo is very nice and professional, however you should always include your contact information in full view for visitors to convert to phone calls for business.

Overall, this is a very nice site. It’s very clean, simple and easy to find and navigate through.

3 Reasons to Take Your Business Online

In my journey into web design I have come across an interesting phenomenon. When I speak with business owners, I find that that they tend to over look the importance of  having a professional looking website. Mostly I find this when speaking to the 40 and older crowd. Anyone in the younger age range seems to understand that the future of business is going online.  A friend and I were discussing how she now uses her telephone books for kindle and how her family does all her searches for goods and services online via search engines. So I decided to write a quick blog explaining some good reasons your business should have a professional design a great looking website to market your business. I emphasize the fact that you should have a professional do it. Here is why:

1.  As stated by my friend. 90% of people nowadays search for goods and services online via search engines.  For example, when my wife and I want to order pizza, I go to Google, type in “pizza, Chicago, il” and up pops all the local pizza places in our 5 mile radius. Here is the catch. People will usually ignore your business if you have a poorly designed website, or even worse, your missing out on that business if you have no website at all.

2.  You should have a professional do it.  As a small business owner, you don’t have time to tinker around with html code, css and search engine optimization. How much have you used photoshop if your in the flooring business?  Or perhaps your a building contractor, do you really know the difference between Helvetica typeface and Calson?  Save yourself some time and hire a professional. There are tons of students out there or new business owners like myself that do good work for affordable cost. Consider it as part of your marketing.

3.  You say “Well I’m already in the phonebook” or “I advertise on radio or other print ads”.  Yes, but how much money are you spending and how effective has your marketing been?  To have a clean looking, beautiful website built will provide you with 5-6 pages of full color marketing material you can advertise to your prospective customers. Your website can tell your customers much more about you, your services and pricing than magazine ads can. Plus, you can track the demographics from your website personally to see who your getting hits from so you can target your services better.

These are just 3 small reasons to take your business online if you already haven’t. If you already have a website, you might want to consider a re-design or updating the site. Hire a professional designer to do it. Please don’t let your teen age cousin do it or nephew. (Unless they know what they are doing).  There are plenty of good companies and respectable firms out there that can help you make those design decisions.

Why Use CSS?

Ok kiddies. CSS is the answer to all my problems, the solution to the problem of world hunger. I’ve been discovering the great flexibility of CSS. If for no other reason to use CSS, but to be able to alter presentation of pages in multiple pages using only one cascading style sheet. Not to mention my “web teacher” at college taught me the ancient use of tables. (horrible). I’m not saying there isn’t any use for tables, but I’ve been finding that current practice is to use divs versus tables. To be considered a serious web developer these days you must learn CSS. Also on a side note, I’m being exposed to a little php working with WordPress.

Intro To CSS

So I figured out that if I’m going to become a serious web designer at 32 yrs old, then I need to seriously consider learning CSS. After being beaten down on a designtalk forum for using tables, I’ve taken down my poor excuse of a website for my company and instead uploaded a landing page with my contact information. I was told this was a very wise move for me. (btw, you really don’t realize how much you suck until you compare your design to other sites you like and also having peers in the field critique your work).  Needless to say, I got busy viewing the tutorials on CSS. Since then, I’ve been actually dreaming about CSS websites. It’s so smooth, easy to format and cleaner in my opinion. Granted, I’ve only really begun and only know how to format text and fonts, but its a step in the right direction. I definitely would rather create an external style sheet to format things than go through every page of my site and make changes or format the style.

My current challenges consist of gaining practice and remembering the various attributes and selectors. I find in life that you really don’t understand what you’re doing until you get out there and do it. Thus the reason why I’m taking on projects to gain some experience. I’m a pretty confident person. I find that web development is quite scary.

3 Tips For Publishing Your First Webpage

So my first experience in the web design field. I designed my companie’s home page for Severity Design, a web design company located in Elgin, Il. I’m excited about it because, although I’m just beginning in this, I’m happy with the simple, clean design which Severity is all about. So I publish the webpage, although not complete. (Big mistake!) I simply wanted to put something out there to be able to take on some projects so I could get more experience under my belt. So I publish my link on Yelp (Business Directory) and also put my contact information out there. I left the post alone for the rest of the day, but to my surprise I checked back a few hours later and got at least 25 responses to my post! All negative. What I found was TONS of critics and even a few designers rip apart my site. What a learning experience! By the end of the day I was thinking of throwing in the towel. I thought my home page looked pretty good. Obviously there were some big problems with it after my Yelp critique. First off, NEVER publish a website with broken links. (I guess I should have known this). Second, your graphics need to be clean, sized properly and off the chain! Third, please remember to use spell check on content and copy.

So needless to say, I’m NOT throwing in the towel, but I went in and corrected some of the mistakes my fellow critics pointed out to me. I considered it a learning experience. Some times you think you have the hottest thing since sliced bread…put it up on a board for everyone to look at…you’ll get back down to earth real fast.