Web Design

Link building tactics

There are so many link building tactics out there that when looking around there is a possibility that a few easy ones can be missed. Most of them can be classified as passing low to moderate levels of link authority. However, even with low authority, getting enough links can and will make a difference to your rankings. The best method will be to attempt all of the tactics listed below and maintain a list of pages/posts and tactics that apply to them.

Here is a quick rundown of some of the more popular tactics:

Using resource and links pages on other websites to get a link.

Competitor research to find easy links that the competition has obtained.

Profile links at sites that require memberships but have public profile pages.

Provide html code for other to link to you.

Link out to other sites in articles, a lot of them will link back eventually.

Internal links are hidden gold, use them to add additional anchor text relevance.

Content marketing will generate backlinks.

Make you have a blog.

Publish your RSS feed.

If you have a webcam, there are easy high PR directories for webcams.

Create and get your web app listed in directories

Regularly social bookmark your content

Video submission

Submit press releases for any launches or announcements

Start a podcast

If the funds exist, submit to paid directories

Get links from niche specific directories

Create infographics

Submit to blog directories

Get testimonials from customers/visitors

 

Business Services, Web Design

How to Find a Good Web Design Company

If you want to know how to find affordable Web design in Glendale, Ca, or anywhere in the United States, then you have to know a bit about what makes Web designers good. These tips will help you evaluate good Web design companies, so you can find someone reputable to work with.

Ask Friends and Colleagues

One way to find a good Web design company is to query your friends and your colleagues. If you know any fellow business owners, then there are good odds that they had someone build a website for them. You should ask them for contacts, and start making some phone calls. You can usually find a decent bid using this method. The flipside is, you’ll also know which companies don’t offer a quality service.

Read Reviews

According to Web Design Express, reviews offer some insight into a customer’s experience with a company. If there are a lot of reviews, you benefit from knowing the score is most likely accurate. If there are only a few reviews, it’s possible some could be fake. Read reviews carefully, as they often have links or photos of the work the company put out. This way, you can evaluate the review and the work for yourself.

Contact Others

Another way to find a good company to work with is to look at some examples in the wild. See a site you like? If the company isn’t a major brand name, you might be able to contact someone on their team and just ask them who they use. Especially if you’re not in a related market.

Web Design

Measuring the authority of web pages

What we know for sure is that there is no single authority metric that Google uses when ranking pages.  From comments and other disclosures by Google staff, we know that there are several currently undisclosed metrics that form the level of authority of a page. Here is what we know:

Google says that the authority of content is calculated on a page-by-page basis. This means that there is no single domain level authority figure that applies to all content under that domain. This would lead to some bad assumptions of individual content, so Google was forced to look at it by the page. For example, it would be difficult to apply it on a per-user basis for sites like YouTube and Tumblr, so every single page has its authority.

There are still site-wide signals that have an effect on the authority of the page. It’s not a blanket application across all pages. One of the initial attempts to fight spam, The Penguin update, applied penalties across the entire site. Now, with Penguin a part of the core algorithm, it applies at the page level. In reality, it is a good thing that penalties and boosts apply at the page level. It is possible that the computational load was too great to do so in the past.

The days when PageRank was all you needed to rank are gone. Now there are something like 200+ ranking signals, of which as many 20 could directly affect authority. Google wants to ensure that if you rank high in its results, that what you are saying is true, and that it belongs there.Save

Web Design

The most useful reports in Google Analytics

Article written by : Top SEO Software Reviews

Google Analytics is probably the most powerful analytics tool available for web traffic. The best part is that it is free to use. The problem is that most webmasters simply plug the code into the website and just look at how much traffic comes in and from where. It is so much more powerful than that. Set up properly, the reports provided can be extremely useful. Here are some reports to consider using:

Landing pages’ report

This report shows the traffic and more importantly conversions for all the landing pages on the site. That is the first page they arrived on that lead to the conversion. When you find a page that converts more than others, a quick analysis can show how that success can be replicated to other content/channels.

Acquisition channels

Another report that is extremely useful for marketers. This shows a high-level view of whi
ch channels generate the most leads and conversions. You can see which ones converts the best and worst.  This is particularly useful for larger organizations where decisions need to be justified using data that management can understand. For example: when the data shows that social media traffic converts the worst, convincing management not to invest more in social gets easier when such a report clearly shows the conversion rates.

Source/medium

This is as useful as the landing pages report. In this report you will where the traffic to the various channels comes from and how well it converts. This can be isolated by each individual goal.

Web Design

One of the things that Google is on the lookout for is quality content

Part of the quality is how comprehensive the article is towards the subject matter. The question is, how do you identify everything that could be answered by the search query?

The first step is to look at all the implicit and explicit meanings of the search query. It can be surprising in how many different ways a single query can be approached. For example, let’s look at the search query “computer maintenance best practices”. Some people who are searching that could be people who have computers at home. Other might be helpdesk team at a company. It could even be IT directors who want to keep up with changing practices. The content should answer the query for every single one of them.

The next step is to go through a few pages of the search engine results and look at all the meanings that the results show. Chances are that most of the purposes of the query will be there and even some which are not so obvious. Sometimes the deeper you go the more diverse the meanings.

Lastly, ask people. Use services which have Q&A components or open-ended surveys to get a list of what the visitors to the website think. There is no better way than to ask those that actually end up on the same website. There are also social sites like Quora that are perfect to ask or even to mine for data on the query.

Web Design

Build backlinks by turning mentions into links

If you are promoting your site right, then chances are that other websites will be talking about you or your product. These are known as mentions. If none of these mentions actually link to your site or product that was referenced, then it is a missed opportunity for a link. Fortunately, with a little bit of work we can turn these into links that will help the site’s SEO.

The first step is to find any mentions of the website or the product. We also want to avoid any of our own pages or other campaigns appearing in the results. Search for the site or product name but make sure that the time period of the search is as short as possible. Start out with one day and then expand little by little.

Open the pages that come on the search and check for the actual mentions. Make a list of all such pages that do not link back to you from the mention.

This is where it gets hard. Now that you have located mentions without links, the site owners need to be contacted. You need to ask them (nicely) if they could link to your site from the mention. Contact can be made using email or the sites contact form. However, sometimes a social media channel might seem less like spam.

Assuming that the link was added. Give it about four weeks and check back if the ranking on the page has improved. Even a minor traffic bump can be indicative of a fluctuating ranking improvement.

Web Design

How much is a website worth

Flipping websites and blogs used to be a massive money maker in the past. The usual process was to build a site, do some quick SEO and sell for a profit. This was easy when it did not require so much work to get ranked on Google, even for a short time. Long tail traffic was relatively untapped and there was a lot of potential. Not so anymore. Now selling a website means that the website will need to measure up to certain standards. Those standards are flexible for most but here is that prospective buyers will look for:

Content – The site must have decent amount of content that is of sufficient quality and length. The content must also match the topic/theme of the site and that of the buyer.

Backlinks – Nowadays the number of backlinks are not the only metric that is checked. The ratio of root domains to total backlinks is another. The lower the ratio the better.

Root Domains – Same as the above except with a focus on the total number of root domains. The higher the number of root domains the better. It indicates better link diversity in the backlink profile.

Traffic – A site for sale needs to have consistent traffic. You will need to provide access to analytics and reports for at least one year to prove consistency.

Activity – There has to be recent activity. Dormont sites tend to be at the beginning of a downward trend in both traffic and search rankings.

Web Design

Finding a good web designer

If you’re building a website or want to update your existing website and you decide to hire a designer to help you can quickly get overwhelmed. There are thousands of Web designers. How do you decide what makes one designer better than another designer?

Experience Isn’t Everything

Most people will tell you that the most important thing is experience. A designer who doesn’t have a lot of experience, they’ll tell you, can’t give you the quality that an experienced designer can. I don’t agree. While experience can be useful, it can also be a drawback. Just because a designer has less experience doesn’t mean that he or she can’t build a beautiful site for you.

Take Note: If a designer says they’ve been building websites since before 1995, they are almost definitely exaggerating. When I started working on the Web in 1995, very very few people had even heard of the Web, let alone had set up a business. I was working at an Internet company, which is the only reason I was involved with it at that time.Before you base your decision solely on how many sites they’ve built or how long they’ve been in business, think about this:

• Many long-time designers are stuck in their habits and might not be willing or able to give you a cutting edge website (if that’s what you want).
• Younger designers are more likely to have gone to school to get a Web design degree. While this isn’t vital either, it does tell you that this person has academic knowledge that an older designer might only have through practice.

Ask to See Their Portfolio

While experience might not be important, having a good portfolio is. You shouldn’t be as concerned with whether the portfolio is made up of live sites, so much that the examples show diversity and range for the designer. Ask to see the portfolio online so that you can see how the websites they’ve built actually work. This is especially important if you’re looking for a designer to build any type of interactivity for your website.

Some people will tell you that the way the potential Web designer’s personal site looks is a good measure of how good a designer they will be. But I disagree with this too. While I do think having a good Web design business site is important. I don’t think that it’s a good indicator of how well they would design your site. Most designers design their business site when they’re not working on paying jobs. And if they have tons of time to modify their business site, then they don’t have a lot of experience, do they? But they might have a good portfolio. So you have to judge for yourself.

Web Design

3 Ways to Generate Web Traffic Using Your Design Skills

Having good design skills can come in handy if you want to generate web traffic. There are a number of ways by which you can do this in creating specific types of website content.

So, with that said, here are 3 ways to generate web traffic using your design skills:

#1: Infographics

The most obvious reason why infographics are so popular on the internet is because they are able to convey complex and large amounts of information quickly – a benefit that suits most internet users.

To give you an idea as to how popular this form of web content is, a study reveal that people searching for infographics since 2010 has increase by 800%.

#2: Freebies

An excellent example to describe this is that of Orman Clark who has sold almost $1 million worth of WordPress themes on a website called ThemeForest. One of his most important strategies to do this is to offer freebies in the form of free WordPress themes at his website, Premium Pixels. It’s a very good reason why he remains a WordPress theme top-seller.

#3: Desktop or Mobile Wallpapers

Without a doubt, a well-designed wallpaper can attract a number of visitors to your website.

But where do you attract visitors from?

Wallpaper galleries such as InterfaceLIFT and Wallbase.cc are just two examples of places where you can upload your design and attract visitors, especially if your wallpaper is good enough to get featured. This works for both desktop as well as mobile wallpapers as well.

Web Design

Better Web Design Will Improve Your Profitability

Article submitted by Web Design Express.

Hardly anyone in business needs to be reminded that what a better web design will do for an enterprise’s bottom line. Promoting your salable products through online platforms is like putting the front door of your business inside of the front door of your customers’ homes. Who could resist browsing your carefully put together wares if it wasn’t even necessary to step out the door to do so?

Of course, the real rub in this scene is that the increases in people’s overall internet connectivity have made everyone’s businesses and products equally accessible to consumers — well, practically.  A better web design would provide the competitive advantages other businesses need to stand out in the crowded space that is the Internet.

How can a web design firm position your company to be in a direct path to attaining the Holy Grail that is profitability? By improving the design of your business’s online front door, or, more directly put, by making your site  more attractive for better conversion. The more professional looking your site, the more likely it is customers will buy something from your website or engage with your firm. Moreover, the cost of web design has gone down in recent years. So if your marketing budget is on the small side, even then, there’s something that web design companies can do for you.