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Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

On-Page Optimization – One Piece of the SEO Pie

Thursday, August 11th, 2011

Getting Found

While I understand that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with all the changes in SEO, especially if you are trying to run your own business, doing a few small things can make a big difference.  Although we believe in a holistic approach to SEO, which means you get the best results by integrating the latest trends into the design, navigation and code, basic on-page optimization one of the easiest things you can do to help your site get get found by Google and other search engines.
That being said, to help  clients with this effort Visual Adventures has put together a basic package that would include the following:

  • Google Analytics
  • Page Titles
  • Heading Tags
  • Alt Attributes
  • Internal Links
  • Site Map
  • Social Media Icons (google+, FB, twitter)

This package would run around $250-$500, depending on how many pages there are in the site and a few other factors.    Here are some examples of some additional things we could provide:

  • Identify landing pages and check for key word usage within site
  • Sign up for google places
  • Add appropriate site maps
  • Overview navigation and general usability and URL structure
  • Submit site for a crawl using the SEO MOZ crawl tool to determine errors

If you would like more information on Search, check out the Visual Adventures Facebook page.  We post tips there pretty frequently.
Give Lisa a call at (928)699.1061 or email if your interested in learning more about how we can help you be found.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

10 website blunders that users hate

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

10 website blunders that users hate

No introduction needed.
These things make me want to stick needles in my eyes.  So, in no particular order…here we go!

  1. Don’t let the design over rule the content. We all know designers love to showcase their skills, but if I’m so distracted by things that are jumping around on the page that I can’t focus on the content. You have lost me. This is especially true for the landing page.
  2. Make your company name and purpose clear, especially on the home page. I kid-you-not, I recently visited a website where I could not find the company name…on the home page!  They used an acronym several times, but no company name.
  3. Invest in a decent logo. Ok, this one makes my husband/partner really nuts. Folks spend upwards of $2k on a website, but have a logo that looks like clip art and sticks out like a sore thumb. Really folks…this is the cornerstone of your company. Spend a few bucks and have it done right.
  4. Make sure your site loads quickly. This is a no brainier…I wait about 5 sec and then move on.
  5. Date your blog posts and make them easy to share. There are lots of plug ins for cool and creative ways to do this.
  6. If you are selling a service or a product, make it easy for folks to contact you. I hate looking for an email address or phone number. Put it on every page with a link to your email. Unless, of course, you don’t want to hear from your customer/clients.
  7. Make the navigation easy to follow. I don’t want to guess how to get back to the home page from your store.  Make it easy for me and label it “home”.  Save the creative writing for the content.
  8. Turn off the music. I know it sets a mood, but it’s distracting….and not everyone LIKES the same music as you.

Ok…so maybe that’s nine things….taking submissions for the 10th.

For some additional entertainment and information about how to ruin your website, enjoy this cartoon about “How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell.“

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Technology, web design, Website tips | No Comments »

Checking Your Website in Other Browsers

Monday, April 5th, 2010

As a web designer I’ve long struggled with having to test websites in a variety of different browsers.  Technology is a rapidly changing field, and the ways to go about doing things is rapidly evolving as well.  Just a couple of years ago, I bought a Mac so I could test websites.  I had to keep my PC computers though so that I could test the websites on Internet Explorer.  You could only have one installation of Internet Explorer and so I essentially needed two PC computers to test for Internet Explorer 6 and 7.  What a headache it was!  Internet Explorer 6 was long a headache for me, but I no longer support it (nor does Google) so that headache is gone.  I got around that problem on my Mac with Paralells, a Virtual Machine software that allowed you to have multiple operating systems on one machine.  That was great, but each Virtual Machine (or operating system installation) took 10 GB of space.  I could go on and on with my troubles and how I have solved them with various solutions, but only other designers would be able to relate to this painstaking proceedure.

Enter the Future!

Here are two online tools that will allow you to test your website on various internet browsers.  Yes, you can have Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 7 and 8 all in one place!

Adobe Labs
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/browserlab/

Spoon.net

http://spoon.net/browsers/

Making the Fixes

Internet Explorer: I find using Internet Explorer 8′s Developer Tools to be useful in trouble shooting IE errors (found by pressing F12).

All Other Browsers: Get yourself two firefox plug-ins to make your life a whole lot easier.  The first is Firebug, and the second is Web Developer.  If your site works in Firefox, it will work fine in most other browsers.

Notice a trend here?  All other browsers vs. Internet Explorer.  Yes, it’s been that way for some time now.  IE is a thorn in most web developers sides.

Validate Your Code

Another great starting place for figuring out how to check for errors is by validating your HTML code.  The W3C has a great online validation tool (http://validator.w3.org/)

Hope this helps! Happy troubleshooting!

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Technology | No Comments »

The Power of CSS

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Jason did a guest blogger appearance at redheadwriting.com this week. Read his article titled “The Power of CSS” and find out what CSS can do for you.  It’s written so a designer or average Joe will understand.  Erika has many other interesting and informative articles on the redheadwriting.com site.

Here’s the link one more time for you!

“The Power of CSS”

Read it, tweet it, then sign up to become a fan on Facebook.

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization, What's new with Visual Adventures, WordPress | No Comments »

I have a website, now what?

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

So you finally decided it’s time for your business to have a website!  You have a look and feel decided upon, purchased your URL, spent hours writing content and found the perfect designer to make it all happen.  Once your site is built and online you’re done, right?  Wrong!
Unfortunately, this is only the first step in having a successful website.  People need to be able to find you, easily.  Your job now is to manage your website and continually market it on the internet, which is a constantly changing environment.  The good news is, now there are all kinds of tools/programs to help you with this.  Google Analytics, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Facebook as well as great internet resources and blogs. I ran across a great one, DoshDosh.  It’s chocked full of useful information on how to use the above social networking sites as well as other ways to market your business on the internet.  We also use a great SEO copywriter, Erika Napoletano at Red Head Writing.  She can write you copy so it’s spot on for keywords, helping you get organic results.
So spend a little time each day monitoring the traffic on your site and getting your URL out there.  Your time spent learning about this environment will not be wasted!

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

SEO and Links

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the talk of the town these days. SEO essentially consists of a few attributes applied to building websites.  Here are a few things that should be considered when building a site:

  • Page titles using keywords (this goes in the HTML title tag)
  • Meta Tags for keywords and descriptions should be included in the <head> tags of your HTML page.
  • Heading tags (h1, h2, etc.. HTML tags) should be used and should have relevant keywords included in the headings.
  • A navigation system that search engines can follow.  The days of fancy navigation buttons that hop, skip, and jump are long gone.  These days, a bulleted list is the way to go.  You can then use CSS to style the navigation and make it appear lots of different ways, including drop down or fly out menu’s.
  • Linking text within your page content to other pages on your site is also helpful.
  • Your page content should also be keyword rich, yet be legible and useful to your readers.
  • Web pages should be coded with HTML (or XHTML) and CSS coding techniques should be used to style the page.  Previously, tables were used to organize content and images. Tables are much harder for search engines to follow and they are also much more difficult to make edits to.     You can check this on your web page by going “View Souce” or “View Page Source” (in Internet Explorer and Firefox you can right click on the mouse for this option) and then looking in the HTML code.  If you see a bunch of code below the <body> tag that looks like <div>, </div>, <div class=”header”> then it’s likely you site was created this way.  If you see a bunch of tags like <table>, <tr>, <td> then you are looking at code for tables.
  • Include alt text descriptions for your images.
  • Linking to other sites that have helpful and relevant content is a good thing.
  • Having other sites link to you is even more useful.  That tells the search engines that you have useful content on your web site.  Search engines also put importance on link/site popularity.
  • Creating a Robots.txt file to hide coding and pages you don’t want to have the search engines seeing is a good step to take.
  • Creating a sitemap.xml file to show search engines what pages are on your site.

Search Engine Optimization is just the begining of getting your site indexed and on top of the search results.  This is however, an important first step in getting there.

Here is an article about this topic for further reading.
The New SEO – Let’s Get Real

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Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Technology | No Comments »

To Blog or Not to Blog

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Six Reason Every Small Business Should Blog

This is a convincing article about why to blog. At Visual Adventures, we have been building almost all of our sites lately as custom designed WordPress blog sites. For about the same amount of time it takes to create a regular website, you can have one with a content management system, a blog, photo galleries you can manage, and lots of other options available for this popular software.

In case you haven’t noticed lately, the search engines love blog articles. The majority of search results I end up on these days are blog articles. That is a huge reason alone, why you might want to consider a blog. Read the article to find out more!

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