Match Your Online Marketing To Business Web Design Capability

Ever notice how the TV shows of the early 50s seemed stilted, people standing in front of curtains talking into a microphone to a studio audience. Measure those shows against today’s CSI shows with all their video special effects and they seem worlds apart. The difference (aside from more modern technology)? The early TV shows were stage like the radio shows – they simply filmed the a radio show as if it was moved to a theater and any sight gags usually came from vaudeville stage shows.

Is your business web design, though professional-looking, really like the old TV shows – limiting the Internet medium by marrying static print advertising to it?

Business web design is far more capable than just rendering images and marketing text to position your products or services. With the advent of e-commerce, open source database software, and scripting, online stores can be created that dynamically populate the online catalog with products stored in the database. Products can be added and deleted as inventory varies, so the customer is only presented with current products.

The type of web design architecture is key to the level of search engine optimization (SEO) available to business owners. The higher the level of SEO, the greater the potential for appearing high in the search engine results. It is important to reckon with the SEO at the start of the web site creation, since certain elements must be placed in the foundations. To go back later and instill the high level optimization is harder and more expensive.

Keeping an eye on the evolving world of web standards also helps business owners address the different ways their web sites may be accessed, from the 19″ monitors of home computers, to the smaller screens on netbooks and iPads, to the very small screens of the smart phones and cell phones browsers. With adherence to standards and making sure your customers’ viewing platform is served, you can expand your online market to its fullest potential.

The business web designs making the most of current technology and SEO capability use Cascading Style Sheets to overlay the content’s styles and positioning on to the XHTML code. Dynamic web sites, such as blogs and catalog e-commerce web sites rely on scripting languages such as PHP to dynamically populate the site. Both static and dynamic sites can be designed with SEO elements for maximum visibility.

If you need your business web site to make better use of the online technologies, contact Lightwave Web Design. Business web design make-overs to a higher level of search engine optimization is our specialty!

Search Engine Sea Change In The Future?

Search engine optimization has for years used Google guidelines and search results to benchmark success. The reason is simple – Google has been the dominant search engine, usually capturing close to 80% of online searches, leaving Yahoo and MSN’s Bing to divide most of the remaining 20% of the online searches. Google has expanded to offer online word processing, spreadsheet and next an operating system (that boots in 7 seconds).

However, the core strength of a search engine is delivering results that are most relevant to to the keyword search. Recent market-testing pitting Yahoo, Bing and Google on various markets by Lightwave Web Design SEO web design techs turned up some interesting situations.

Yahoo and Bing tend to populate more of their top ten with relevant local search results. Google, due to a tendency to reward larger websites, came up with fewer highly-focused local websites and more general websites as results. This tendency may be the force behind the increased usage of 5 to 8 word search terms. How better to weed out the regulars that Google seems to favor than to get as specific as possible?

For instance, for the keyword term “Montana mural artists”, Bing returns 8 of their top 10 with local Montana artists, whereas Google returned 10 national sites that mention Montana artists or famous Montana murals…and two listings for Hannah Montana mural websites. Yahoo’s top ten likewise returned national sites and a representation of Hannah Montana sales sites.

As with any marketing plan, giving the customer what they want is key to future sales and growth. From Lightwave Web Designs semi-statistically significant searches, we think that, dislike the Microsoft Empire as much as you like, once you try Bing and compare search results with Google, you may change your web browsers home page. Wow…firing up Firefox and loading Bing…seems like culture clash, but a rather satisfactory one at that.

Bottom line prognostication: Part of Google’s strength lies in its current “install base” of browsers set to Google as the homepage. As search habit patterns change to reflect people’s appreciation for less time consuming and better search results, Bing will begin to take a larger chunk of the online searches.

Any increase in Bing’s traffic will be a boon to small business websites everywhere. It will also reinforce the Internet’s role as the market leveler – allowing small and new businesses to compete in the largest market place ever.

Ironically, the best way to rank high on Bing search results is to follow all the Google webmaster guidelines and current SEO “white hat” techniques. Lightwave Web Design helps businesses optimize their websites for higher ranking in search engine results on all three search engines.

When Business Website Redesign Is Needed

Is it time to redesign your business website? Older business websites using frame web designs or on-page text styling suffer in search engine rankings. Actually frame websites are largely invisible to the search engines. Frame websites, the popular web design technique in the late 1990s, has been replaced in up-to-date web standards with HTML websites using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Web developers use frames to present a masthead, navigation buttons and footer that frames the page’s content. All the different information pages are called up by the navigation and presented within the framework.

The drawback of frame websites is:

1. Their content is usually not indexed by search engines,
2. Since the meta tags are only on the homepage, interior information pages do not benefit from meta tags,
3. Navigation buttons are usually graphics with no text information for search engines to see,
4. They usually do not use CSS, so they do not avail themselves of the search engine optimization (SEO) potential CSS offers.

The better way to go is with a website redesign that keeps the look and feel of your website (if you still like it!), however utilizes template files for ease of maintenance and CSS for text styles and layout rules.

As a business owner, ease of maintenance and CSS translates as less time and money to make global changes on your website. For instance, if you want to change a banner ad that appears on all your pages, by changing the banner ad in the template, the ad is automatically changed in all the pages that are based on that template.

On websites where the font styles and repetitive images are called out on every page, any global change means a labor intensive project of making the changes on all pages instead of just editing the template or  style sheet. With CSS, if you decide to change your main heading’s font color from brown to green, a change of one line in the style sheet causes every web page’s main heading to change. Very fast and simple with no worry of missing a page.

With a CSS web redesign, your website can make use of over a dozen search engine optimization steps. With online marketing competition getting stiffer as more business owners realize customers are turning to the Internet to shop and research products and services, any ethical SEO technique you can use is to your long-term advantage!

If your website needs a redesign to compete into today’s evolving online marketplace, contact Lightwave Web Design. There is not time like the present for improving your online marketing!

Keyword Searches Favor Alert Small Business Websites

How often have you entered a basic keyword search term, like “business website design“, and then wade through pages of results trying to find the type of business website developer you want? You are not alone. Hitwise, a website that tracks how 10 million users interact with the web, found that searchers are learning to use more keywords to narrow their search results. This change in keyword search habits favor alert small businesses that can adapt their websites to these “longtail” keywords.

Longtail keywords are very specific search terms that are usually longer than 4 words. The benefit of optimizing  for longtail keywords is that the leads your website generates are high quality – they are looking specifically for what you are offering.

Hitwise’s research shows that since 2004 two and three word keyword searches are dropping and searches using 4 words or more – the longtail keywords – are increasing. In 2004, no one did 8 word searches. In 2009, three and a half percent of all searches are 8 word searches!

How does this help small businesses? Small businesses can differentiate themselves in the online marketplace by capitalizing on their market’s longtail keywords. If we take a chiropractic practice in Seattle, the longtail keywords include items such as their specialty, their specific neighborhood, and even nearby landmarks.

Lightwave Web Design works with our clients to find those gold nuggets of their niche market’s keywords.

Small businesses monitoring their visitor traffic can see which longtail keywords have visitors checking more than one web page on their site. Once owners detect a pattern of good keywords, doing a second, refining search engine optimization helps boost the website’s search rankings for those keywords.

One technique we have used successfully is to create a new web page just dedicated to a longtail keyword. Over time we watched the new pages go from nowhere to finally capturing Google’s #1 position for those terms.

Any keyword that drives quality traffic to your site (i.e. visitors review two or more pages) is an asset for two reasons. First is the quality sales lead generation. Second is the tide raises all ships principle. Since Google tracks how much traffic visits your site, small businesses that harvest the “low hanging fruit” of the longtail keywords can improve their ranking for more popular keywords.

For small businesses that are only showing up high in search engine results for the owners name, it is probable that the website is not optimized for longtail keywords. Don’t leave money on the online marketing table!

Contact Lightwave Web Design to see if your website can benefit from search engine optimization for your business market.

Finding Customers With Keyword Research

Keyword research is an area of search engine optimization that is often not understood by businesses as a key marketing tool. When building or updating a web site, business owners are often asked “What keywords do you want to use?” Instead of giving a list of keywords they think the market uses, better to lean on the SEO services of your web design company. Finding the best keywords for your online marketing is an involved process that includes watching the effectiveness of keywords over time.

First, let’s introduce a working definition of “keywords”. Keywords are:

1. Search terms of one or more words used by web users to search for products, services or information.
2. Terms used in a web site’s content (title, headings, meta tags, and paragraphs) that are key terms in describing a business’ products, services or information offered.

Effective keyword use matches a web site’s choice of keywords to the keywords customers’ use in their online searches. Customers can always surprise business owners with the terms they regularly use. Best to know what they use and deliver your web content using the customers’ language.

Web sites like Google’s Adwords and WordTracker offer services that shows what terms are used on an average daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Experience says that doing three or more keyword usage searches are best since business owners and SEO services start with the web site owner’s list of keywords. Keyword research tells business owners what their customers’ search terms are.

An example is choosing keywords for a chiropractor’s professional services web site. Do customers usually search for: chiropractic practitioner, practice, doctor, or clinic? Or even more general terms like “wellness clinic” or “alternative health clinic”? Chances are all these terms are used, however, your online marketing strategy should focus primarily on the most used terms.

The second phase of keyword research is checking the web site’s traffic logs. Which terms show visitors checking more than one page and which terms regularly bounce visitors off the site? How many visitors check two or more pages is a more important success factor than how many visitors checked the site. Visitors who bounce off the web site do not generate sales leads.

As in any marketing, quality of leads makes money, not quantity of visitors. Keywords are the online marketing tool for winnowing the field.

Lightwave Web Design knows that a business web site’s keyword success hinges on the depth and effectiveness of the keyword research so we do a minimum of three keyword searches with at least two of the keyword research web sites. Contact us if your web content needs a keyword review. Different keywords can net business owners a whole new market for the same products and services.