Feedback from your blog readers is most of the time underestimated but at the same time it is one of the most important aspect of blogging. A “like” on Facebook, a Tweet on Twitter, even a comment is a sign that your blog is important and the post you have recently published is a good one.

Of course, there is no ideal recipe for developing a strong relation with your readers, however there are some tricks that could definitely increase your trust and “love-sharing” among your readers:

1.      Ask questions – by asking questions you give the opportunity to your readers to leave a comment and start a discussion based on a blog post of yours

2.      Readability – this means a clean design, no hundreds of banners and pop-ups, perfectly written text and so on

3.      Participate as well – you have published your post, you’ve got some comments, but are you participating to discussions as well? Answer questions, talk to your readers and develop a strong relationship with them

4.      Become more personal – if you will only write “for the search engines” you will end up nowhere, in terms of building a relation with your readers; try to be as natural as possible

5.      Offer just a small piece of the puzzle – when readers subscribe to your RSS feed they should be sent only a preview from your article and not the whole thing; chances are that they will want to read the whole story and click on the link, thus landing on your website once and again

Of course, more can be said about how to build a relationship with your readers but these five tips are definitely a great start for any blogger, whether you write on a personal blog or a corporate blog as well.

Most of the time when doing SEO for a website we start with different recommendations regarding things to change on that website in order to become better optimised for search engines. However, most of the things can be done and should be done even before and during the website development by the web developers.

The problem is that most web developers do not perfectly understand basic SEO concepts thus the problems that arise lately when “calling” an SEO company. Here are some things you should be aware when designing your website or things that you should remind your web design team when dealing with your website, all from an SEO perspective:

Duplicate content resulted from non-www and www websites

Always decide from the very beginning which version of your website should be used, with or without www. By making your website  load using both versions can only mean trouble when it comes to SEO as this creates a duplicate version of your website. The simplest method to do this is to 301 redirect one of the versions to the other. Also, duplicate content can result from not using unique URL for each of your product, so create unique URLs for each of your products, even if it can be found in multiple ways on your site.

Do keyword research from the very beginning

Whenever a website is launched, keyword research should be already done even before starting the website development. It is the most important thing you should do and it guarantees a best start when dealing with search engines.

Text instead of images works better

Whenever you can use text instead of images for site navigation, do that! It is a great opportunity to improve your internal link structure through perfectly chosen anchor texts.

XML Sitemap and Robots.txt

Always generate XML sitemap and submit it to the most important search engines. As for the robots.txt, it is a great thing to have as well while you can allow/disallow search engine bots to crawl certain pages from your website.

Add more content to your pages

There are websites with pages featuring 10-15 words of content. Try to make things a little easier for the search engines, create for each of your page at least 250 words of content and optimise it. Use H tags, unique meta descriptions, unique titles and so on. You will have more chances of ranking high with that page instead of just throwing some 10-20 words with less to zero optimisation.

Show some love!

Right from the start you should incorporate some social media sharing buttons, from Facebook Like to Tweet and Digg. As we all know, social media is on a big wave right now, why missing the opportunity?

With all the latest Google algorithm changes, most people are still asking whether what worked before still works nowadays, like submitting a website to Internet directories. Years ago a website would start to rank higher only with a few directory submissions, but things have changed lately and most web directories do not provide the value one might look for.

There are two types of web directories: good ones and crap ones, each being treated by Google in different ways and with all the automation software available it was just a matter of time to see less than zero value from links in directories. However, even if these links cannot rank your website all by themselves, it would be a clever move to use those as well as part of your whole link building campaign while link diversity is still good to have.

There are some directories that seem to make a difference, here they are below. Some have no fees, some have a yearly fee, but in the end it only depends on you whether you want to grab a link on those or not: Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, Business.com, BOTW, JoeANT, Aviva, Web Beacon and Wow Directory.

Other directories that could worth a try are those strictly related to your niche, for example if you want to promote a web design company, using the right queries you might find some really powerful web design directories that could help in building your link profile. A great way for finding strictly related directories is by searching for keyword+directory.

Even if directory listings are not as powerful as before, it could be worth getting a link from those that really are worth the effort and avoid spam directories that could do more harm than you would have thought.

Online stores seem a little more difficult to optimise for search engines due to many factors like less  internal links, no user generated content, very little helpful content and so on. However, following these tips for e-commerce sites could be a great step forward when trying to optimise a website for search engines.

1.      Attach a blog to your e-commerce site

A blog is the best way for getting user-generated content, build a great structure of internal links and also promote your services or products. Don’t have time to write content for it? Hire a blogger, might seem like an extra-expense however in time you will see that worth every penny invested.

2.      Unique product description

Easiest way to create unique product description is to re-write the description from the manufacturer’s site. It would be best to write descriptions from scratch but again, this is very time consuming – re-writing description is one of the middle-solutions available.

3.      SEO-friendly URLS

How many times do you see those long URLs with different characters that are nothing but trouble for search engine optimisation? One of the best solutions would be to create a structure like site/product-name.

4.      Unique titles, descriptions and keywords for every product

Although this is time consuming, it is one of the best ways to avoid duplicate content issues and help you create unique content on each page. Also, as for other websites you should keep one thing in mind: do not overdo it! (keyword stuffing is a no-no).

5.    User-generated content

Reviews are probably the best way for generating unique content without any work from you. Give your users the possibility of reviewing your products without any hassle (one thing that can be implemented would be writing reviews without registering, though getting more user-generated content without the hassles of registering, verifying emails and so on).

Although there are many tips that can be implemented on an e-commerce site however we at WebCreationUK believe those above are the best ones that can be used by any website owner in order to get better results in the online environment.

Once you have accomplished the major tasks for a new website, from internal SEO to satisfying content, the best way of getting loyal readers and even some links is to get as social as possible. Syndicating your content through multiple channels gives you a great a chance of new links and new readers through sharing and new traffic sources. It is a terrific way of building traffic, links and referrals.

First things first, the “subscribe to RSS” button should be available on each and every page. But, of course, to get new loyal readers you should create some awesome content that will make the readers say “hey, they really know what they are talking about, I should definitely subscribe for future content”.

Second, as we said in a previous article, social bookmarking and networking should be used at its maximum capacity. There are dozens of social media websites but not all are popular. Make sure each article has a “share” button so that those that find your content great can easily share it on different channels like Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg and Reddit, these being the most popular social bookmarking sites nowadays. However, a Facebook account is a must. Keep it updated, get likers and interact with your readers.

Video channels are amazing these days, and we are not talking only about YouTube. Create accounts on more popular video sharing sites, start “building” great videos and promote your website through those. Also, not to forget about photo sharing websites like Flickr, those can be another great way of getting social in the online environment.

Last, but not least of all, Twitter ! How did we allow Twitter to be listed last ? Well, Twitter can be amazing and it’s not so difficult to get social and update it frequently. Sign-up and start following people in your niche or related to your niche. They will end up following your tweets as well so keep those flowing on your Twitter page. Another great method is to add feeds from Twitter posts to your website/blog.

As you probably know by now we are very active on our Facebook page as well as on Twitter page so if you are not following us do it now and stay in touch with best UK web design firm.

Who would have thought years ago that in 2010 tens of millions of worldwide Internet surfers will go online from their mobile devices, whether for everyday browsing or just for checking an email and so on? With mobile Internet getting more and more popular nowadays, it is a must that each and every website design firm create mobile-friendly websites in order to grab a piece of this market, whether we are talking about US companies or UK website design firms.

This article will showcase the best practices developers should use when creating a website that can be accessed from mobile devices as well.

1.      iPhone is not the only mobile device used for browsing

One of the biggest mistakes website designers are making is to check only with the iPhone if the website is perfectly viewable. they forget that the iPhone is not the only mobile device used for browsing. Forget about online emulators and check the website with  5-10 different mobile devices in order to get a perfect picture of it.

2.      Use sub domains for mobile version

Before creating the mobile version you might consider asking the client what visitors really search when they are on your website. When browsing from mobile people usually want to browse fast and find the exact information they are searching for, so it is imperative to clean the unnecessary content and keep it simple.

3.      Use small images

The smaller an image is the faster the site therefore better visitor satisfaction. Again, mobile users usually do not have the time to wait too much for an image to be downloaded so keep in mind that optimising images when creating a mobile website is a priority.

4.      Frames, cookies and Flash

While the iPhone has cookie support and so on, as we said above, not all people will use an iPhone for browsing favourite pages. Try to avoid using Flash, cookies and frames and also avoid fancy fonts that most cell phones cannot read.

5.      As always, WordPress

WordPress users always had an advantage over other platforms and it seems mobile sites compatibility issue can be easier solved with a plugin, the WordPress Mobile Plugin. As most plugins this is available for free and in a matter of minutes it will make a blog/website mobile friendly. But in the end, it all depends on the clients’ needs and if he would like a more fancy website then he will probably need a professional web design firm that can handle his requests.