Website designing is extremely useful nowadays, especially as result of the fact that if you want your business to grow fast and develop, you should also have it online. This is not possible unless you have a web site and web pages and you can get all these with the help of web designing. We design can be done by anyone who has a little spirit of self education and by anyone who is ambitious enough. Actually, if you have a few web designing skills, you can save a lot of money, because a specialist is without any doubts, extremely expensive.

Now, beginners should know that when you start the design of a web site, you have several tools at your disposal, tools that will help you create and attractive and interesting set of pages for your business. The set of tools is the thing that makes the difference between concept and fruition, dream and reality. For example, Fireworks are extremely popular. Fireworks are available with the Mac operating system and the Windows operating system, so if you work with Linux, you might want to think at the possibility of changing it. A plethora of tools and options come along with Fireworks, so make sure you know a little bit about them!

Another wonderful tool for those who are beginners in web designing is represented by the Dreamweaver. This is a commercial application used for web development, again available with Mac and Windows. So far, it seems like it is not a good idea to try web designing as long as you use Linux! Dreamweaver comes with Smart Objects and Photoshop, so your work will definitely become an easier one with its help! Panic Coda is only available with the Mc operating system and it is a share web application that tries to reduce the number of applications you need in order to start a web site. Coda can be described as simple and intuitive, so don’t avoid it because it can make your life a better one! Firebug is another tool that you need as a beginner in web designing. What is great about Firebug is that it is a free web development tool at the disposal of anyone who wants to use it, the tool that will help you see the way in which elements of a web page relate to elements of another web page. I assure you that web designing tools will ease your life, so use them without any worries!

There are many folk hiring web design companies to create their websites or even getting a new blog with the help of the so popular WordPress. However, a big chuck of those have literally no idea what are the next steps for ensuring a quick indexation, some popularity and a little exposure.

Here are some great steps to follow after your have just launched your website into the wild:

1.      Make sure it gets indexed fast

Time is money and even if you are just publishing a new blog that will not get you any revenue in short time, make sure it gets indexed as fast as possible. The best way for doing this is to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. Do not limit yourself to only one search engine (even if it is the most popular one) but also submit to Yahoo and Bing as well.

2.     Get some natural links

Maybe the most natural way of getting some backlinks at the beginning is to submit your website to directories. If you have a blog there are thousands of blog directories available; on the other hand, if your website is niche-related do some online searches and get yourself listed on those industry-related directories as well.

3.      Never underestimate social networks

With almost 1 billion users, Facebook and Twitter are a must for any online business or blog. Creating a page/account on both is an easy task and you are not only getting backlinks from well established websites but you can also get some loyal readers or even future prospects.

4.      Social bookmarking backlinks

This one is simple: register to the most popular social bookmarking websites, such as Digg and “share some love”.

5.      Comment on related blogs

Getting exposure through niche-related blogs is a great way for getting backlinks and potential customers. Not only that but you could also use niche-related forums for getting some highly-related backlinks and visits to your website.

With all these latest algorithm changes Google did in the past days, there are a lot of rumours regarding how Google classifies low-quality websites that do not deserve their rankings, thus getting them penalties and being thrown from their actual rankings.

How will Google determine whether a website is of low quality or not for its future visitors? There are two major things that seem underestimated nowadays by SEO communities out there: the click-through-rate and the bounce rate.

The CTR, although being a way to measure the success of a PPC campaign it can also be considered one of the top factors of ranking a website due to its quality. The higher the CTR, the more Google sees a website as a quality one.

The bounce rate represents the volume of visitors that enter a website and leave it instead of continuing viewing any other pages from that site. But what does a higher bounce rate percentage mean? It means that people entering the site did not find the information they were searching for nor did they find anything interesting to read more of on the website, thus leaving and searching for another website. This leading us to the conclusion that the website is not of such high-quality…Nothing wrong here, right?

These two metrics can definitely represent a quality site (or a low-quality one), but again, this is only a supposition while nothing is clear right now. We will definitely keep an eye on this subject and update as soon as we find out more data.

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 the multitude of website designers available on the market (whether we are talking about freelance web designers or web design firms) it is already a difficult task to find other clients to add to your portfolio. However, there are some mistakes in this industry (some applying in other industries as well) that can make you lose the client you’ve worked to get.

Quality services and respect for the client, these are only a few things any web designer should be aware of. Here are some causes that can make a client “firing” his website designer and sign the contract with another firm.

No services variety

Even if your major service is web design, be aware that more and more clients are searching for companies that can provide along with website design also SEO, content writing, blogging, social media and so on. If you don’t offer what they want they will  move to another firm. Tip: a lot of them can be outsourced in case you need them for a special project.

Under client’s quality expectations

Clients want best value for the money they are paying but this does not mean someone with a lower budget will be satisfied with lower quality. Lower quality means the customer will not be satisfied and we all know that one unhappy client can be overcome with 10 happy ones.

Respect your promises and deadlines

The best example to describe this situation is from the website SEO area: “We promise you number 1 in Google in 2 months”. Nobody can promise that, no matter the amount of expertise the company has. This usually becomes a negative point for the company and again, the risk of losing the client is high. Also, when you promise a date for the project to be finished and delivered always try to respect it.

Bad customer service

This is one of the biggest concerns for clients. They always look for professional website design firms that can respond to emails/calls in time with people able to solve even the slightest mistake in a short time. Almost every time bad customer service occurs, clients will look for another web design firm that can handle their requests/questions in time.

All business owners are excited when they get an online presence from setting up an website, whether it is an ecommerce one or just a regular site. However, the excitement might lower in time you see your business does not get so many visitors or the exposure is very low, and this is where SEO professionals should come into play.

Though many business owners are trying to optimise their websites’ SEO on their own, this is sometimes not the best practice one can take, so here are some reasons why any company should use an SEO firm that will properly take care of online promotion.

1.      Knowledge and experience

As a business owner, even if you start learning about SEO and web mastering, one thing is sure: you cannot know what are the best practices when optimising a website while you lack years of experience SEO professionals have. While you will do this in your spare time, a person/company hired  for this will focus 100% only on SEO, so the benefits are obvious here.

2.      Time and effort saving

Though it might seem an easy task for anyone with basic information about SEO, optimising a website takes lot of time and effort. Staying up to date with all new methods, analyzing competition, building links, building content, this definitely will cover a lot of your time. By hiring a SEO firm you will have more time to promote your business in other environments.

3.      Long term rankings

Long term rankings come only with great SEO. Although PPC could be a great way to promote your service, once you stop paying you’re off the “network”. An SEO firm knows exactly what to do to get your website as high as possible in rankings for the foreseeable future.

4.      SEO firms can make the difference

Most companies nowadays do not use SEO professionals for their websites but they try to optimise it themselves, or worse, seal a deal with a website design firm, have their site created and launched and wait for customers/exposure to come. If that company is from your competitors’ boat, wouldn’t a SEO firm make the difference between you and your competition? This can only translate in more customers/sales.

Do you need a company to skyrocket your rankings in search engines? Ask for a free SEO quote, no obligations, and we will get back as fast as possible with some answers.