The Most Important Rules of Website Design

When creating a website, you only have one chance to keep your visitors from clicking on the back button on their internet web browser.  It doesn’t matter whether you are selling a product or a service, your site represents your company, and you want to make sure that you are putting your most professional foot forward. After all you certainly don’t want to spend money on designing and having SEO done on your site, just to loose visitors. Just like a work interview, you have approximately ten seconds in which to make your best first impression.  This first impression can mean the difference between a paying customer and simply a visitor that has found your site.

Here are 5 Easy Rules to Bear in Mind when Designing your Site:

First of all, either limit the use of or completely do away with the usage of banners and advertisements.  There is a time and place for these, but not on your homepage.  The only exception to this rule is that a customer would be coming to you to see banners or advertisements, such as if you are a marketing company offering web advertising, the visitor will want to know what he or she is paying for.

Next, be sure you design your site with simple navigation in your mind, this is also an important SEO factor. Look at the site as if you are your own visitor. If it’s hard for you to navigate it will likely be hard for the visitor in order to navigate. Visitors should possess a clear sign of where they’re at on your website and how you can navigate around your website.

It pays to include an “about us” page along with a “contact page” for the visitor to obtain some understanding of who your company is, what your company is regarding, and how you can contact a person for more information.

The color of the website is an essential part of the website style. Colors which are too vibrant or dark might be hard upon some site visitors’ eyes. It may actually trigger some in order to strain to see your info.

Excessive utilization of font colors could be annoying as well, to these potential customers. Try to remain with a maximum of three font colors throughout your site.  For instance: If your site is aimed toward older clientele you might want to use enjoyable colors. It’s not a secret once we grow old our vision becomes sub-standard.  Think of the audience as well and gear the actual colors utilized on your website towards the audience you’re catering to and wish to attract. Font colors and web site colors ought to be one consideration when making your web site.

When doing web design, you should seriously consider the loading time. The time it requires your webpages to load is crucial. You may reduce launching time through reducing images on every page. A great website style should take under 5 seconds to load.  The longer it requires the webpages to load the more frustrating it may be to the web visitor and search engines, as the load time of a page is important to how Google ranks your site too, if in doubt you should find a professional seo services company and take their advice.  People want to buy yesterday, not really today, and not at all tomorrow, because of the nature that people have become accustomed to of getting what they want, when they want it.

Use the font dimension and style that’s common to any or all web site browsers and readable. You have to consider your marketplace. If you’re selling a service or product that can be used by older individuals you might want to increase the actual font.

I’m pretty sure I already know the answer to this one, as a quick Google search for any common term (or an uncommon one for that matter) will return several results with all or at least one of the keywords from the web users search string in the url, or failing that, at least in the folder or file extension.

I guess the real question is why would the search engines, and Google in particular give this metric such an emphasis for SEO purposes? It’s incredibly easy to manipulate so therefore is, very often, but why would Google in particular let companies and organisations get away with it? After all, if your company is called ABC Taxi Co you have a good keyword rich domain available to you (provided it’s available at all), but if your company was called AB Price Ltd, there is no prominent keyword in the likely domain name, yet your business could be bigger, longer established and more profitable than the taxi firm.

The only thing I can think is that they know that in time the domain names which are registered will become so numerous that everyone will have their own small bite of the cherry, or perhaps as many bites as they have the time to set up multiple sites! Take a couple of websites in my area of expertise, first you have SEO Company UK this is a brand new website, but the company name itself is specifically targeted at the keyword search for which they wish to appear. Because it is brand new, I will be watching it carefully as I want to see just how easily and how long it takes then to reach page one (if at all of course).

Then we have the big boys such as SEOMoz they are completely the other end of the scale, a long established business who have been offering SEO services for many years and now only to other companies in the industry, no longer to the end user company. They have SEO in their name too, so I assume it worked back then too.

So it would appear that having keywords in a domain name does help, even a folder or file path seems to have some small effect too, how much longer this will apply is anyone’s guess though.

Unless you’ve been asleep for the last few months, you will probably have started to see googles local or places results appearing in the search engine results. These are the listings with a red icon next to them with an A, B, C etc inside and a map off to the side with corresponding icons pinned to a Google map. So what are they and why are they now appearing?

simple internet diagram

Firstly just to be clear, these are called google places listings now but are just the newer version of what was previously called google local listings, they can be added by anyone who has a website, all you need to do is visit the google local pages and list your website, fill in as much detail as you can, including a description, opening hours, pictures and of course make sure you have that little pin in the right spot on the map.

So how do you go about getting listed? That’s the easy part, you just log in to your google account and add the listing, then leave it for a few weeks and if you are lucky, or in a small town or uncompetitive niche, you may find that you start to appear straight away. If not you just need to keep going back in and adapting the ad, make sure you adhere to the guidelines though, breaking those may mean you get a penalty of some sort and then find it even harder to start appearing in the future.

I must admit that I am still trying to work out exactly when and why the local listings are displayed for a given search term, as this does not seem to follow any specific logic in the same way that traditional seo does. For example if I search builders with a UK town name, I always seem to get local listings, this makes sense seeing as most builders do work within a set geographic region, due to time and cost implications. However, if I search for pizza without a town name I still get localised listings, obviously this is due to my browser being set with a region and therefore the results are being set accordingly.  Other times though I can search for a term and I see no local listings at all, just the normal SERP’s and Adwords. Then again, sometimes I get about 8 listings and sometimes just three, sometimes the map is in the main page, and sometimes it’s in the side bar. I’m not sure if it is still settling in, or if there is some kind of logic behind this, so I will keep an eye and report back further if I find the answers.

Of course, if you are unsure about doing this, you can always find a professional SEO company to add it for you. If you do use a company, you may be best finding someone local to you, as they will most likely have done it for other companies in your local area, so if you are in Wiltshire find a wiltshire company, or even better if you can find someone in your local town, so if you are in swindon and can find a swindon seo all the better.