Professional website developers know the importance of web design and the role it plays in making a website successful.

Designing a successful website is no easy task, especially for someone who is new to the world of web development. With the help of web development applications many people can and do create decent websites. But decent in most cases is not good enough to make a site successful from a traffic or financial standpoint. There are five crucial components of web design that you must focus on in order to make a site valuable to its visitors and successful for you.

1. SEO – Getting free traffic to your site.
2. Usability – Ease of navigating around the site and finding desired information quickly.
3. Aesthetics – Visual appeal.
4. Content – Valid, up to date, relevant information.
5. Graphics – Eye candy that relays relevant visual information to the visitor.

Before you ever lay down a byte of HTML code for a site you have to know and understand at least the basics of SEO and how it fits into the design. SEO is the art of designing a site in a fashion that gives the site an advantage for obtaining free and abundant traffic.

The number one aspect of SEO is selecting keywords relevant to your site. The keywords you select should be based on high usage, low competition and relevancy to your topic. Once you select keywords you can then begin the development of your site. Keep in mind keywords are a critical aspect of the design. The keywords you choose will be applied within the design in strategic fashion to benefit the flow of traffic to your site. To understand more on how to implement SEO you should read and learn more about this important subject. If you don’t, your website success will be difficult to achieve.

Usability

Your website must be easy to navigate and designed in a way that makes it easy to find information. Visitors will not stay long if it takes more than one or two clicks to get the information they want or if it takes brain power to figure out how to get the information they want. One of the goals of your site design is to keep usability easy, and simple. To do this, apply the following three fundamentals of usability.

* Provide a site search tool.

A visitor in a hurry can quickly find the info they desire then move on to the action they desire.

* Provide simple, intuitive and consistent site navigation.

This provides visitors the tool they need to leisurely explore their way through your site.

* Provide logical and simple to follow content.

The message of a site should start off in a simple and basic fashion with well defined links pointing the way to more detailed information or explanation as needed.

In the cases above the goal is to make it easy for your visitor to find the information they want without frustration or difficulty. Doing this well will have a positive effect on increasing the return of your visitors.

Aesthetics

A website has to look clean, uncomplicated and strike a balance in layout that is pleasant to the visitor. Pleasing aesthetics come about when the colors of a site complement each other, the graphics blend and lend continuation of the theme and the layout brings unity and openness to the page.

Often overlooked by novice designers is the color palette of the site. While you can select color in a willy-nilly fashion and still provide a visually appealing site, a better idea for color selection should be based on an understanding of the color wheel and proven color strategies.

Many web designers often view a web page as an opportunity to blast a visitor with lots of information in hopes this will convince the visitor to take action. Usually this results in a quick exit due to the overwhelming visual effect and complicated look. A better approach is to provide less content and open space (referred to as white space) to allow visitors eyes to scan and explore with ease.

Content

An important feature of any website is the quality of the text content. Visitors come to a site expecting to find answers to their questions, solutions to their problems or for entertainment value. The content offered at your site must be well-written, without grammatical or spelling errors. It also has to be relevant to the theme of your site, with valid, up to date information for your visitors. Content is King!

Graphics

You can have a functional and usable website without graphic elements. However, if there are similar sites to yours that employ graphics, guess which site will get the most traffic. The necessary companions to any well-designed site are the images and illustrations that grace its pages. The images can’t be any willy-nilly graphic that you might think is cool. Graphic imagery has to support your branding, and communicate the message you are trying to convey. Before you incorporate graphic elements into your site, take some time to look around the web. Notice what looks good and how elements are laid out. These same layouts techniques can be used as models for your site.

The Internet is a highly competitive business arena. To be successful with a commercial website, you have to keep these five crucial web design elements in mind. Contrary to what many will tell you, it is rarely possible to have commercial success without the benefit of a professional website. This is not to say that you must hire a professional, however you must implement professional design elements to improve your chances for success.

Making simple changes to a website to improve search engine rankings and drive traffic is not as complicated as it sounds.

1) Keyphrase Research

Before you can begin implementing any of the optimization techniques mentioned in the rest of this article, you will need to know which keyphrases you are going to optimize your site for. Once this is decided, everything becomes a lot clearer.

You should be able to get a rough idea of target keyphrases from the content on the pages within your site. At the end of the day, if there’s not any content at which to target optimisation, achieving good search engine rankings will be very difficult and ultimately pointless! Visitors will leave immediately if they are not provided with the content they are searching for.

A frequent mistake is to target the keyphrases that drive the largest search volumes. It’s important to target keyphrases that directly relate to your websites content, and the more defined the keyphrases are the better. Using keyphrases that may drive 120 high convertible visitors to your site each month is likely to be much better than targeting a highly competitive broad keyphrase that is only vaguely related to your business, even if it does attract 30,000 searches each month.

2) Page Titles

This is one of the key on-page elements that can be optimized. Each title should be different, and full of keyphrases related to the content of its page. Search engines often only display the first 65 or so characters of the page title, so it’s important to get the most important keyphrases at the beginning of the page title. Also, the characters near the front of the page title are given more significance in algorithms.

The page title is displayed in the search engine results, so must make sense and encourage browsers to action the link. Finding a balance between readability and keyphrases density is a challenge but something that will improve with time and practise.

3) Meta Description

The meta description is not actually included in search engine algorithms, although as it is displayed in search engine results pages, it is vital it is optimised. Like page titles, the meta description should be specific to every page and contain text that is relevant to the keyphrases that page is aimed at.

The meta description is limited to around 160 characters, so it can often be challenging to fit all the required info into such a small space. However, if no meta description is entered, search engines tend to grab a random chunk of text from the page, regardless if it makes sense or is useful to the searcher. You can avoid this from happening, by ensuring every page has a meta description of some variety.

4) Page Content

Page content is viewed as the best method of attracting visitors and incoming links to a website, so it’s important that it is given sufficient time and resource. Search engines thrive on content, so the more content on your site the better for search engine rankings. Content is less important now in search engine algorithms than it has been however, I suggest ensuring every keyphrase that is being targeted is mentioned about every 100 words or so.

Beware – don’t fall into the trap of keyphrase stuffing! Search engines employ advanced techniques to track this and will more than likely pick up on it immediately and you could end up with a blacklisted site that is impossible to rank.

One of the ways search engines determine site ranking is to sort through your online content and rank the site based on repeated keywords or phrases.

Content rich websites have found success in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies. While We highly recommend this strategy there is another viewpoint that is less dependent on content for exposure for site rankings.

Some webmasters are strong proponents of non-content SEO strategies. These technical experts rely very heavily on meta-title and other html or code-based SEO strategies for sites that are less content oriented.

Purists on both sides of the argument will say their approach is far superior to the other.

For the content sites they can judge their success through keyword strategies that are observable in long-term site rankings.For the non-content sites they can observe keywords or phrases being used to determine site rankings from a more technical source in behind-the-scenes code.

Hopefully you get the idea, by adding knowledge-based articles you can assist your site ranking, help your customer and minimize the need for coded SEO strategies until you learn how best to implement the non-content SEO.There will always be a battle as to which SEO strategy is best, but I will go so far as to say the best strategy will be the one that includes both concepts to the best of the web owner’s capabilities.

Trust is a major factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. Some websites can get high rankings on Google for nearly any content they publish while other websites cannot get high rankings at all although they have optimized web page content.

A high trust level is crucial if you want to get high Google rankings

The reason why some websites do better than others is trust. Some websites have managed to reach a very high trust level with Google. That helps them to get higher rankings on search engines than you do.

Google doesn’t want to list spam sites in the search results. For that reason, it is important to show Google that your website is for real, that you’re not a spammer and that you plan to stay in business for a long time.

Here are some things you can do to show Google’s algorithm that it can trust your website.

1. Things you should consider about your domain name

The age of a domain is important to Google. When you start a new online business, consider buying an old domain name if a suitable name is available.

If you start with a new domain, buy it with a renewal period of two years and more. You show Google that your domain is not a throwaway domain by doing so.

Check your WHOIS records and make sure that the contact information is correct. Do not use exotic top level domains. If you are in the USA, use .com, .net or .org. If you’re in another country, use the official top level domain of your country.

Don’t overuse hyphens in your URL. For example, www.keyword-keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4-keyword5.com might look spammy.

2. Things you should consider about your website content

Make your contact information easy to find on your website. List a full address and not only your email address on your website. The more information about your company can be found on your website, the more likely it is that it will be considered a real business.

Your website should have a privacy policy and terms and conditions (if applicable). Both should be linked from your sitemap.

Don’t use doorway pages. They annoy search engine spiders and website visitors. Doorway pages are a clear indicator of a low quality website.

If possible, keep the HTML code of your web pages below 100 KB so that search engine spiders can crawl it easily. Regularly update your web pages to show Google that your website is alive.

3. Things you should consider about your links

Do not participate in automated linking schemes. If your website gets 2000 inbound links on a single day then Google might think that you try to game the algorithm with a link system.

The links to your website should contain your keywords but they should not all contain exactly the same link text. If all links to your website used exactly the same link text then this would be a red flag for Google.

Do not use paid links. Google does not like paid links and they might penalize your website if use them.

If Google trusts your website then it will be much easier to get high rankings. Of course, your website still needs optimized web page content and good inbound links.

For Help with Improving Your Google Rankings, Learn More About NetConneXion’s Search Engine Optimization Services.

Are you living in a bad neighborhood? Your website could. Did you know that your web host probably hosts several websites on the same web server as yours?Some of these websites might belong to shady businesses. If they are major spammers, your website might be banned on Google.

What’s the difference between shared and dedicated IP addresses?

IP addresses are the addresses under which search engines find websites on the Internet. Domain names are only an add-on to the IP addresses.

IP addresses can be shared or dedicated. If you use a shared IP address, there will be many websites that use the same IP address as your website.

If you use a dedicated IP address then your website will be the only site on that address.

Does it make a difference what kind of IP address you have?

Yes. We recommend that you spend the money to get a dedicated IP that hosts only your own domain names. This has several reasons:

1. Search engines might use it in their algorithms

Google will tell you that it doesn’t matter whether your website has a dedicated IP address or not. However, most of the web pages that can be found on the first result pages have dedicated IP addresses. That’s interesting because the vast majority of domains is hosted on a shared IP address.

2. Shared hosting makes your website slower

If you share an IP address with hundreds of other websites then your website might become very slow. If one of the other websites on the server uses a lot of resources then this will affect your own website.

The web server delivers the web pages in the order it receives the requests. If there are more requests to the other websites on your server, the visitors of your website will have to wait before the server sends them your pages.

3. Your website might be in a bad neighborhood

If your website has the same IP address as websites that sell questionable products then your website might get in trouble. If one of the other websites on the server gets banned on Google then your website might get banned, too.

How to find out which websites are hosted on the same server as your site

Go to the shared hosting check web page and enter your domain name. The free online tool will show you all domains that are hosted on the same server as your website.

If your website does not have a dedicated IP address, call your web host. There might be a small fee for the dedicated IP address but it is worth the charge.