Why Web Design Is Important
Web design is an important part of doing business online. In the old days, if you had a website it was enough. People were not expecting attractiveness. But today, an ugly website won’t do. Your website needs to have a pretty face.
Your first impression as a business will often be your website. If it looks cluttered and unorganized then people will have that impression of your business and you will lose sales. It is vitally important to focus your web design efforts on three key areas of first impression:
- Attractiveness of design
- Search engine optimization
- User functionality
If you ask which of these is more important, the answer is none of them. They are all equally important. Your web design should be attractiveness enough to keep people interested long enough to read the content. The content needs to search engine optimized so that it attracts the right people through search engine marketing channels. And it needs to be functional and easy to use for your visitors. Miss the mark on any of these and you’ll lose sales. But it all starts with a pretty web design.
On Page Vs. Off Page SEO: Which Is More Important?
There are SEOs today, and some of them are quite well known, who teach that link building is the most important aspect of SEO. But is it? Well, just try building links to a blank page and see what happens. I’m betting not much.
On the other hand, I’ve seen web pages rise to the No. 1 position for their targeted keywords just for their on page factors alone.
A few years ago Google fixed a problem called Google Bombing that caused certain pages to rank No. 1 on the basis of thousands of inbound links using the same anchor text. The thing was, the anchor text was seldom relevant to the page in question. We can chalk that one up to the value of link building.
Of course, it goes without saying that both on page and off page SEO are important. But, what if you had to do without one or the other? Which would you choose? You’d better say off page SEO because even if you could rank a page on the basis of inbound link anchor text alone, what value would that be for a page with no content?
There’s more to SEO than being No. 1 in the SERPs. You’ve also got to convert traffic and you can’t do that without on page content.
How Web Design And Content Are Connected
One of the oldest adages concerning Internet marketing is “Content is King.” The adage simply means that content is the most important aspect of your website because without content you really have no website. But that doesn’t mean that web design isn’t important.
Perhaps one of the things that many webmasters don’t think about is what your web design is actually for. You should consider your web design template as a shell for your content. If it were nuts, the web design would be the shell and the content would be the nut.
So what is the web design for, exactly?
Well, your web design is the face of your website. Having an attractive web design is much more important today than it was in the past. Ten years ago you could have an ugly site and get away with it. Not so much today. That doesn’t mitigate the importance of content, but you should consider that your site’s web design will either drive visitors away or attract them to the content. And there’s the rub. If your web design doesn’t point visitors to the content then it’s failing you. Pretty or not.
Do Article Spinners Work?
There is a new practice in article marketing using SEO tactics on the cheap. It’s called article spinning. The practice is simply taking an old article and putting it through a computer software program that mixes it up and changes the sentences around so search engines don’t recognize it as duplicate content. The problem is, it is duplicate content and usually the articles don’t make a whole lot of sense.
For instance, the article spinner will take a sentence from the third paragraph and make it the opening paragraph. It might even exchange a keyword for another pre-selected keyword. Then it will take a sentence from the bottom of the article and make it the second sentence while moving the first sentence of the original article to the third sentence spot and thus forming a new paragraph.
The article spinner rearranges the entire article this way. And marketers actually use them.
I’m not going to say that the articles are poorly SEOd. By bot standards, the SEO isn’t bad. But the writing is usually horrendous. I don’t know how people make money with these articles, but some do.
It’s almost always better to use original articles. Original content in any format is always best. The search engine optimization will almost always be better, but the writing, which is always for humans any way, will nearly always be a big step up. And your reputation will go along with it.
Two Essential Elements To Viral Marketing
If you want to run a successful viral marketing campaign there are two absolutely essential nonnegotiable elements you must infuse into your content. If you have these two essential ingredients then your content may go viral. It isn’t guaranteed to go viral, but it is guaranteed NOT to go viral if your content does not have these two essential ingredients.
So what are they, these two ingredients?
The first absolutely essential ingredient to any viral marketing campaign is a message that resonates. You have to produce content that gets people emotional. It must anger them or make them fall in love. It can produce a positive feeling or a negative feeling, but it has to elicit a strong reaction. Otherwise, people will ignore it and your message will not go viral.
The second ingredient to a successful viral marketing campaign is easy accessibility. Your content must be accessible to anyone anywhere. In other words, it cannot be behind a paywall. If people have to jump through hoops to get to your content then they won’t share it with their friends. They won’t even experience it for themselves. You’ll kill your viral marketing campaign before it begins.
That’s it. Any viral marketing campaign that even hopes to succeed must, at a minimum, possess these two qualities. Otherwise, you might as well just hang up your viral hat.
Content, Links, Meta Tags – Which SEO Factor Is Most Important?
Content, links, meta tags, keywords … it’s all a sea of confusion, right? Which SEO factor is most important?
Links are important. They build link popularity. Relevance, page authority, anchor text, link age, they’re all important, right? Yes, they are all important. But links are the not the most important thing for SEO. Without at least one inbound link to your website, it won’t get crawled and the search engines won’t index it. But for search engine ranking purposes, links are not the most important SEO factor.
How about meta tags? No. In fact, Google doesn’t even consider meta tags for ranking purposes. Yahoo! and Bing still consider meta tags, but they aren’t the most important ranking criteria.
Is it keyword density? SEOs still talk about keyword density. In fact, keywords get a lot of airplay all around. Keywords in title tags, keywords in alt tags, keywords in anchor text. Yes, they’re all important. Even keyword density, to some degree, is important. But not the most important thing.
Content.
Quality, original content is the most important SEO factor online. There’s a reason “content is king” is the Internet’s chant. It’s not a campaign slogan. It’s reality. Content is the most important SEO factor. Over links. Above keyword density. And higher than meta tags.
Make your content shine and dress it up with great links, meta tags, and keyword considerations. But make your content the king.
How Viral Is Your Marketing?
There are two ways go viral in Internet marketing:
- Planned
- Spontaneous
Naturally, you can’t plan every thing you do to go viral. It’s nice if you set a plan in motion and it works. But it need not work in order for your message to go viral. The crowd can make it go viral for you.
In order to tap into the spontaneous viral marketing pool you’ve got to have a message, but not just any message. It’s got to be a great message. It’s got to be a message that people will want to share with their friends. If it’s great enough, people will share it without any prompting. And that’s the kind of viral marketing that works best.
Of course, you can always plan a viral marketing campaign. And if you can do that and pull it off, great. But note that just as many attempts to plan a viral marketing fail as succeed.
If you focus on building great content – I mean, really great content – then the viral marketing will take care of itself. All you have to do is give it a nudge and it will go.
Social Media Optimization Tip: Headlines Make All The Difference
Optimizing for social media traffic is a bit different than optimizing for search engines. But there are similarities. When you optimize your landing page for search engines, keywords are extremely important. After all, people will find your site by those keywords. But with social media, while keywords are important, they aren’t the most important thing. Social media users look for something different.
First and foremost, they want a unique experience. Keywords are good for ensuring those social media pages achieve better rankings in the search engines, but what happens if someone finds your content in Digg or StumbleUpon and arrives there from a search engine? You still want them to go to your website and that will take a different approach than merely sprinkling your content with keywords.
Your headline is very important. It should attract attention. More than that, it must get the click. Social media users have two things to go on in deciding whether or not to read your content: The headline and the description, or summary. The headline, more than anything, will determine whether or not they read your content.
What should a headline do? Three things:
- Arouse curiosity
- Tell the reader what to expect from the content
- Use your primary keyword
Understand that Nos. 1 and 2 and more important than No. 3 when it comes to social media optimization. Yes, you want your keyword there for the search engines, but human readers care about the content. It must answer their most pressing questions or make them believe that your content will answer those questions. Get them to click. That’s the goal. And if you achieve that then you’ve done your job.
Web Design Tip: Don’t Overload With Information
You’ve heard that content is king and that is true, but you can go too far. One of the five common mistakes that many businesses make in their web design is providing too much information at once.
There are several ways you can provide too much information on your website:
- Too many irrelevant pages
- Too much information on a single page, making it too long to read
- Providing too much depth when giving an overview would do
- Elaborating on topics that need no elaboration
- Redundancy
- Duplicating content
- Adding irrelevant content to pages, watering down your SEO
Web design is very important. People will leave your site as often for a poor web design as they will anything else. An attractive site is very important to keep people interested. Even then, relevant content is what keeps visitors on your site and if you have too much irrelevant content or provide more than what people are willing to read through then you could be cutting off your own nose.
Before you build your site, learn a few web design basics. Don’t be a bore.
Title Tags a ‘Must’ for On Page SEO
When evaluating site content, it’s vital to, have a look at the title tags when doing SEO. If the title tags don’t contain keywords relevant to the content of the web page, then it has a significantly lower chance of showing up in the search results. Unfortunately, many web designers these days don’t know anything about search engine optimization. A common misconception is that your site will show up for its keywords when you add them in it’s “Meta tags.” The truth is, that meta tags are one of the least effective things you can do to improve your site’s search results.
Below are a few guidelines for writing effective title tags, when we do SEO at Reciprocal Consulting, we evaluate many factor of “on-page” optimization, and help to make your site as search engine friendly as possible.
- Don’t exceed 10-12 words in the title tag.
- Make sure that the keywords you’re targeting are actually represented in content on the page.
- For more competitive keywords, keep it short and sweet.
- For less competitive keywords, or when you’re not targeting anything specific, shoot for the “long tail” by having longer title tags.
- Think about clickthrough rates and visitor perception – the title tag is the first thing they will see in the search results, so it helps if it has meaning, rather than just a bunch of keywords mashed together. You want visitors to click on the search result, not ignore it as spam.