Making sure you choose the right website design company can be very difficult. How do you decide how to find the company that is right for you? Do you go for the first result in Google, do you talk to fellow business people for recommendations or spend time online looking for something that catches your eye?

Here are a few pointers to consider when you make that all important decision choosing the right company for you.

Has the company asked you what you want to achieve from the website as a business?

It is important that the design team take the time to understand what you want from the  website. Therefore it’s important to consider what type of website would best suit your business. Will it be a static website, a portfolio website or a online business that you can manage.

What experience does the company have designing websites in your industry?

Have a look at the portfolio to get an indication of the type of sites and work that the design team have done. It might also be worth ringing the company and having a chat to see how knowledgeable and approachable the team are.

How well do the existing sites work?

Make sure you look at several of the websites that have already been designed to see if they are easy to find your way around. Also look at testimonials to see what other companies have to say about the work they had done.

Is it easy to communicate with the team?

It is vital that you feel comfortable to be able to talk to the design team and that they are easily approachable. It is also important that they full understand what you want to achieve with the website and keep this in mind.

Do the design team have ideas that could be useful for the website?

It’s important that the designers understand what you want to achieve and are able to suggest ideas that could benefit you. However, what the client wants should be the main focus rather than the design team pushing for what they think is right.

Approximately three months ago upon completing the design and development of their new website, Extrudakerb approached our team to find the most effective avenue to not only increase the exposure of their online branding but increase traffic from the right users.

After sitting down as a team we came back with a bespoke solution aimed at generating the maximum return on investment, aptly named the ‘brand awareness proposal’.

Generating traffic to a website can be achieved in many ways, adwords, backlinks, social networking, blogging, podcasts, mobile devices the list goes on. The challenge is deciding on the right combination for each client.

How do you target the right users and keep them coming back? One of the most effective tools is the use of a blog. It was the first enhancement for the Extrudakerb site, we also installed an IPhone/IPad version challenging their competition by becoming much more accessible to prospective businesses online.

I have recently carried out a review on their monthly traffic statistics and was pleased to see over the past three months a consistent 30% increase per month. Accompanied by other brand awareness techniques they have also achieved first page rankings for their targeted keywords.

Similar patterns are emerging for our other brand awareness clients.

Without giving too much away, the secret to our success lies in targeting the relevant areas of the internet/markets specifically for each company. This is done by distributing their content across the internet. An alternative to the more common practices from our competitors who tend to run smaller scaled campaigns and never quite reach the correct online saturation points.

If you would like to learn more about how Corporate Web Solutions could increase your ROI from online marketing, raise brand awareness, synchronize offline/online campaigns and track the success, simple call our Sheffield office on 08444 145 932 or visit our site at www.corporatewebsolutions.net

This article is targeted at non technically minded small business owners. I’m going to try and explain how a search engine interprets your website and how a few small changes (upgrades) can make a massive difference in your search engine traffic.

The aim is to empower you enough to understand why your site might not be generating the return on investment (ROI) you initially expected / were sold on and put you on the right track to appear under the right keywords/phrases you are seeking in search engines such as Google, Yahoo etc.

How relevant is my website and can its intended target audience find it ?

In a previous article (5-things-to-remember-when-considering-a-new-website) I explained how a search engine places emphasis on page relevancy. Take Google for example, Google will read web pages and match results that appear to be the most resourceful against what the internet user typed into its search box.

Great, and ?
Well the question you need to ask yourself is :

Does my selected web page contain enough information to outrank its competition on this topic / product?

Example :
I go to Google, type in web design company sheffield, hit enter and expect to see my website. In this case I do, but why? my competition talk about the same services, they are also in the same town etc. I’m obviously not going to give away our personal tricks and secrets, but I’ll explain the basics which my competition if any good should already have covered

Meta Tags :
A website’s code is broken up into two sections, something called the head and something called the body.  In the head section we have something called meta tags, these are basic chunks of information that a search engine scans to discover the topics covered on the rest of the page, try to see it like the index of a book with a summary of the current chapter.

In the meta tags you can put your page title, keywords and a page description. In all honesty Google doesn’t pay too much attention to these compared to the actual page content but they are still important and should not be overlooked.

A common mistake is that people call their page title ‘My company name homepage’ for example, forgive me for saying but who cares? Your website will already be relevant enough for Google to realise you are ‘ACME co’ as competitive websites will not be competing for top spot under your company name.  The right approach would be something like this ‘Web design company in Sheffield, SEO & Internet Marketing – Corporate Web Solutions ‘.

The previous meta page title is keyword dense and hopefully more informative to Google regarding what the user searched for. The page content should then include a load of information about web design, internet marketing and SEO in Sheffield.  Back to the book, think the title is the chapter and the page content is the story. Keep the content relevant and outweigh competitors.

How many keywords can I put in my meta keyword section?
Remember quality over quantity, as a general rule of thumb don’t overkill it with every keyword you want to appear under and list all the products/services you offer.  Try to enter no more than 25 words, avoid repetition and have unique keywords for each page, each relevant to that page’s content. Let the ‘marketing’ page have marketing in its keywords and the ‘graphic design’ page follow suit.

Step 2, the actual web page content.
There should be a page title in the body section, the body section is the actual visible section of the web page on your computer screen. under the URL (website address) to the bottom of the visible page.

If your website sells ‘mobile phones by Sony’ the page should have a page header called Sony Mobile Phones and then display all the products in your shop. This page title should be something called a <h1> header.  The designer should have coded the site to have a  H1/Header 1 HTML tag around the body’s page title, this is what Google will interpret as the most relevant title on the page and expect to find information on the page that matches to title, again, chapter, story.

If not, try not to pull your hair out, its a quick fix just give them or even me a bell and I can sort it for you.

The next step is to name your images with relevant names and add something called anchor title text to your links.  These are the titles that should appear when you roll over a link containing a little more information about the link’s target page. Once again, don’t panic if you are lost, you’re probably not a techy and the aim is to open your eyes to areas of improvement in your site and ensure a good job has been done by your web designer.

Recap :
Add meta tags relevant to each page, make sure the page has a visible relevant title that is wrapped in a <H1> tag, name images and ensure your sites links have titles that show extra text when you roll over them. Make sure the content/information on the page is relevant to the page’s ‘chapter summary’.

A common mistake is not having enough text on a page, don’t overkill it with graphics and exclude text that the search engine can read, otherwise how will it ever know how to rank you? The trick for the designer is to balance graphics and text to maintain a user friendly attractive design whilst feeding the search engine enough information.

Ok, I think I’m covered.
Once you have the basics covered and have made yourself more relevant you need to let Google know. Don’t just sit there and think that everything will miraculously kick in now.  Go to Google and add your website address (URL) to Google (click here to add your website to Google).  Add your website address in and approx 8 top keywords.

Following that, go to DMOZ.org, that is the open source directory project (directory of websites Google pays a lot of attention to) and drill down the categories until you find the list of websites that best represent your industry and in the top right hand corner click suggest URL, if you cant see it, then you need to drill down deeper into the categories.

Dont stop there….
Open a Google account if you dont have one and add your website to the local business directory. This will include you in the map section of Google and hopefully increase the awareness of your site. Go to Yahoo and do the same, In fact, search for business directories in Google and add your site to as many freebies as possible.

Top Tip
When adding your site into directories etc if possible name your site as ‘Keywords – Company name’ in the directories, ensuring the phrase is associated more and more across the internet.

Publicise your site as much as possible
Include a link to your website in your email signature, search for similar websites with blogs and comment with useful information and a backlink to your website. Links back to your website are another massive aid to search engine optimisation and it’s something I’m going to cover in a future post.

For now, I hope this article has helped you and opened your eyes a little to a few things you can do to take control of your website’s SEO.

Comments are always welcome, suggestions for future topic coverage also.

Don’t forget to spread the love using the social networking tools below, stumbler me, digg me, tweet me, facebook me

If you like this article subscribe (top right) and I’ll make sure you are emailed when future posts are added to the site.