December 2007

Search Engine Marketing and Optimization. If you are reading this article you most likely know the basics of what the two mean, but for those who do not or need a refresher…here it goes:

Search Engine Marketing - Typical involves advertising on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and various other search engines. Programs like Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Search Marketing, and more are typically used in conjunction with start up websites and even established ones :) .

Search Engine Optimization -Optimization is completely different from Search Marketing in that Optimization is all about your website as a whole. Some things to keep in mind are: Does your website utilize xhtml and css standards? Does your website use Alternate text (e.g. ) ? Are your links relevant to information on your page? These are just a few things to take into consideration when building or maintaining SERP’s (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

To start off, I will discuss the often common missed practices for Search Engine Marketing:

* Time of year - People seem to think that time of year does not matter. By far the worst time to spend most of your money on SEM is towards the end of the year (Christmas, Hanukkah, etc). Some people need to face reality, people are not at their computer’s during this time especially or better yet looking online for your services. Instead, they are spending time with their families, which is a given .

* Too much money spent on advertising - Companies go around spending hundreds of dollars a month on advertising when all their advertising efforts are useless, their marketing steps should begin with their initial design.

* Ads being displayed annoying - How many times have you been to a website and boom an annoying sound starts playing in the background with no on/off switch? How often are you reading a article on a website and the ads get in the way of the text you are reading? How would you feel if your reading was interrupt by someone’s stupid ad being displayed? These are just a few complaints that make a potential reader leave and go somewhere else.

Some common missed practices of Search Engine Optimization include:
* Text is not readable by Search Engines- Numerous businesses today still design their site primarily in Photoshop. While, this might look great from an aesthetic standpoint, from an optimization standpoint its terrible. Search engines cannot understand and/or read text within images or in flash.

* Link farming and invalid links - Newbies to website optimization often look toward link farm agencies to get them inbound and outbound links to their websites to increase their SERP (Search Engine Ranking pages), or the pages that link to a particular website. If search engine optimization were so easy, people would not be getting paid over $100/hour for search engine optimization. However, you do get one thing out of link farming and do you know what that is? Being banned from search engines, that in theory will make you money for free. * Out of date technologies - What is the use of making a website if your not using up to date technologies? You wouldn’t want to create a business and not be able to represent it correctly online? So what’s the point? If your website is a 1990 website built in old-standards of html without anything else why should your potential client trust you or better yet trust your services. They won’t and they shouldn’t, creating a successful isn’t just about creating a website and your done; it’s doing it the right way that counts.

Conclusion - So you’ve seen the benefits of not only building a website from a design standpoint (SEO) correctly, but also how not to burn your business on too much paid advertising like Google Adsense where the ROI isn’t worth what some people spend. If you get anything out of this article, understand that especially for start up businesses spending hundreds of dollars per month just for a handful of clicks is not worth it in the long run, the ROI is not worth it. Remember this before you go to spend hundreds per month on a little three line text ad.

About the Author
Joseph Dickinson, a New Jersey based Web Developer who created JDFreelance.com and the JDFreelance Blog. Currently, I’m a college student studying Computer Information Systems at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania. I work for the U.S. Navy in Philadelphia, PA as a database adminstrator full-time during the summers working with PHP, mySQL backend databases, XHtml, and Css. I love blogging, enjoy your post my blog!

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You’ve heard of them Way-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) Editors for web development. Some common WYSIWYG editors include Front page, Dreamweaver, and so on. For beginning designers I think trying to create websites with them is quite an excellent source especially if your savvy enough to be able to look at the code a WYSIWYG editor produces, interpret it, and in the end understand what it is doing.

This method of developing websites is something I had been doing some 7 or more years ago. It taught me the hard way, by learning that spending 50+ hours on developing a garbage newbie site in Dreamweaver could look immensely better in only 15 hours tops. One thing that makes Dreamweaver unique to other WYSIWYG editors is it writes xhtml and css; the standard for compliant web design.The learning curve with one of these editors also is enormous, it’s a point and click type of deal almost like Windows (and yes, it runs on Windows).

In my own personal experience as a web designer, I found in the early days of my web development that a program like Dreamweaver where you can point and click and are then able to view the code that edited a certain region of the site was tremendous, it was something that taught me so much in so little time.

About the Author
Currently, I’m a college student studying Computer Information Systems at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania. I work for the U.S. Navy in Philadelphia, PA as a database adminstrator full-time during the summers working with PHP, mySQL backend databases, XHtml, and Css.Enjoy the article and please visit my blog .

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So you want to spice up your website, add a splash page perhaps, maybe some video. Maybe you’ve thought about outsourcing the flash to someone else. Here are 10 things you’ll want to consider before you hire a Flash designer.

10. Flash requires quite a lot of bandwidth - Flash files, especially if they use sounds or embedded movies, will take a long time to load, and the visitor may not have the best connection and, obviously, the patience to wait.

9. You could be at the mercy of the Flash developers FOREVER! - if you use 3rd party Flash developers, they might code the project so that you won’t be able to make any changes and have to hire them again, and again even for the smallest modification.

8. The “Back” button is usually disabled - if the Flash designer has used some trick such as meta refresh in order to disable the browser’s Back button, it is highly probable that the visitors might get frustrated and not want to start browsing your site over and over again. So they will leave. Besides that, Google’s AdWords doesn’t approve pages that have the Back button disabled. So, beware of this if you intend to promote your web site by using a PPC campaign.

7. Flash doesn’t care about your visitors’ needs –silly Flash intros and dumb sounds that you cannot turn off will drive your visitors away. Moreover Splash Pages don’t favor your visibility - they lack the text that contains the keywords identified as pertinent to your services / products; they only include one outgoing link and, most of the times, no back-link from another page; they often include re-directions, and most of the search engines will not include re-directions in their page index.

6. SWiSH is a heck of a lot less expensive than Adobe’s software. SWiSH is basically Flash for those without the wish/need/time and or finances to buy the actual software. And with all of its built in preset effects you’ll never need to understand concepts like frames, libraries, symbols etc.

5. Users recognize and are much more accustomed to using HTML form elements than they are of Flash form components hence less likely to understand how to use them. Seriously, how many different ways does there need to be to submit a form. Stop making me think already!

4. Whereas Adobe might have you believe that the obstacles for users with disabilities are derived from A. issues with the design or B. issues with the assistive technologies and not Flash, the truth is that this propaganda serves only to guide the spotlight away from major cross-browser accessibility issues encompassing Flash. The uses of wmode parameter for example, prevent assistive technologies from receiving information from a SWF. Meaning that a SWF will essentially be hidden from a screen reader. Yes, I know, this is not an issue in Internet Explorer, settle down, however true web accessibility can be best described as the ability of any user, regardless of disability and or web browser, to access the same content and information. The correct acronym for that is HTML.

3. Most search engines don’t like and don’t index Flash -not all the search engines can crawl and index the content of Flash, and if they do, it’s not free of errors. What is more they won’t be able to direct the visitors to the proper page. The truth is that without some type of clunky workaround, like creating HTML copies of all your Flash pages, Google wont index these pages.

2. Why even hire a flash designer? You can get a Flash template for less than sixty bucks- each Flash template is unique and completely customizable right out of the box. What is more, most quality template shops will provide you with a free sample template so you can evaluate the quality of the product and try your skills before you buy.

1. Don’t assume that everyone has the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player installed. While 90% of people do have the Flash plug-in installed, not everyone has the Flash 9 Player or even the Flash 5 Player installed. Should a user visit your site using an older, incompatible version of the Flash player, you could end up inconveniencing the viewer to the extent that she’ll never returns to your site again!

My point is – I don’t want anyone to tell you that Flash is the next best thing since sliced bread, and if you do decide to use it, do it in moderation everything in moderation, even moderation.

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1. Attractive design
The design of your page is the 1st thing any visitor sees, so making a good 1st impression is key. Make sure your color scheme is easy on the eyes. Too many overpowering colors can be a big turn off to some. Font size is very important as well. If visitors have to strain to read your content they will most likely just close the page.

2. Easy Navigation
Easily accessible info is a MUST! Try not to bunch too much content into one page. It’s better to have more navigation links than for the visitor to have to spend 20 minutes looking for the info they want. Rather than spend the time searching through the site, they will just close it and go onto a site that is easier to navigate.

3. Content
Keep your content on subject and have plenty of it. Updating often is essential as well as dating your updates so that they can see that you do take the time to add new content. This will give you a better chance at being bookmarked and them returning.

4. Simple IS Better
Yes there are still people out there with slower connections. So try not to use too much flash or graphics that will add to your sites load time. Keeping it simple with a fast load time will net you many more visitors and sales than a graphic intense page that looks great but takes forever to fully load.

5. Webmaster Accessibility
Be sure to have a contact page with your email address or phone number so you can be contacted easily. This makes you easily available if someone has a question and trust me people always have questions! :-)

These 5 simple things will help improve the experience of your site for all of your visitors and they will tell their friends. So you will have a booming site before you know it.

Find more Web Design tips and tricks by visitinghttp://webdesignessentials.blogspot.com/

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