Video marketing is powerful and accelerates an audience getting to know, like, favor and trust you!

Social Media + Local SEO + Mobile = Success!

A great little formula that I saw today – those local Tallahassee businesses that use this formula are the ones destined for success!

Best quote I’ve read about SEO for Tallahassee businesses in a while: “Ranking high on search engines is no longer optional, it’s critical!”

As you read through these 10 Red Flags of Web Design, see if your business website fails one or more of these and my specific thoughts are in read after each in the list:

1. Clever site names (clever and cute does NOT translate into more business because you will confuse your potential clients)

2. Cluttered, busy layouts (simply designed sites that have lots of white space and are easy to read are the best)

3. Navigation Problems (navigation should be in the same place on every page and it should be obvious on how to find all the content on your site)

4. Boring web design (be interesting, use photos on as many pages as is possible, but make them count)

5. Pop-up ads (DONT DO IT!)

6. Slow load times (around 5-7 seconds or your visitors will leave)

7. Small fonts (larger fonts are becoming a ‘must’)

8. Too much text (use images and video to break large sections of text – use paragraphs with headers appropriately as well)

9. Corporate Look and Feel (you can show your personality, it’s okay and it helps your clients get to know you before they buy)

10. Poor search functions (people need to find the content they are looking for on your site or be able to search for it easily)

Original Source – 10 Red Flags of Web Design

The common mistakes

• Strange domain name – Increasing number of business websites use strange domain names that do not reflect their businesses in any way. I’ve see some that use hyphens, just because they want to include their target keywords in their domain names. Others choose very long domain names that include their most important keywords. All these cause confusion to customers and visitors. A business domain name has to be short, contains no hyphen and reflects the brand of the company. A short name that reflects a brand helps everyone to easily remember the website’s address. So, always go for memorable names!
• Bad color combination - I strain my eyes on some websites to read text, because of the bad color combinations used. Some use very faint colors for text, while others blur the text with background colors or images. It is important that a business site choose a good color combination that blends effortlessly with the entire theme.  Probably the best tip I have learned about color combinations – have your text appear on a white or very like background – there is a reason books aren’t printed with white text on black pages – think about it!
• Auto-playing music – Nothing annoys me more than visiting a business site and being surprised by an auto-playing music. Some of these businesses use it as a marketing technique, but its actual effect on visitors is negative. I believe a business website should not set any marketing audio to automatically play on page load. Use proper business ethics and give visitors a choice to turn the audio on if they like to hear it.
• Contact Information - Prospective customers and existing ones deserve the right to know where the business they’re dealing with is located. But unfortunately, many business websites don’t include physical addresses on their sites. Some even lack telephone numbers where customers can reach them in real-time. These issues cause lack of trust and confidence.
• Web page loading issues – Some business websites take forever to load. This is most commonly caused by server overload, badly-coded scripts that make dumb SQL queries and those that make heavy use of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), such as Flash and SilverLight. Studies have shown that Internet users have very short attention span, and want to do whatever they come for as quickly as possible. If a site doesn’t load within a few seconds, they will go off to a competitor’s site. To help keep visitors on your business site and reduce the bounce rate, get a server or hosting that guarantees faster loading of web pages. Also make sure your web-based software is developed very well with good database architecture. Moreover, avoid heavy use of RIAs, as they tend to largely slow down loading time. Flash and SilverLight are sparingly used to spice up web pages, but it is wrong for web pages to heavily depend on them.
• A Long Story about the business - I’ve noticed on so many Chinese and some other business websites that they spend too much unnecessary time and space talking about how many acres of land their factories cover and how many employees they have. A visitor is not interested in knowing these facts. Go straight to the point and let visitors know about your products and/or services and their benefits of buying them.

As a business owner, I know you will take the above-mentioned precautions seriously and not want to make the same common mistakes that drive visitors away from sites.

This video is a follow up video that was circulating on the web about a year ago. It includes many new statistics and thoughts for those who still consider social media a ‘fad’.

As a recognized leader in social media marketing in Tallahassee, Design850 is poised to help take your business to the next level online.  Using social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others, Design850 can show you how being social is not just a fad, but a necessity in today’s business world.

Give us a call to let us show you the ins and outs of the major social media platforms and how each not only helps your brand, but helps you position your site more effectively in the search engines using proper SEO techniques.

If you are on Facebook or Twitter, please join Design850 on those platforms:

Facebook:   http://www.facebook.com/design850

Twitter:   http://www.twitter.com/dadofgage

Type in the URL of your website as www.design850.com replacing the ‘design850′ with your web site URL.   Your web site should load in the browser.

Now do the same thing only this time leave off the ‘www’ at the front and just type design850.com and replace the ‘design850′ with your web site URL.   Again, your web site should load in the browser.

In the second example, you now want to check to see if your web server added the ‘www’ to your domain name.  If not, you need to contact your web master or web host.

What you want to prevent from a search engine optimization point of view is having your domain search by Google (and other search engines) from viewing www.design850.com and design850.com as two separate domains/web sites.   As you add more and more content to your site, you want to ensure that only ONE gets indexed and ranked by search engines.

This can be corrected on your server (or your web host) by performing what is known as a ’301 redirect’.  This redirect is done by a single setting to tell any browser or search engine bot that is visiting your site that it should add the ‘www’ to the domain if it was not there when someone visited a link or typed in your domain.

Design850 can help correct this and other SEO basics on your web site to ensure that you are being ranked as high as possible in the search engines – give us a call at 850-445-2076.