This video by Design850 owner Mike Bunton will give you the 3 basic items every video that you use on the web should have.  If you are uploading to YouTube, Facebook or some other video sharing platform, having these 3 parts on every video will ensure an effective marketing piece for your Tallahassee area business.

Every business should be using video to promote their business without exception.  What will set your video apart from all the other videos that are out there on the web?  Follow these three quick tips and apply them to all the videos you use and you should see a difference.    Making sure your videos are branded by having an opening/welcome screen, a lower third showing your name, business name and contact information (like a phone number or website URL) and closing with an extended screen having a specific call to action will help maximize each of the videos that you are using to market your business online.

If you are a Tallahassee area business and need assistance in marketing your business on the web – from web site design to email marketing to lead capture to video marketing to search engine optimization – Design850 invites you to drop us a quick email or give us a call and we can chat about how we can help your business market more effectively online.

Simply put, ‘blog’ means:

That’s right.  The BEST way to get a better listing on Google is to have a blog.  Now you might only need to post to that blog once or twice a month or maybe you are in a competitive market where you might need to post once a week or more.    The basic rule is: adding more unique and helpful content to your website on an ongoing basis is the BEST way to help the placement of your website in the search engines.

This post is a second in a series answering the question, “How Can My Business Rank Higher in the Search Engines“.

Today’s post is “5 Tips to Have a Great Website Foundation”.

As a quick review, there are three different aspects to help any business website rank better in the search engines:

1) Have a Good Foundation
2) Have a Site that is Updated Regularly with Original Content
3) Use Video to Help in SEO

Today, we are going to look at the first of these three items, the foundation of your website.

The foundation of your website is the actual code, the images, the stylesheets – each of the items that make up the physical website that when put together, make the website that you see when you type in your business website URL in a browser.

Before you decide that your website looks fine so everything must be good, you can take a look at these five different tips that will help you determine how well of a foundation you have on your business website.

#1 – You Have Done Keyword Research

There are a number of free tools out on the web – Google having one of the most prominent ones – where you can determine what phrases and keywords are being used in search queries in your local area.   This can help a business owner make sure that you have your content written toward those keywords.

#2 – Make Sure You Have Valid Code

What ‘having valid code’ means is that you have a developer who developed your website and that they have done all the proper techniques in coding your website in the best possible way.

You can check the code on your website by using this free tool – http://validator.w3c.org – type in your business URL and click on ‘Validate’ and it will tell you if there are any errors or not.   If you have a large number of errors, that is something that you will want to discuss with a web developer.

#3 – Use a Sitemap

You can view the Design850 site map – click here for the sitemap – this is the sitemap that I use and submit to Google on a regular basis.

From a business website, you want to make sure your website has a sitemap and that you submitted that sitemap to Google, especially as you add new content to your website.

#4 – Take Care of the Technical Stuff

This is a wide ranging set of items to consider and one of the best tools I have found on the web that can tell you how you are doing on taking care of technical stuff is Website Grader and you can view the free tool here – click here for Website Grader – and once here you can type in your business URL and it will tell around 20-30 different factors about your website and then assign your website a grade.

Design850.com Website Grader Score

The best part about this tool is not only is it free, but it will also give you some direction on how to improve your score.

#5 – Keep Your Website Updated Regularly

We will discuss this idea further in our next blog and video post.

We hope that you have enjoyed today’s video and blog post and encourage you to ask any questions by using the Quick Question form located on the sidebar area of this website.

Today, I wanted to talk to you about one of the most common questions that I get asked and that question simply is, Mike, “How Can I Get My Business Website Found in the Search Engines?” or “How Can I Make the Placement of Website Better in the Search Engines?”.

So, I wanted to take a few moments to answer that question today as one of the common questions that I get and here is the answer!

First, you must have a good foundation with your website.

What that means is the actual coding, the structure, the images – all the different parts that make up the actual website itself, need to all be done correctly. If you don’t have good page titles, page names, if you’re images aren’t named correctly, or your content isn’t tagged correctly, the foundation of that website isn’t going to lend itself to make it easy for Google to find your website and index the content on the website.

Second, you need to have good content posted to the website on a regular basis.

What site owners should be looking for is that when Google sends it little computers to come visit your website and finds 10 pages of content on your website, the next time it comes back and visits your website, we want there to be new pages of content that it can index.

The reason is that Google will always give presidence to those websites that have and are continuing to post new and unique content to their website over the long term.

Having good content posted to your website on a regular basis is an important factor in search engine optimization.

Third, use video to help market your business and market your website.

One of the great things about video is that it can greatly enhance the search engine placement of your main business website. Using video properly can greatly effect how search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, can go in an index the content and bring up the power of your website in the search engines.

Today, we talked about a commonly asked question with a straighforward and simple answer.

How Can I Improve the Ranking of My Website in the Search Engines?
1) Have a Good Foundation
2) Have Good Content Posted to Your Website on a Regular Basis
3) Have Video Help the Placement of Your Website in the Search Engines

Stay tuned for our next three blog posts where we will share more in depth information about each of these three key parts to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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

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.

• Links – check your links to ensure that they are still live.    This would refer to both links that point to other pages within your web site and then also links that point to pages that are not on your web site.   Hopefully your internal links will not be an issue, but linking to external sites could be problematic because other web sites might change their site structure periodically and your links might need to be updated.

• Mobile Phones – since just about everyone has a mobile phone, you should be checking your site on a regular basis on multiple mobile phones to ensure that your site is visible and functions properly in the mobile environment.

• Analytics – this should be done at least every 30 days.   You should always be looking at analytics so you know where your site visitors are coming from and how they are finding you.    I know that approximately 40% of traffic to design850.com and I can see how that is changing every month (or week in my case).  I also can know what other sites are driving the most traffic to my site.

• Newsletters/Forms – you should be testing your forms on a regular basis to ensure that the emails are getting through to you and to also know what the end user receives if they sign up for your newsletter or send a request through your contact form.

• Images – the last item that you should check on a regular basis is that the images that you have on your site all load correctly.   This is especially true if you have any sort of online store where the images are a necessary part of your ability to conduct business.