With Internet growth in South Africa at a all time high and the introduction of Paypal, the best thing you can do for your business nowadays is get online. So many consumers and so much of the market is based on the internet nowadays, that it is almost financial suicide not to get involved in the online sensation. Scream Media offers highly competitive prices, as well as a very professional, proven product.
Scream Media not only offers a team of skilled designers and programmers to help design and build your site, we also offer services including webhosting, SEO, PPC, social network marketing and internet strategy.
Creating a website is like nurturing a plant, where the process begins with choosing the right sapling or seed and ends with sowing the proverbial fruit of your labor. Likewise, website designing also requires your utmost attention and step-by-step execution of strategies in order to thrive in the long run. Without a doubt, website designs do play the role in creating that preferred reaction to your business. It is about the overall outlook of a website, where packaging does play the role. After all, first impression can yield better results by convincing the visitors to stick to a page for sometime. Usually, visitors do jump from one page to another, as nobody has much free time these days. In the event that your design does attracts the visitors, there is a high probability that they would like to check out more of your pages. A rule of thumb is 3 clicks to find what you want.
On the other hand, a webpage design says a lot about your business. In case you do not have the budget or skills to create a background based upon coding, you can streamline things by designing the perfect theme. These days, themes have become one of the most useful tools in retaining the visitors, as people remember these websites and like to return to them. Themes work well, when you need to convey your message without too much effort. For example, Scream is in the process of redesigning our own website, following on from the modern art theme we currently have on H2L
It is not difficult to get the right theme for your website. You can consult experienced corporate website design professionals, who can help you out in getting the right theme. A well designed theme should communicate your message effectively.
Showing posts with label web design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web design. Show all posts
12 April 2010
04 December 2009
How to get quality Linkbacks
In mid 2007 Google began editing toolbar PageRank scores and rankings for many sites that were selling links. It is not legal to buy links, you need to earn them.
At the same time, more and more people are writing online. Setting up a blog only takes a few minutes. There are hundreds or thousands of people talking about every topic imaginable, so if you create something remarkable and capture the attention of a few thought leaders who like it, you are going to get links. But how do you create content that people will like?
Passion = Market Knowledge = Links
One of the easiest (and most effective) ways to predict a future and to predict what people like is to immerse yourself in your topic. If you are passionate about a topic, know more about it than anyone else, and openly share information, then eventually people will notice and link to you. If you know what people are interested in, rather than asking them to link to what you have, create something that they would be interested in linking at. Express your world view and your bias in a way that matches their world view.Become a Platform
Each of us is the most relevant thing in our own lives. It sounds selfish but it is true. If you promote other people they will be more likely to promote you. Popular bloggers search to see what people are saying about them. If you want someone's attention linking at them from a blog post on your site is an easy way to get them to notice you. The Web is a Social Network
Social interaction of any type leads to links.
* Speak at a conference? Someone will likely blog about it.
* Want to get thought leaders to promote your site? Create a community project or contest and ask them to participate. Or give out awards.
* Lack the budget needed to go to conferences? Moderate forums, comment on related blogs, and build social relationships online.
* Track hot news in your space and try to get out in front of important trends.
o As an example, when Google did a big update that promoted some big brand websites we were one of the first websites to analyze it.
Be Credible
But for people to take you credibly you need to make sure your website adheres to good web credibility standards.
* Is your domain name memorable?
* Does your design complement your copy?
* Is your content interesting and conceptually unique?
* Does your site have an editorial component and voice, or is it a boring low-value thin product database?
* Is your about page memorable?
* Is your site easy to use and understand?
* Do you have a brand people care about?
You do not need to "have it all" to get started, but the more credible you look the faster you will gain momentum.
Build on Your Success
Work to improve your site every day. Over the course of the year fixing or creating one thing a day will lead to a large advantage. Building up a leading market position can take years, but once you get at the top those years are the barrier to entry which prevent others from being able to replicate what you buit up.
How to ask for a link back
Below is an example of an email to send out, remember no one will link to a site with a lessor page rank then their own website.
Dear Sir / Madam
We came across your web site on Google and would very much like to exchange links with you. Swapping links with similar themed and good quality web sites can help improve search engine positiopns and encourage mutual visitors to each web site.
If you would like to swap links with us, please add our link using the following information.
Title H2L Onlinemarketing
URL www.h2lonlinemarketing.co.za
Description: H2L Online Marketing is a Cape Town based Internet Marketing company, with over 15 years experience on the web. We offer a variety of Online Marketing services including Web Design, Logo Design, SEO(Search Engine Optimization), PPC(Pay Per Click Advertising), Email marketing, Web Hosting and bespoke Programming and Scripting. Please send us your own details in the same format and we would be delighted to add a link to your web site here:http://www.h2lonlinemarketing.co.za/links.php (page rank 3/10)
Many thanks for your time and we look forward to hearing from you.
Kind Regards
H2L Online Marketing - A Scream Media Company
At the same time, more and more people are writing online. Setting up a blog only takes a few minutes. There are hundreds or thousands of people talking about every topic imaginable, so if you create something remarkable and capture the attention of a few thought leaders who like it, you are going to get links. But how do you create content that people will like?
Passion = Market Knowledge = Links
One of the easiest (and most effective) ways to predict a future and to predict what people like is to immerse yourself in your topic. If you are passionate about a topic, know more about it than anyone else, and openly share information, then eventually people will notice and link to you. If you know what people are interested in, rather than asking them to link to what you have, create something that they would be interested in linking at. Express your world view and your bias in a way that matches their world view.Become a Platform
Each of us is the most relevant thing in our own lives. It sounds selfish but it is true. If you promote other people they will be more likely to promote you. Popular bloggers search to see what people are saying about them. If you want someone's attention linking at them from a blog post on your site is an easy way to get them to notice you. The Web is a Social Network
Social interaction of any type leads to links.
* Speak at a conference? Someone will likely blog about it.
* Want to get thought leaders to promote your site? Create a community project or contest and ask them to participate. Or give out awards.
* Lack the budget needed to go to conferences? Moderate forums, comment on related blogs, and build social relationships online.
* Track hot news in your space and try to get out in front of important trends.
o As an example, when Google did a big update that promoted some big brand websites we were one of the first websites to analyze it.
Be Credible
But for people to take you credibly you need to make sure your website adheres to good web credibility standards.
* Is your domain name memorable?
* Does your design complement your copy?
* Is your content interesting and conceptually unique?
* Does your site have an editorial component and voice, or is it a boring low-value thin product database?
* Is your about page memorable?
* Is your site easy to use and understand?
* Do you have a brand people care about?
You do not need to "have it all" to get started, but the more credible you look the faster you will gain momentum.
Build on Your Success
Work to improve your site every day. Over the course of the year fixing or creating one thing a day will lead to a large advantage. Building up a leading market position can take years, but once you get at the top those years are the barrier to entry which prevent others from being able to replicate what you buit up.
How to ask for a link back
Below is an example of an email to send out, remember no one will link to a site with a lessor page rank then their own website.
Dear Sir / Madam
We came across your web site on Google and would very much like to exchange links with you. Swapping links with similar themed and good quality web sites can help improve search engine positiopns and encourage mutual visitors to each web site.
If you would like to swap links with us, please add our link using the following information.
Title H2L Onlinemarketing
URL www.h2lonlinemarketing.co.za
Description: H2L Online Marketing is a Cape Town based Internet Marketing company, with over 15 years experience on the web. We offer a variety of Online Marketing services including Web Design, Logo Design, SEO(Search Engine Optimization), PPC(Pay Per Click Advertising), Email marketing, Web Hosting and bespoke Programming and Scripting. Please send us your own details in the same format and we would be delighted to add a link to your web site here:http://www.h2lonlinemarketing.co.za/links.php (page rank 3/10)
Many thanks for your time and we look forward to hearing from you.
Kind Regards
H2L Online Marketing - A Scream Media Company
23 October 2009
Fundamentals of Website Redesign
About 9,999 times out of 10,000, companies that begin a redesign of their Website do so with the following reasons in mind:
1. "We want to freshen the look/feel."
2. "We need to update our content, to be more relevant for where we are today."
3. "We have too much information on our Web site...we need to clean house and provide a slimmed down version."
It's rare, even in 2009, that companies will speak to things that also matter a great deal: usability and SEO.
Usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. Search engines want to rank Web sites that provide a quality user experience for the searcher. How that's defined can be somewhat subjective (every Web site is unique and its target audience will also be unique).
So, rather than speak to usability, let's look at common mistakes that can happen when you're redesigning your Web site.
Keyword Research
If you're building a Web site to do well in SEO, you must begin with quality keyword research and competitive analysis. Many tools are available for keyword research, including Google's AdWords Tool, Wordtracker, and Keyword Discovery.
Another great source for keyword research is your existing paid search campaigns. After all, you can see actual impressions and historical data on how these words have performed in terms of CTR, time on site, pages visited, and -- most importantly -- conversion rate.
OK, so the keyword research is done, but we're not quite ready for the graphic designer yet.
Competitive Analysis
Once you know which keywords you want to target, you need to determine what it will take to compete (or if it's even feasible to try). If you determine that "travel" would be a great keyword, make sure have loads of content and links already, or have the patience to ride out the long process of building up this kind of authority. You may want to re-think this keyword, unless your brand is already a household name.
A quick and easy way to check the competitive landscape is to do a Google search for your targeted keyword(s). Find the top 10 ranking Web sites, then do a "site:www.example.com" search on Yahoo and see how many pages (and backlinks) are indexed for these Web sites. From there, you can also see how these other Web sites have built their information architecture and structured their content.
Information Architecture
Your goal should absolutely be to have a Web site that looks good, is search engine friendly, and provides a quality user experience. This stage of the game is very important. You don't want to just throw together a bunch of pages with little meaning or pages that don't add to the user experience.
That said, there are ways to generate quality, useful content that is good for SEO and adds to the user experience.
Review Analytics
The expression, "you don't know what you've got until it's gone," is so true for many redesign projects. There's such a rush to get the new look/feel live that you fail to review your analytics to see where you've been getting your traffic.
Perhaps you'd want to run a ranking report, as well? Perhaps you had rankings and traffic for a page that was about to disappear from your Web site, with the new launch? Maybe you want to reconsider dumping that page? Perhaps you could, at a minimum, 301 redirect that page somewhere else, so that you have a chance of maintaining that ranking or at least keeping the links that were pointing to that page from now pointing to a 404 page?
Redirects
If there's one piece of headache-saving advice I can give you, it's this: make sure you 301 redirect every page of the old site to the new URL structure. If you can remember nothing else from this column, remember this.
If you can keep your URL structure the same during the re-launch, that's ideal. If you're like most, your URL structure will change. Remember that even a small change in the URL is a change and will require a redirect.
Staging
I've seen Web sites that were built out on a staging environment by their design agency, but lacked password protection. These development versions of sites were indexed by Google and, once launched, didn't do well at all because their content on the new site was a duplicate of the staging site.
The search engines didn't know they were the same company. Once this is live, it's very hard to correct. The design firm would have to 301 redirect every URL on the staging site to the new site's URLs.
Hopefully, these tips help spare many of you from the pains that often go along with a redesign and, more importantly, save you time and money.
1. "We want to freshen the look/feel."
2. "We need to update our content, to be more relevant for where we are today."
3. "We have too much information on our Web site...we need to clean house and provide a slimmed down version."
It's rare, even in 2009, that companies will speak to things that also matter a great deal: usability and SEO.
Usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. Search engines want to rank Web sites that provide a quality user experience for the searcher. How that's defined can be somewhat subjective (every Web site is unique and its target audience will also be unique).
So, rather than speak to usability, let's look at common mistakes that can happen when you're redesigning your Web site.
Keyword Research
If you're building a Web site to do well in SEO, you must begin with quality keyword research and competitive analysis. Many tools are available for keyword research, including Google's AdWords Tool, Wordtracker, and Keyword Discovery.
Another great source for keyword research is your existing paid search campaigns. After all, you can see actual impressions and historical data on how these words have performed in terms of CTR, time on site, pages visited, and -- most importantly -- conversion rate.
OK, so the keyword research is done, but we're not quite ready for the graphic designer yet.
Competitive Analysis
Once you know which keywords you want to target, you need to determine what it will take to compete (or if it's even feasible to try). If you determine that "travel" would be a great keyword, make sure have loads of content and links already, or have the patience to ride out the long process of building up this kind of authority. You may want to re-think this keyword, unless your brand is already a household name.
A quick and easy way to check the competitive landscape is to do a Google search for your targeted keyword(s). Find the top 10 ranking Web sites, then do a "site:www.example.com" search on Yahoo and see how many pages (and backlinks) are indexed for these Web sites. From there, you can also see how these other Web sites have built their information architecture and structured their content.
Information Architecture
Your goal should absolutely be to have a Web site that looks good, is search engine friendly, and provides a quality user experience. This stage of the game is very important. You don't want to just throw together a bunch of pages with little meaning or pages that don't add to the user experience.
That said, there are ways to generate quality, useful content that is good for SEO and adds to the user experience.
Review Analytics
The expression, "you don't know what you've got until it's gone," is so true for many redesign projects. There's such a rush to get the new look/feel live that you fail to review your analytics to see where you've been getting your traffic.
Perhaps you'd want to run a ranking report, as well? Perhaps you had rankings and traffic for a page that was about to disappear from your Web site, with the new launch? Maybe you want to reconsider dumping that page? Perhaps you could, at a minimum, 301 redirect that page somewhere else, so that you have a chance of maintaining that ranking or at least keeping the links that were pointing to that page from now pointing to a 404 page?
Redirects
If there's one piece of headache-saving advice I can give you, it's this: make sure you 301 redirect every page of the old site to the new URL structure. If you can remember nothing else from this column, remember this.
If you can keep your URL structure the same during the re-launch, that's ideal. If you're like most, your URL structure will change. Remember that even a small change in the URL is a change and will require a redirect.
Staging
I've seen Web sites that were built out on a staging environment by their design agency, but lacked password protection. These development versions of sites were indexed by Google and, once launched, didn't do well at all because their content on the new site was a duplicate of the staging site.
The search engines didn't know they were the same company. Once this is live, it's very hard to correct. The design firm would have to 301 redirect every URL on the staging site to the new site's URLs.
Hopefully, these tips help spare many of you from the pains that often go along with a redesign and, more importantly, save you time and money.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)