Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Website Designing Tips: A Super Homepage – Know what it takes

Imagine entering into a house. You open the door and what you come across is a sight you would rather forget. The living room is a sorry place to be in; curtains out of place, the pillows on the floor, newspapers and magazines littered all over the floor and yes, don’t forget beer cans! Would you visit the same place again? Hope not. Now transfer your thoughts to a webpage that you visit for the first time.

To describe what a badly designed homepage would look like, all you have to do is open any random page on the web and 5 times out of ten you are bound to come across a Fugly fanpage that will definitely give you the jitters. The layout is missing and so is the structure. You can only feel sorry for the user interface and there are multiple buttons in the name of navigation.

You end up thinking what damned keyword made you land up on this dreaded page and were you even meant to land up on this homepage on that keyword in the first place! Wouldn’t you love to write a stinker to the one who designed this webpage; presumably with a coke and a bag of donuts in both hands, some of which got splattered on the page itself.

The Images

So if it were you, what would you do to make this homepage a much prettier sight, something on the lines of “taking your breath away”. The first thing is the visuals. Make sure that inoriginal, relevant and attractive visuals are used. Something that instantly makes you widen the eyes and you are hooked. You can get these photographs from any of the internet photo galleries/libraries. Take the example of a medical tourism website, all you would require is a photo of a message being done on a sandy beach. That would surely suit your purpose.

The Slogan
 
So what is your website all about? Tell this to your visitors in a catchy punchline or a phrase that knocks their socks off! This phrase or slogan would give the visitor a quick idea about who you are and what you do. For example, the slogan “Best web design in India” makes complete sense to the visitor. When you do this, makeGenerally, select just one slogan that tells your visitor in a few words what your sure that you don’t end up cluttering the phrase with too many keywords that would define your web services/product.

Color Schemes
 
Color that sooth the senses and catch the eye. The color scheme of your homepage should be simple yet vibrant, subtle yet bold. It should be shaded at just the right places so as to deviate the viewer ficus towards areas that you want more eyeballs on.

Also, use shading to link different parts of the website together. For example, in a portfolio page, use background shading to link together each photo and its description.

The Spaces

Another aspect that would prevent the clogging of your homepage would be the spacing mechanism. Spaces on all sides of the webpage as well as the header and footer spaces are very important elements of an attractive web design. Likewise, a line break after each paragraph helps to break up the page into less daunting chunks.

Subheadings
 
The importance of headings and subheadings needs no mentioning as they help in catching the attention of the visitor instantly and more so in understanding the contents of the page.

Relevant Links:

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Ridiculously Powerful On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization for dummies always begins with the usual keyword research, assigning of keywords to various pages according to relevance, title tags, introductory copy et el. But when it comes to optimizing a website that contains tens of thousands of pages, such an optimization strategy is thrown out of the window. Imagine performing the above mentioned exercise for a website which consists of over 100,000 indexed pages. Nightmarish, isn’t it?

The optimization of your website should be such that the uniformity is visible throughout the website, not only to you, but more importantly to the search engine spider. Hr, the Title tag is of immense importance. Take the case of a website like Slideshare, which has thousands of pages indexed by Google.
Here the subtitles and the titles gains importance as it follows the following mechanism in its tagging - “SlideShare » Slideshows tagged with [keyword]”, whereas the right strategy should be to tag the Powerpoint presentations/slides with the right keywords. This would definitely have a much better influence in the ranking of the website as well as the presentations on it.

So you think the work is done here? Well not exactly, as there are much bigger things waiting to you’re your attention. The HTML script – optimize it till the last letter in the script. Heard about BlackHat SEO strategies? If you have, forget them because a short term solution will land you up in long time trouble. Do not clutter your page with keywords; rather give enough breathing space between the titles and the content. H1, H2, H3 tags should be chosen and written carefully and make sure that the same description does not go with the whole template and so do the keywords.

Optimizing URLs is a taxing job, but a rewarding one. There are certain parameters involved in the optimization of URLs. One revelation we would like to make here is that dynamic URLs and static URLs are treated the same by Google.

Also a URL like www.yoursite.com/linen-bedsheets.php is considered to much better than a URL that goes like www.yoursite.com/product-82543.php. The separators used in this case need not be sweated upon. Make sure that your old URLs respond with a 301 permanent redirect to the page’s new, optimized URL.
The end motive behind all this is to being in as many visitors and therefore as many leads as possible. This can also be done through the effective use of platforms like forum, discussion groups and blogs. User generated content is hugely popular with search engines as it speaks volumes about the kind of interest which people show in your website. Content syndication is also important as you should be able to provide the users with RSS feeds from your blog.

Tag clouds are one thing of my fag which always raises many heads and many issues. Many website vote as well as against tag clouds and therefore it remains totally your call to have them or not.

If you have anything more to share on on-page optimization, feel free to get in touch.

Ensuring the Right Global Presence

Like all good things in life, organic traffic is also free. Organic traffic is referrals, strictly from search engines, for a set of industry specific key terms. Website owners and bloggers simply love it, as it allows them to raise the bar and get noticed, without wasting time in getting their website discovered by their set of target audience. Search engines support organic traffic. This means, the more organic traffic you have for your website, the more search engines are likely to give your website higher rankings.

The strength of organic traffic to your website largely depends on how efficiently your website is promoted, using various tools and techniques of search engine optimization. Strategic search engine optimization techniques strive to improve and maintain website’s ongoing visibility. Some of the key factors for driving a good volume of search traffic to your website include:

Site Structure and navigation 

The functional part of your website is its navigation and internal linking structure. Broken links or poor navigation upset Google spiders. Hence, it is necessary that you optimize your website for:

 Bad Navigation
 Inconsistent, broken links
 and User-friendliness

Good Keyword Strength

Keywords define what you are and what you do. Hence, you must choose the most specific keywords that relate to your business nature as well as the section you want to pitch more. You must carefully use your keywords in title tags, meta keyword tags, alt tags, and meta description so that it gets selected in all major search engines.

Website Content 

Your website must have keyword rich content with an average keyword density of 3-4%. It is recommended that you update your website content on regular basis with good quality relevant content.

External linking structure

External linking structure defines the number of websites pointing to your website. It is important that you get good quality in-bound links from websites with higher Page Ranks. This can be accomplished through writing strategic articles, blog posts, and link exchanges.

Expert SEO Support

As internet is getting clogged with more and more companies from similar products and targeting same audience, competition has increased manifolds! Realizing the importance of professional search engine optimization support, companies are going smarter and seeking professional SEO services, available at much affordable rates.

E2 Solutions is one of the top SEO companies in India offering online reputation management, SEO Services, ecommerce website design, web application development.