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    Choosing a Web Designer
    Starting with SEO
    Choosing a domain name

     

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    Professional advice and full of practical tips and tricks to increase revenue with your business.

     

     

    Customer feedback

     

    Satisfaction guaranteeWe are very pleased with our new website, designed, and optimised in search engines by Noble Web Design.

     

    The good, clear advice and practical support that Noble Web Design gave us led to the creation of this innovative site that has surpassed our expectations.

     

    My website is first in Google!!!! My website never used to get any hits but since I got my website optimised it's been unbelievable. The number of hits is growing every month and my phone rings too!!

     

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    Web design, ecommerce, shopping carts, internet businesses, hosting and search engines

    01/14/2010

    Website standards

    Filed under: Your first website — noble web design @ 5:05 pm

     

    Website standards and accessibility

    We know about professional web standards and accessibility guidelines as part of our quality assurance. We are registered members of  UKWDA who lobby for better designed web sites to the W3C guidelines.

     

    Why bother

    You only have a few seconds to impress your visitors, so slow or broken web sites will turn them away for sure!

     

    We build our sites using advanced coding practices such as xHTML and CSS and implement checks for readability, usability and accessibility. WHY? Because your site will be faster to download, work in more browsers and on more PCs (Apple Macs included) and be seen by more people than a site not coded to these standards.

     

    A website designed to meet W3C web standards and accessibility guidelines will display correctly accross multiple web browsers ensuring the widest possible audiance can view your site.  This proper coding will also ensure search engines can read your website properly for higher rankings in the search results.

     

    World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

    The W3C are the guardians of web standards that ensure web designers and developers have a coherent direction & blueprint for professional web design. They provide validation tools and conformance badges to show a web site has passed their web standards.

    01/12/2010

    Choosing a Web Designer

    Filed under: Your first website — noble web design @ 5:13 pm

     

    How to choose a web designer

    Unless creating your own hobby related site, you should use a professional web designer to create a website for your business.

     

    There are many people out there who claim to be web designers but in reality have no real experience of meeting web standards or designing for established clients.

     

    Questions to ask a web designer

    • What software do they use?
    • What technology and languages do they use?
    • Can they manually write HTML code?
    • Can they apply SEO to the website?
    • Are they able to create forms and interactive content?
    • Can they work in a secure server environment?
    • Do they validate code to web standards?
    • Do they meet accessibility guidelines?

     

    Any good web designer should hold these skills, even if they don’t apply to your project at hand they are still a good set of questions to ask. Should a web designer lack in these areas, they are unlikely to be qualified to work on your website. 

     

    Try to find out what programs the web designer will use, although a website can be setup using cheap software this does not necessarily mean it will be a good website.

     

    Web design software

    • Microsoft Front page should be a warning sign, few professional web designers will use this programme
    • Plain text editors, in theory should demonstrate that a web designer is able to code by hand, and in return has a good understanding of their medium
    • Dreamweaver and other associated programmes are very good and expensive, however just because a web designer owns this software does not necessarily make them qualified

     

    Other questions to ask

    Find out what steps the web designer will take to make sure your website can be found in the search engines, this is very important.

     

    Ask to see examples of the web designers work, if they have a portfolio take a look.

     

    Find out what will happen if you do not like their design, will you incur additional charges or will they keep working on the website until you are satisfied?

     

    Find out who will retain copyright of the website once it is complete, some web designers try to retain ownership of the website. In our opinion the client should own the website outright with no limitations or conditions at all.

     

    Ask about the websites cost, a website quote that sounds to good to be true usually is.

    Starting with SEO

    Filed under: Search engine optimisation, Your first website — noble web design @ 3:40 pm

     

    Domain Name

    Choose a domain name which is keyword rich and describes the product you are selling exactly.

     

    Always choose either .co.uk or .org.uk extension as these are most defiantly preferred for ranking in google.co.uk.

     

    So a good example which covers both of the aspects above, would be winterboots.org.uk.

     

    Title Tag

    This is one of the single most important aspects of on page SEO. This needs to be totally relevant to the domain name and also be as natural as possible

     

    So a good example of a title tag for winterboots.org.uk would be this : winter boots | girls | boys | shoes

     

    Keep it short and to the point. Don’t be tempted to put too many keywords in here, as you will water it down and not have the same impact.

     

    Meta Description

    This is what the search engine uses to show a snippet in the results page. This should be keyword rich with your domain name keyword used at least once and also be informative and easy to be read by humans

     

    So a good example of a meta description would be this “Winter Boots have the best range of shoes for this magical occasion. We have both boys and girls winter boots at the cheapest prices and available with free delivery”

     

    This is very keyword rich, with lots of possibilities of other matching keywords appearing also in the search engines.

     

    H1 Tag

    This is very important and your chance to shine. Google likes correct formatting of the header tags and if you use them correctly, you can achieve some excellent results. Try to keep it as similar as possible to your domain name, but without making it to obvious.

     

    So a good example would be “Winter Boots at the cheapest prices”

     

    H2 Tag

    Again this is important and can be used with good effect. Use a variation of your main keyword and keep it targeted

     

    So a good example would be “Their special day is fast approaching, and you are looking for the best Winter Boots you can find – now you have found them”

     

    H3 Tag

    Just to keep in line with looking fluent with correct use of H tags, this can be utilised with just another variation of your main keyword.

     

    So a good example would be “Choose from our extensive range of winter boots, which range from classic to modern”

     

    Image ALT tags

    Make sure you always use image ALT tags on all images included on your page. These do not only aid those who are partially sited, but it also follows further compliance with search engines and makes your site nice and clean. They also can bring you extra traffic from google images etc if done correctly.

     

    Unique content

    ALWAYS use unique content. Never copy someone else’s content as A. it is stealing and B. search engines hate duplicate content. Keep your content as keyword rich as possible but only mention your main keyword 4-6% in the entire content on the page. So for every 100 words, you can mention your keyword 4-6 times. Only bold the keywords approx 2-4 % on the page also – don’t over do it

    07/21/2009

    Choosing a domain name

    Filed under: Your first website — Tags: , , , , — noble web design @ 3:27 am

     

    Choosing a domain name for your website and business

     

    To help your website and business flourish, pick a domain name that:

     

    1. is easy for Web users to remember and find
    2. suggests the nature of your product or service
    3. serves as a strong trademark so competitors won’t be able to use a business name or domain name similar to it, and is free of legal conflicts with trademarks belonging to other businesses

     

    So what makes a good domain name?

    Good extension – If a person is surfing around looking for a site, and they know its name, most people will try .com. So, for the web site owner who wants their site to be found, the rule is: if at all possible, get a .com name.

     

    Short – Less than 7 characters, ideally. A simple name will roll off the tongue more easily in conversation, look more professional, and have less chance of being mis-typed.

     

    Easy to spell – Make sure it passes the phone test: if you were to say the domain name of your website to a friend over the phone, would your friend be able to spell it correctly the first time without your having to spell it for them? If not, you’ve failed the phone test and should likely try a different domain name.

     

     Also, be careful about double letters. Take CyberRodeo, for example. Their domain uses a double R, as you might expect, but there is an uncertainty there. The two R’s together look a bit strange if written without capitalization, and a good name will not force the user to assume anything about the name. If you must have a double letter, the best solution is to buy both versions of the domain. Avoid using dashes in your domain name.

     

    Descriptive – A good site or business name will describe exactly what the site is about. In most cases it’s important for a person to be able to get some sort of sense what the website is about just by reading the domain name. Of course that logic doesn’t work for sites like ebay, amazon, ivillage, etc, but then again you likely don’t have a multi-million dollar budget to help you brand your name and teach people what it means.

     

    Keywords – Include descriptive keywords that describe your business, product or mission in your domain name. This will play a very small part, in some cases, in increasing your search engine ranking for search phrases that include the keywords used in your domain name.

     

    When shopping for a domain, it is also important to keep an eye open for domain name scams. The surging popularity of domain name affiliate programs has created countless “fly by night” operations; dozens of domain name resellers worldwide cease operations every month, often leaving the administrative status of the domains they leave behind up in the air. Making a purchase from a reseller is not a bad decision, but make sure to research the company’s history and credentials.

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