Now is 2011 and the websites have to go developing better and better, so we from Artwish studio has built 5 main things which every website should have this year.

Social Media Widgets or simply said Facebook and Twitter

What if you have a Facebook page or Twitter account and you have never linked it in your website?  Always make sure you integrate them with your website, that way the customers can glide between your existing in Internet.

Also, you know how popular “Like button” is, make sure you have one on each page. That way you are most likely to get more and more popularity on your Facebook page. And to import your Twitter feed to your website like posting the latest news so everybody can see them is not a bad idea either.

Facebook and Twitter not only keep you connected to your customers but they also help you when your own fans spread the word between each other and that brings definitely more business for you. Very easy they can share your publication and like it and even tweet about your newest product. Who would skip a free advertising, think about this!

Why don’t you share your day in the way you like it or simply create a Blog

Due to the blog, you can be connected with your customers every single day and will help a lot to your business. It is like a forum where you share what’s going on. You can post some sales or discounts that everyone will like. You can share your personal opinion for the newest product or service that you offer. If you don’t have any of these nowadays just tell stories for the business and the people you work with and how great they are. This will develop some personal relationships with your customers that will be enormously helpful.

You can integrate your Blog with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, so customers can follow your blog at any time. The comments section on your blog will become 2-way forum and will allow your customers to leave feedback and even talk to each other.

The most important feature of the blogs is that they are great for search engines. You can’t even imagine how easy they will boost your small business website’s ranking by creating a rich keyword content. Make sure you use specific words that will help you find new customers when they are looking for similar business to yours.

As e reference look around in our blog to see what I am talking about…

Search where you are or just use the Local Search.

What would you prefer a business which is miles and miles away or something which is very close to where you are located?  These days most of the people use their smart phones or tablets to search specifically for small businesses which are near them. Statistics from the most recent census.gov  in 2010 have said that 87% of adults online used a search engine daily to find information on the web.

It was 2010 when Google created it this great feature “Google Places”. That service allows you to create profile pages with images, videos, coupons, sales. A great website for the local business and is to be tied to Google Maps. Google Places results very often come up at the top of every local search results. They can be even tied to a computer’s IP address, even when people do not explicitly search with a local phrase.

Google Places and the website optimization with local keyword will put your business in the top level of local business. It will rank really high in search results and it will bring some many new customers.

Why don’t we just watch it on Video

Unfortunately, but a fact, many people today grew up with television and don’t wish to catch a book and read it. Here comes the video on your website which will bring that audience. Depending on the subject of the video and how long it is, that might keep people for many minutes on your website. And think how much more convenient is for customers to learn about your small business and the products and services that you offer.

WSI Superior Web Solutions report that about “52% of online video ad viewers take action and 16% make purchases” . Since we were small kids we are taught to react to video, why just don’t add one to your website as well.

Find your perfect and always available Web Designer

We can just enjoy the nowadays internet changes and wait for the new ones which appear so quickly. Your active web designer can make your changes as fast as possible so your web site will be updated all the time.

A good web designer knows what’s going on and his job is to be updated with the new technologies all the time. And having him all the time will be helpful to be always in the first pages of search engines.

Artwish studio can offer you such service and you need to know that with us you won’t be ever alone on the web. We provide very affordable maintenance and support ideas which will help keep your website running and always succeeding.

Let’s compare the advantages and disadvantages of both website design alternatives:

Template Website Designs

A template website is a very popular design  and it has been used from many businesses. The designs are usually generic, but recently more template designs are creative and unique. You can find many templates in Internet but you have to be very careful when choosing one. Some of them are just very expensive and not worth it because they use outdated technology.

It doesn’t mean that if the template is cheap is not good. Some the most inexpensive ones are some of the best. Surprisingly, some of the cheapest templates are also some of the best. Theme Forest offers a wide range of templates that are well-developed,  very stylish, catching eye and inexpensive. You can find even for $10-$20 and it would work perfect for you.

Advantages

• Cheap. The standard packages include a free design template.
• Choice. There are extremely many templates across the Internet to choose from.
• Speed. Your website can be ready in few weeks.

Disadvantages

• Copycats. Very possible other companies to use the same template design or even these other companies to be your competitors.
• Limited. You can’t pick your own color or style. Whatever the template offers you, that it.
• Common. Your business is not going to shine with its unique since the templates are built for everybody.

Custom Website Designs

If you want your website to be the only one, never been copied before and have its own characteristics and creativity, here comes the custom website design. Of course this feature of your web design will increase the popularity of your business brand and will bring more personal relationships with your clients.

Advantages

• Unique. The colors and the style will be the same like your corporate colors. The website will match to your marketing aspects and idea.

• Personality. Just add a face. It could be even your face. Or just make the website fun to read, with jokes and humoristic stories. Or if you want add some professional idea.
• Credibility. Custom website designs appear to stand out, and it shows you plan to stick around when you make the investment.

Disadvantages

• Expensive. You will spend lots of money for a website which is a custom called it. You can go and check our prices which are one of the cheapest at the market.
• Time. You have to provide many additional pictures, themes for building the design. You have to also make suggestions and revisions of the design which usually take a lot of your time
• Freedom. A custom design starts with a blank canvas and can become anything. Sometimes, too many options can be difficult to manage if you don’t have a specific vision.

If you just start your business, we would recommend you not to spend lots of money and just get a template design to start with. The first website is kind of an experiment and the right path for growing business. But on the other side the company logo is of great importance for you business presence and presentation and we recommend not to save money on that.

And of course if you can spend some extra money and have your own style, colors, and specific vision of your business website, just do it.

If you have any questions on which design is right for your small business you can get a free consultation on our website and we will make sure to answer you as soon as possible!

If you read this you have already made the first step, just contact us and good luck with your future success

It is a very important step for the companies right now to create, publish and promote their company blog. If a company has a blog that produces quality content is less likely to get be a spam than an article that got submitted to a general distribution site. A company’s blog can also be qualified in a pretty high position in the search engines and can bring more traffic to the main site.

Why do you think that you need a blog? Here are the answers:

• Due to the blog you can target specific keywords per post. This gives you the opportunity use keywords more than the others. The words have to be the ones that match with the subjects in your website. It also allows you to target completely different keywords that you decided to remove from your site entirely.
• Company blogs allow you to give a your personal opinion and voice to your business and brand. They allow you to communicate directly with your consumers in a very informal way and encourage consumer feedback.
• Company blogs are a great place for company news and updates very quickly. If you want to structure a press release that definitely will take you hours or even days but if you post it informal on you blog that consumers will get it immediate.
• Running a blog and posting helpful information can help you rank your company as an industry expert. If you write your own content,  rather than copying articles and work from other writers, you would make your consumers trust you. Your blog could be found and understood as a useful and credible source of information for anybody searching for information about your industry. This is one of the things building the reputation of  your company.
• You have also the possibility to establish business relations with members of your industry because of your blog. It is always good if you invite them to write comments on your blog. When you do same thing in their blogs that means meaningful relationship.

It is not just important to have a company blog but also you have to write daily in it. Updating it once per month, it is not worth it even developing one. If you can do it at least once per week, that would help very much o your Google engines and to consumers appreciation.

Ok, you make your own website.

Over the past five years numerous studies have found that search engines bring 80% or more of the traffic websites. If your site is not indexed and shown in search engines it loses its main purpose – advertising.

The practice shows that for companies providing any services: About 80% of customers seeking a service come from the Internet and 80% of users coming from the Internet – from search engines.

Well, you’ve already convinced that search engines are important. Should you give money from the last budget of your site to achieve high ranking by Seo optimization? Or you can use the paid advertising like Pay per Click – PPC? It is very difficult to decide especially if you do not have a marketing strategy like the most small business companies, and at the other side if you ask people how they find services or products, they will answer through search engines and especially Google.

Use both methods of marketing. Optimize your site through optimization Seo, and at times, use click advertising – banners, links, Google Adwords and other advertising networks.

SEO vs Pay per Click

People with professional advertising experience and SEM experts argue that SEO is a waste of time. Seo companies can not do much to improve your Google rankings with SEO and is time and money consuming. Optimizers do say that while SEO can take more time to achieve results and can not guarantee first results. The website ranking is long-term investment and is very effective, much like public relations and should be a very important part of your marketing mix.

Traditional Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of fine tuning (optimizing) your web site for detection of specific keywords and phrases that are appropriate for your business and you want to attract visitors looking for such words in a search engine.

This refers to the optimization of different elements, not just the home page of your site, its subgroups and subpages. These elements may include terms such as meta tags, link structure – link – popularity – site content.

Once your website structure and layout is well optimized, make sure that is already indexed in search engines and then start adding more pages to the site, possibly on the same topic. Search engines will start with the homepage of your site and then move to other pages and its subpages.

Search engine optimization also means that your site is included in the main directories such as Yahoo and Open Directory to show the search engines that it is important site. Other elements of SEO include monitoring of positioning in search engines, maintenance and updates for your site, support to remain in top positions, constantly launching new links, writing new articles and new content.

Advertising with pay per click.

Pay Per Click or PPC is a service, the advertiser selects specific keywords or phrases and then creates a list of that keywords and the website will appear when someone searches for that phrase. The advertiser chooses the amount paying for each click on their registration, which leads to visit the site – thus the term “pay per click”. If other advertisers have chosen the same keyword or phrase such as yours, then compete with them for the highest position that is through cost per click.

What makes PPC ads attractive is that paid ads are distributed to many partner sites. In fact, if you have made an offer for one of the first three positions on Overture (for example) your ad will appear in some of the leading search engines including Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, HotBot, Infospace, iWon, Lycos and other partner sites.

If you use the largest network – Google AdWords, then your ads will appear immediately on thousands of sites and effect on website traffic and sales you will gain.

What pay per click allows you to do is immediately “pay” the way to the top having in mind that traditional SEO takes time and effort.

Arguments in support for SEO – the pros and cons of pay per click

Above all we must understand that the PPC (pay per click) will not help improve your positioning in normal search results. PPC results always appear in the “Top”, “Sponsored” or “Paid Area”, which is usually at the top or side of regular search results.

Although it is nice to your site first appears there are still many users who do not click on paid advertisements, but rather look through regular search results (organic search). The only way to optimize website and rank high in these regular results is through effective SEO program.

In most cases, once you are well positioned in the regular search results, your site will continue to receive “free” traffic while obviously when you stop paying for advertising, sales traffic stops or decreases.

Think about the fact that optimization comes with a high degree of reliability and trust. Traffic coming from traditional search always has higher conversion rates, while pay per click is no guarantee that competition will not click on your ads and spend your money for nothing.

Perhaps the most compelling reasons not to exclude the SEO of your online marketing strategy depends on the price. In some niches click advertising may be advantageous because there is no major competition for the keywords and phrases, and in another area could be very expensive.

There is one major disadvantage of traditional SEO. It often takes several months to achieve the initial results and it is not easy to control.

Do not allow web designers to dictate your marketing strategy.

Web designers often use Flash, JavaScript or DHTML navigation tools, dynamic content management or other techniques to make the most of your site design. Each of them is a great challenge to the search engine spiders.

Web designers often have no idea how search engines work and what are their capabilities. They have other goals in designing Web sites such as:

• The site to look interesting and unique.

• Fill and use the maximum amount of space on the site for real estate (for example).

• Use the existing design techniques to deliver the message in more effective way to the end user.

• Processing of content in an efficient manner saving a large amount of work.

• These are all very important objectives but most often the final design is not “friendly” to search engines.

There are even sites where content is completely hidden from search engines. Search engine optimization can help to save the contents of your site and also make it perfectly discoverable by search engines. The final advantage of Seo optimization is that a good site with rich content will make it more discoverable and visited on many keywords.

Several advantages of PPC – pay per click.

• With PPC programs you select your keywords and write your own ads.

• You control where and what ads to display and even who can see it (locally)

• You decide your budget and you can adjust your costs based on the results or events.

By tracking the results of the PPC campaign  you can create a knowledge based on your business. This knowledge can help to improve and define your business goals and services.

Tracking also allows you to understand your ROI (return on investment) of a specific marketing initiative, and gives you confidence to spend more money on more advertising. You might think at the beginning that spending like 1000 dollars per month for PPC campaign is just wasted money but once you measure the ROI you may realize that it’s worth.

Why would users click on paid results when they can click on the unpaid (organic) results?

Although it is true that when consumers seek information, they prefer the organic results.  It is also true that if they are willing to pay for that product or service this is preferable as well.

PPC programs give immediate results.

Once you’ve selected keywords and run your ad, only a matter of hours is your site to come to a wide audience of users (depends only on your budget). You can cancel your ad at any time.

Pay per Click or SEO services?

In fact, both SEO and PPC is part of a good and balanced SEM strategy. If it is necessary to improve the quality and quantity of your customers as quickly as possible. PPC is the right answer. If you want to get the highest return on investment, improve your search and detection in at least two times lower price for long-term sales, SEO optimization is what you need. For most companies the maximum possible success is a combination of both services.

SEO and PPC are complementary. In fact Pay per Click program can help identify the most successful search keywords and later to be used to optimize the site with. A campaign that includes both – and PPC and SEO helps climbing the site more effectively in search engine results – SERP.

Conclusion

If you have a business and you do not have your own website – make it now and make it with good strategy. Site traffic achieved through either organic optimization, PPC, or both, should be an essential component of the overall marketing mix of a company.

Frequently updating increases the chance of your website to be found and visited from the search engines and their robots. You can’t be 100% sure that the robots will visit your website every week even if you update your content every day. But you are definitely loosing positions if you don’t do it.

The company websites very often get a common problem because they would rather focus on their new products but not updating their website content with the new information.  For these kinds of websites there is a compromised decision. No matter what is the main theme of your website, it would be very helpful if you include News in your content. News can vary like company, business or RSS news. The main idea is to attract the search engines.

How can I write optimization content in my website?

It is very import how you formulate the content of your website. If you would like your content to have a good SEO optimization and your website to have an excellent inner optimization, the way to do it is to formulate your content in a certain lane or a similar one. And of course if you don’t want to follow the lane then at least  follow some rules otherwise you are making a big mistake. Get more info about onPage optimization or look at the graphic on the right hand side.

Current subjects and how to add new content more often in your website.

If you are doing SEO optimization for online store, you are a lucky person. You will ask why that way is. The answer is easy: you have a fresh content that appears very often and you need just to create a new title and arrange the paragraph. But even if you do SEO on a simple business website it is not that hard at all.

One of the fine points of the optimization of a business site is that your website has to be serious. If the content is mostly like an advertisement instrument and there are no real benefits for your visitors, then your content is absolutely useless. Keep in mind that even having a business with products your texts have to give information which will make them more attractive for the customers and search engines. It is always better if you have many products that you want to add and if you would like to do specials on some of them that freaks the search engines out.

Also depending on what your business is for you can include many different kinds of automatically updating of the information. These kinds can be a list of the most popular products, a list of the new products, products on sale, a script for following the orders or even an online calculator. This update can bring you many new visitors or to increase your rating. Same thing would do a page with special sales.

Including news for past and future events will increase the traffic in your website as well. You can also include news for events of similar business which you will visit.  Some companies even go further when their executive director opens a blog and write unofficially about the things which happen in the company. Sometimes he would even speak about his life or personal things but from the company name. These blogs attract the visitors especially if the information is true. The alternative way of getting updated information is RSS emissions. They become more and more popular and if you search harder you can even find free content for any type of business.

Make the text bold or italicize it.

When you have a lot of text you very often wonder what should have been bold or italicized so your readers or search engines can pay attention to more important parts. Even if the search engines can’t read the texts the way people can, they have their own methods to find the important points in your text. Here are some of the helpers:

1)      Pick subtitles in your texts.

2)      Make the texts bold or italicize it.

3)      Emphasize a particular word.

The search engines see which text is enclosed in tags <b> or <i>. In this way they understand that this part is more important than the rest of the text. Apparently you have never allowed the tags to be overused  because this will most likely lose the main effect of searching.

Duplicating the content

There is one very important question when you add new content: Is the content unique? Because if it is not and you stole it from another website this will bring you just troubles. Even being for free and you are allow to use it, think about this that maybe you are not the only one using this text. If you have the rights to change the text, better do it and in this way it won’t be the exact same copy of the other website and it won’t be understand like a “duplicated content” from the search engines.

If you are not able to fight with the filter for the duplicated content, which has been used for awhile from the search engines with the aim to filter the copy information, you would experience the fact that your website might stop existing in the content of the search engines.

The problem with the duplicated content appeared when some webmasters started making copies of same pages with a different title. Their aim was to make the search engines to think that their website has more content that it actually have had. The answer of the search engines was the creation of the filter for duplicated content which deletes the suspicious websites. Unfortunately this filter deletes sometimes normal websites when the description of the products are given from the vendors to many companies and they have to be kept the same.

As you see the duplicated content can be a serious problem. You can always fight this when you periodically check in internet for similar websites to yours. You can use http://copyscape.com. If you find similar to your text and they are not websites that you have created then you can connect to the webmaster of the certain website and ask him to delete it. Or you can change the text of you website and hoping that you will get rid of the punishment for the duplicated text. The websites for products that have the same description provided from the vendor and they appear as a duplicated website can be avoided very easily if you just add a section for comments from the visitors and buyers where they can log in and leave their opinion which will be unique for the search engines.