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Title: Why Your Web Designer Should Know About Web Marketing
Author: Halstatt Pires
Article:
Many excellent web designers know next to nothing of web
marketing, and this can be a big problem. Marketing a site in
search engines requires that the site be designed in a search
engine compatible format. Many beautiful sites do not fare well
in search engines at all simply because of the way they have
been designed. Here are some things web designers should know
about web marketing.
Load Times
Beautiful sites with lots of graphics may look awesome, but are
often so slow to download that web visitors, particularly on
dial-up connections, will simply go elsewhere before the site
even finishes downloading. Some search engines also may penalize
sites for being to slow.
File Names
When designing a site, all of the file names of the site should
be representative of what's on each page. File names like
page_1.html are not helpful in conveying what is on the page.
Search engines look for sites that are relevant and that are
clear about the information being provided. Descriptive, yet
short names, like web_marketing_design.php tell not only search
engines spiders what's on a page, but humans as well.
URLs
Similar to file names, URLs should be created in formats that
that are meaningful to humans and search engines. Often URLs are
a combination of domain names, directory names and file names.
All of these elements should be descriptive of what's on the
site, the directory and the page respectively.
Also, many shopping cart use URLs such as
http://www.somesite.com/store/index.php?pid=2786247642. Looking
at this URL, neither search engine nor human can determine the
contents of the page.
http://www.somesite.com/store/widgets.php?product=sky_hook_widget
s is much better. It seems most major search engines will now
index pages with question marks in the URL, yet this may still
hinder some smaller search engines. Shopping carts that do not
use question marks in the URL are available and make for cleaner
looking URLs that are easier to remember, such as
http://www.somedomain.com/store/sky_widgets.
Alt Tags
Alt tags are displayed when graphics have been turned off. A
surfer may turn off graphics to get better Internet speed or may
rely on alt tags because of physical impairment. This is
probably why search engines still seem to weigh alt tags into
their search ranking algorithms. Many web designers leave alt
tags blank, when in fact they could be populated with keyword
laden and accurate descriptions of the images.
Usability
There are certain elements that users of the web have come to
expect of the sites they encounter. Examples would be Home and
Contact buttons. Have you ever been to a web site and found
yourself digging for the Home or especially the Contact button?
I don't know about you, but I find this quite annoying. Ahh…
What a breathe of fresh air to go to a web site and find the
menu in the same location on every page and have the first
button be Home and the last button Contact. Mmmm, I get warm
just thinking about it. Yet, designers are driven by aesthetics
and beauty. "How boring to always have the same menu format!"
might be one web artist's cry. Boring - perhaps. Easy to use?
Yes. When it comes to marketing and web sites, easy-to-use goes
a long way toward making a sale.
Meta Tags
Commonly Web designers will put the same meta tags on every page
of a site. This is not nearly as effective at getting ranked in
the search engines as focusing the meta tags of each page to a
few specific and accurate keywords on the page. The goal of
search engines is to bring relevant data to its users. Having
page specific meta tags is another way of showing not just
search engines, but your visitors as well, exactly what your
page is about. This makes finding your pages that much easier.
Generally, before designing a site, it is a good idea to
determine your keywords first. Determining your keywords is the
topic of another article altogether. Once keywords have been
determined, the site can be designed in such a way as to focus
most on those keywords, in the domain name, directory names,
file names, the menu names, the alt tags and meta tags.
Designing your keywords into your site will give you a huge
advantage over many competitors and is much easier than
designing keywords into a site after it has been designed.
About the author:
Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with
http://www.marketingtitan.com - an Internet marketing firm in
San Diego offering automated web site systems through
http://www.businesscreatorpro.com.
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