The business is based in York, and they will be running Salsa lessons and classes for people of all levels, from beginners to advanced, for people who are serious about salsa, keeping fit, or just wanting to have fun.

The brief was simple, an attractive informational site, with a colour palette to be described as ‘using sexy colours’ and the overall site to have a subtle ’sexiness’ to it.

Take a look at how I went working on this site and the final product at www.salsasource.co.uk

As most of you will already know, Google is rated by many as the number one search engine in the world.  Infact, the term ‘Google it’ seems to have turned into an everyday phrase.

There are a few basic search engine optimisation techniques which I still see people missing.  These simple additions should really be the first thing you would include to stay ahead of competitors.

The Right Keywords

Choosing the right keywords to base your site optimisation around is an important first step. General or generic keywords are usually not the best approach, and sometimes it’s better to be a little more specific and focus on niche keywords relating to your product or service.

Be specific, which means:

• Targeting a more suitable market that is looking for a content editing solution
• Competing with fewer websites targeting the same keywords
• Optimising for keywords that people actually use when performing searches

Depending on your website, your products or the services you offer, you need to be specific with your keywords, and remember that people no longer use single keyword search phrases – the average search phrase contains 3-5 related words.

For example, if you’re optimising for a web development site and you’re located in Bradford, West Yorkshire, use keywords such as “web, development, bradford” or “web, development, west, yorkshire” would be a good start.

Remember, don’t keyword stuff!!!

Too many times have I seen website with the keywords such as “web design, web designer, designer, web, web developer, web site designer, web site developer”.  This might look like you have lots of keywords geared toward web design, but believe it or not Google will not respond well to this and will mark you down for keyword stuffing.  Why have a phrase of 14 words, when 3 will do.

URL and Title Tag

These are two of the most determining factors in Google’s ranking. For example, a domain name such as: http://www.webdevelopmentbradford.com will generally get ranked higher than http://www.companyname.com, assuming that they had identical keywords and page content.

Your title tag is equally as important as your domain name. Using keywords in your title tag can improve your Google ranking significantly.  For example:

<title>”Company name, affordable web development services in Bradford, West Yorkshire”</title>

H1 Tags and Keyword Density

<h1> tags seem to have been depreciated by stylesheets these days, and are not used as often as they used to be.  The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you’re using a <h1> tag, then the text in between this tag must be more important than the content on the rest of the page. Here’s a quick example:

Sprinkling keywords throughout your page content can also improve your sites keyword density.  Keyword density means the ratio of optimised keywords to the rest of the content on your page. It is usually expressed as a percentage, and should be between 7% and 10% for each page on your site.  There are a few sites out there to help you along with making sure you’re not keyword stuffing, but in my opinion www.rankingtoday.com is definately a tool to have in your arsenal for Search Engine Optimisation.

Links, Links and More Links

Back links are websites that link directly to your website. The general principal is the more back links you have, the higher your pages will be ranked, as your website must be good if so many other sites are linking back to it.

One of the easiest ways to get backlinks if you run a web development company is by simply adding a simple link to the bottom of each of your client’s websites, with your clients permission of course, such as:

<a href=http://www.yoursite.com>Web development by Company Name</a>

Validate your HTML

One thing people overlook is that there HTML doesn’t validate.  While this isn’t always a major worry, if you want to get further up the search engine let get tidying up.  Use the W3C Validator to check if you have any errors in your HTML.  If you do, find out what they are from the report and fix them.  Depending on how many errors you have, it shouldn’t take too long to resolve them and it will benefit your site.

Conclusion

People say “Google is a tough search engine to crack”.  Truth is, its not (as long as you do as Google likes, and steer clear of hinderances). Hopefully  I provided you with the basic tips to get started optimising both yours and your clients website.

Impressed with what I read about the different rendering engines built into one, and that is it the ‘Fastest Browser’, plus getting 100 / 100 on the Acid 3 test, I decided to test it out.

Switch Rendering Engines

Thats right, three different rendering engines built into one browser.  Internet Explorer’s Trident, Firefox’s Gecko and Safari’s / Chrome’s WebKit all incorporated the ability to switch between rendering engines can allow web designers/developers to avoid browser specific issues with certain web sites.

Fully Customizable with Skins

Skins can be installed very quickly and easily, and with 200+ to choose from, you can personalise to your hearts content.  To be fair, some of the skins are a little tacky, but there are a few cool ones in there too.

Abundant Plug-ins

Lunascape have a vast library of plug-ins available to further expand the potential power of this browser.

To see how this browser can benefit you, simple download and install it from www.lunascape.tv

I am pleased to see that some people have taken the time to look at my site on these galleries and even voted, for which I thank you for your generous scores.  I hope my design has triggered inspiration for you as many of the sites featured on CSS galleries are my source of inspiration.

I’m still ironing out a few creases, and have certain extras I wish to include, such as some nice effects in the form of jQuery (JavaScript library), and see what else I can get out of Wordpress.  I have recently been playing with sIFR technology to get some cool typography going instead of the standard fonts.

As I mentioned, I’m still cleaning up things as I’m developing, trying to make sure I have perfectly validating code, to W3C Web Standards.  I’m sure I have missed a few things at the moment, but its still early days for the new design.

Keep posted for more changes, there are plenty on the way.

Cheers, Dom.

I am a professional / freelance web and graphic designer living between Bradford and Halifax, near Leeds, in West Yorkshire. I work as a full time web designer and this has been my profession since for the last few years.

What’s my site about?

My portfolio website is here to showcase the websites I have created, offer inspiration to other designers and hopefully bring in some freelance work.

What are my skills?

I have strong XHTML/CSS skills, jQuery and Javascript, understand the workings of effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and have a good knowledge of Photoshop, (plus I can make a hell of a cuppa).

So, what do I do?

• XHTML / CSS Websites
• CMS Websites
• Wordpress / Blog Themes
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Design For Print
• Graphic Design Projects

Everyone does that, why should you chose me?

• Hand crafted, bespoke web sites from scratch for every project
• I’m a perfectionist

If I sound like the kind of person you could see yourself working with for your next project, if you require any more information, or if you simply fancy a cuppa, please get in touch by going to my contact page