Your website should not just settle on any template design. You need to ask yourself, “Does my business template or copy another business”, “Am I just in it for the short-term success or the long-term”. McAllen Web Design offers a solution to these concerns and we deliver on the functionality and presence of your website so that it may be engaging and intriguing.

Before hiring someone to design your website, you need to think about the target audience first and foremost. What type of audience or crowd are you wanting to come to your website? Is it the young and hip crowd, married couples, young business professionals, teenagers, senior citizens? The type of audience you are targeting will reflect on the design that your website needs, and will affect your web presence. What is your website’s main objective and purpose? Hiring a web designer or developer that can first ask these questions, will be the one that can bring success to your business online.

Another thing you would need to do is make a rough draft of how you want your website to look in terms of architecture and functionality. Successful web designers will do this for you as well, if they don’t this raises a red flag. It does’nt have to be fancy, a paper and a pencil is enough to do the trick. At this time don’t think about the colors or the “design” of your website, just think of your website layout as blocks and build upon that. Having this done at the beginning of the process is very important and avoids having to go back and redoing the entire site again.

Consistency is an important step in designing your website. You don’t want each page to look different than the other one, so keeping it consistent is your best choice to make it look professional. All of your pages, images, color schemes, navigation menu and overall feel of your website should have commonality. This can be done even when you use different web applications, and of course this is where McAllen Web Design steps in and excels. Your visitor should feel like they’re on the same website no matter where they go throughout your site. This is to make your visitor feel as comfortable as possible while browsing your website.

When building your website, always remember that the user experience is first. Never sacrifice functionality for stylishness, your website needs to be able to navigate your user where you want them to go. If your visitor can’t find the information they are looking for on your website, chances are they’re going to leave very quickly. Having a website look and feel like ones from 10 years ago will not work in today’s world. Having a clean site that’s easy to read, user friendly, with relevant content is what makes a great website.

These 3 cities are not the only ones that we are able to serve, as we serve our clients on a natinowide and world-wide basis.  We are proud to be able to serve the Hispanic community of McAllen Web Design, Harlingen and Brownsville as well.  For the month of September we’d like to offer a special on Web Design and Development in the RGV community.  Anyone who contacts us on behalf of our blog post will receive 15% off their web design services.

We are able to create beautiful custom web designs, custom web applications, Internet Marketing, hosting and many more web needs.  If you are a business who needs to expand its services online don’t hesitate to contact anjstudio today!

Organizing your content is key in order for search engines to naturally spider and crawl your website for updated content, but it will also let you be able to publish certain material easier and faster.  This will definitely save you time in achieving end-results rather than having to go thorugh the HTML code and adding your content the old fashioned way.

We utilize two different type of custom CMS applications – WordPress & Expression Engine.  Unless you need a fully, diverse and completely custom built CMS applicaton from scratch than the ideal application would be WordPress.  If you’re business is in need of a custom CMS application, go ahead and contact us for a free quote.  We will show you how much time you will be able to save by using a Content Management System over the traditional way of inserting your content through HTML!

However those wanting a website are afraid to learn new technology and don’t believe that there’s such a thing as a simple content management system.

We offer a CMS with every site design that we create… why?  Because it’s not only beneficial for the end-user/company to manage their own content, photos and videos; it will also enbale them to compete with their competitors that don’t utilize the latest technology.  Those competitors without CMS will not only struggle to stay up with constant changes that need to be delivered online, but managing design changes can be difficult as well.

All simple content management system’s utilize CSS, PHP and MySQL.  The important part here in regards to design is XHTML/CSS.  CSS stands for cascading style sheets and was invented back in the late 1990’s.  It’s very important to design with CSS in mind today because it keeps the look and feel of your website consistent and gives you more control over the layout than HTML would ever do.

If you need to implement a simple content management system contact anjstudio today, we adhere to your needs!

There are a lot of different type of CMS applications that you can use, but we’ll be discussing WordPress today.  WordPress has been used as a blogging platform for many people for the past few years.  CMS WordPress is not a new term, but many people do not make the full use of it.  There are many types of CMS applications that are more complex as WordPress, such as Expression Engine.  However many small businesses, or even personal websites, do not need something complicated such as Expression Engine. 

With the vast amount of templates available for CMS WordPress, the sky’s the limit.  You can have any type of website as long as you can install the application on your server and modify the template according to its license, and to your capabilities.  The backend of WordPress is very simple to use and creating additional content is such a breeze.

One of the great part of WordPress is the extensive amount of plugins that are available for it.  A plugin is an addon to the application to enhance its usage and capabilities.  Utilizing these plugins will give you added benefits to using CMS WordPress. 

Another great part of WordPress is the usage of custom fields.  If you know how to program in PHP then you will be able to do many awesome things with the custom fields section of WordPress’s posts.  If you happen to download and use a template, they may contain instructions on what to use for the custom fields.  An example would be to create a thumbnail automatically based on the “name” portion of the custom field, and then inserting the image’s URL for the “value”.

If you’re interested in creating a Content Management System for your website that’s easy to manage, please don’t hesitate to contact us for a free quote.  We utilize CMS for all of our website’s because it’s easy for the customer to manage it on their own without paying a web designer to update content.  Contact us now for a free quote!

Not every CMS that’s available is search engine friendly, here are some examples of what I mean.

By default, many content management systems determine page URL’s with special characters.  These URL’s look like www.anjstudio.com/page.php?id=48&session=098 for example.  When the search engine crawls your website and sees a URL like that it’s going to throw a red flag. The same can be said for the title of your website.  Title needs to have specific keywords that are relevant to your posting so it can be indexed properly.  Many content management system’s won’t let you change the title format and meta descriptions for each individual page.

This will hinder your SEO strategy, unless you have the proper CMS and know how to change the configuration. Here at anjstudio we make sure to configure and optimize one of the two content management system’s that we use for our clients. For a simple blogging platform that can be configured to act as a CMS we lean towards WordPress.  It’s powerful enough to be configured for a typical website, however if you are needing to take complete control of your website then we would use Expression Engine.

Link building at this point in time, is one of the best ways of getting your website ranked properly; however without utilizing the proper anchor text in your hyperlink what good will it do?

SEO keyword analysis is not about coming up with the most researched keyword on the Internet.  It’s about proper term placement, knowing which keyword you will be able to rank better with, and knowing your competition.  You must design and code your website that is search engine friendly, meaning using CSS and being W3C validated.  Ultimately there are a lot of factors in this topic when it comes to keyword analysis and research that come into play, let’s go a bit further and discuss keyword research.

Finding The Right Keyword

You may be able to come up with at least 10-15 keywords that you think would sky rocket your website onto the first page of Google.  However, those keywords may not be the most popular ones that customers research when they are looking up information on the Internet.  Suppose you have a criminal defense law firm in San Diego.  You may think that “criminal defense attorneys san diego” is a very popular keyword and you would get thousands of visitors a week,  because everyone is going to beusing that to find your firm and you have 3 attorneys working in your firm.  After doing some keyword research and analysis, there are only about 200 searches on that particular keyword in a month.  However, because of keyword analysis, it would be better to use “criminal attorney san diego” because that keyword is being searched an average of 3000 times a month.

There are ways to rank for multiple keywords such as the above, however if you didn’t do any type of keyword research you would not have thought of the second term.  The best keywords have the following qualities:

• Keywords that have strong relevance to your website and content
• Keywords that have high search volume, the ones that people look for
• Keywords that have a low number of search results

If you need some assistance with finding the right keyword for your business, contact us for a cost free SEO keyword analysis.  If you ask nicely, we might even be able to offer a free analysis on keywords that your site is currently ranking for!

First let me cover what .htaccess is and how it’s utilized with your web hosting server.

Pretty much .htaccess is a file extension that is saved in the root folder of your server.  It is used with Apache servers and it affects the entire directory and all sub-directories.

For example, .htaccess that is located in our root directory (www.anjstudio.com) would affect www.anjstudio.com/blog, www.anjstudio.com/projects, etc.   All the commands that are in .htaccess are normally on one line only.  There are many useful things you can do with .htaccess such as password protectiong folders, blocking users via IP, blocking offline browsers, changing your default directory page/file, redirects, etc.  There are some sites that don’t allow .htaccess, but the percentage is small.

Okay, so now that you know what .htaccess is, here are some SEO strategies for .htaccess utilizing 301 Redirects.

There is a difference the way your site gets indexed, meaning www.anjstudio.com is NOT the same as anjstudio.com.  Google, for some reason or another, still considers these two formats as two seperate domains.  A 301 Redirect code will redirect one format to the other and keep it the same throughout the Internet.  Here’s how you enable 301 Redirects:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www. yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The ‘(*.)$’ just means that anything that comes after http://anjstudio.com and append it to the end of http://www.anjstudio.com and redirect to that particular URL.

The “RewriteEngine On” text only needs to be typed once on top of your .htaccess file.

To do a 301 Redirect from www to non-www it would look like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This keeps everything under “1″ domain and that way your SEO work hasn’t gone to waste.

You can continue to follow my SEO Guide by clicking the RSS Feed icon on the top right of the page.  You can also receive a custom quote for San Diego SEO by contacting me here. ]]> http://www.anjstudio.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/seo-htaccess-301-redirects/feed/ 0 http://www.anjstudio.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/seo-guide-part-i/ http://www.anjstudio.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/seo-guide-part-i/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 08:51:55 +0000 admin http://www.anjstudio.com/?p=422 SEO is always a struggle for businesses who want to get noticed online.  Having a website does not mean you’re going to start getting traffic from all sorts of places instantly.  If you do not have some type of strategy or businss plan for SEO, then your web site is just taking up space.  

It makes no sense for a business to have a website if they are not marketing it properly online.  They may have a marketing department who is able to do their job offline, and they think that just having a website is going to somehow “mysteriously” bring them traffic.

Most often then that, the website first isn’t bulit to accordance with W3C.  If you’ve never heard of W3C, here’s a quote from wikipedia.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web

They provide standards when coding a website.  You may ask yourself, “so what’s the big deal with SEO and W3C?”  Here are a few reasons why your website needs to be  W3C validated:

• Clean code goes a long way, and only by utilizing CSS and XHTML will get you there, not tables.
• Compliance helps ensure accessibility for the disabled.
• Being validated also means that your website is accessible from a number of different browsers and even mobile devices.  
• Your website will function the same regardless of screen resolution or platform.

Being W3C validated goes a long way, and it’s almost essential for SEO.  Having clean code, the search engine crawler will be able to easily navigate through all of your content and links, and pick up on keywords easier than if your site was messy.  

SEO can be very tedious because of the fact that it takes a long time and a lot of time to do it properly.  If you’re business does not have a department or someone who specializes in SEO, then you really need to find a business who will be able to provide that service for you.  Over the next few days I’ll be going into more in depth SEO techniques and strategies that we utilize here at anjstudio for our clients.

You can continue to follow my SEO Guide by clicking the RSS Feed icon on the top right of the page.

the “TEUK” approach.

“TEUK” came to me when I saw a child selling lemonade in my neighborhood this past week.  This was a future business man in the making, because he was implementing “SEO” into what he believed.  The “TEUK”, or Tell Everyone You Know, is basically SEO on the streets.  In order to make 5 or 10 cents 50 cents on a glass of lemonade nowadays, you have to be marketable.  You have to be able to tell everyone on the streets that you are open for business and that you have the absolute best lemonade available!  SEO & TEUK have the same concept when you think about it – telling people (or on the Internet, search engines) what they want to hear or what you offer.  If you tell someone on the street that you’re selling grapefruit when they might be looking for lemonade, you’re not going to make a sale.

SEO is the same concept when you break it down to something that you understand.  Search Engines utilize something called a web crawler, or “spider”.  When search engines crawl your site they look for content and to provide up-to-date data.  Web Crawlers visit a site and make a copy of it that is later “indexed” by the search engine in order to provide results when someone types in a keyword to search.  What’s important is that you know what these spiders look for when you’re optimizing your website.  Here is some information that is important, because it’s what we do in our San Diego SEO Services.

Keyword Research – The first step in SEO is to determine what keyword you want to rank for.  By ranking, I mean getting to the top of the search engine pages.  There are many things when researching keywords to determine which one to use, such as analyzing competition, determining KEI, total results, searches per month, past searches and then finally implementing the keyword throughout your website for optimization.

HTML Tag – One of the simplest forms of implementing your keyword is to insert it into the <title> tag of your website.

<head>
<title>Insert Title For Website Along With Keywords</title>
</head>

Having the <title> tag being first in the head area is extremely important as well, as this will be one of the first things that the spiders will find when crawling your website.   H1-H6 tags are also very important because it tells the search engines “Hey this particular keyword wrapped in the h1 tag is the most important topic title on this website”, and so forth.  H1 having the most important, and H6 having the least important.  Other things to optimize would be properly utilizing <em> & <strong> tags, alt attributes and title attributes.  Did you also know that you could optimize your images to be SEO friendly as well?  There’s so much to learn!

Clean Code – What I mean by clean code is having a nicely, organized and user friendly website where you will be able to find particular pages by category and so forth.  It doesn’t make sense to have a page such as www.anjstudio.com/web-design/how-to-make-orange-juice.htm because the topic how to make orange juice has nothing to do with web design.  Relevancy is extremely important when it comes to SEO, and this is something a lot of people and web designers overlook when doing SEO on a website.  CSS is also very important as it is becoming the standard when coding websites now.  Nobody uses tables anymore, so you shouldn’t either!  Also, when hiring a web designer, please make sure he/she uses CSS when coding websites and not tables.  CSS makes pages “lighter” as all the styling of the design and layout is done in the CSS.  Properly using <ul> and <li> will keep your site organized too by constructing menus of important areas of our site.

Quality Content – Now that you’ve learned a few things from what I wrote, you’re going to go out and spam keyword all over your website.  If you’re going to write a blog, or a paragraph for your website, you need to make sure that the content is not copied from elsewhere and pasted into your website.  Quality content is very important as search engines love fresh and unique content for their indexing.  Updating your website on a weekly basis is a good start, the more the better as spiders will keep coming back to your site and delivering the new information for users to search for.

anjstudio offers San Diego SEO Services, for a free quote go ahead and contact us today so we may use the “TEUK” strategy.