If you`ve ever been to a badly designed website, you know it. The colors might not work together, the text is hard to read and some fonts are too small or too hard to read. While not all websites have these issues, it`s a simple fact that if a website design is difficult to look at and understand, no one will stay on the page. It`s just too easy to click away and go somewhere else.

Proper website design doesn`t just have to do with visual elements, though. While this is what will appeal to your visitors, there are plenty of other important things to consider in website design.

Navigation is something that should be carefully considered. Is it easy to get around your website? There should be a link to the home page on every page of the site. Having a good navigation system is not only good for your visitors, it will also help the search engines index all the webpages.

SEO actually begins with the website design, so be sure that your designer is incorporating meta tags, headers and other important bits of information right into the design, making it SEO friendly. The right designer will be able to create ideal website for your business.

Social bookmarking is all the craze. Everyone’s doing it. But why?

Is it links? Is it traffic? Is it keeping up with the Jones’s?

Well, it can’t be links because not all social bookmarking sites give link love. Many do, but not all of them do. In fact, some of the best ones for links are the smaller ones. The biggers, except for a tiny few, don’t give link juice.

But the what the big social media sites do provide that none of the smaller ones provide is traffic. You may not get any link love from StumbleUpon, but you’ll likely get a lot more traffic that you will from that small site you can’t remember the name of. So which is the more valuable? Traffic or links? Well, which one has the money?

Both traffic and links are valuable. If you get enough inbound links with the right anchor text then you’ll rise in the search engines. The higher you go in the search rankings for the right key terms the more traffic you’ll get. So there is a pay off. The source of traffic, however, is just as important as the number of new visitors. So keep that in mind.

For instance, would you rather get 1,000 new visitors from a Google search query or from StumbleUpon? I’ll take the organic traffic any day. Though social bookmarking does have its benefits - traffic and links.

What I’m saying is this: Take some time out to bookmark your blog posts and web site pages. Don’t give up on organic SEO, but add the social mixing to your repertoire of marketing skills too.

Templates are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you can build a website fast using a template and make it look the way you want it to look with no problems. But not all templates are created equal.

The one thing to look out for when you use a template is the source code. You want to make sure the template is easily crawled by the search engines. Otherwise, it won’t matter at all how attractive your website is.

A good template should be written with html, not Flash, and not primarily in Javascript. CSS and php are OK, but in my experience they work better as support rather than primary code. I’ve seen good templates based on tables, though you get a lot more code with tables than you do with CSS and that will increase your code-to-text ratio. Still, if you are building a local website where the competition is slim then that won’t matter much. In a more competitive field you might opt for the CSS over the tables.

The best way to use a template, however, is to modify it for your own purposes. You might take a template and use it exactly as it is, but I’d recommend altering it whenever possible for several reasons:

1. You don’t want your website looking like everyone else’s. While it is highly unlikely that two people in the same industry will pick the exact same template and make their sites look just alike, it is possible. Take the extra step to prevent that by altering your template somewhat.
2. A modified template is more unique. You will undoubtedly have special needs that will have to be considered. Altering a template to meet those needs will make your life on the Web much easier.
3. You learn more. When building your website, you don’t learn anything by taking a template and using it as it is. You’ll learn a lot more about coding if you practice and the best practice is on a template where the code is already laid out for you, but you have the option to modify it. That way, if you screw something up you can alway go back to the original version and start over.
4. SEO. This is the most important thing. Not all templates are SEO-friendly. You want yours to be. By modifying the code, if your template doesn’t start out search engine friendly then you can make it search engine friendly with the right modifications.

That’s it. Have fun with your new web template.

Should your domain name be your brick and mortar business name? Many businesses, when they go online to build their first website and start marketing, will assume that their business name should be their domain name. But not necessarily.

Let’s say you own a lumber company named Jack’s located in Denver, Colorado. All the locals simply know it as Jack’s and when they are ready to go buy lumber they just say, “I’m heading on over to Jack’s.” Do you want your website domain name to be Jacks.com?

Chances are, that’s already taken. But you may be tempted to find other variations of the word Jack’s that fit with lumber. The obvious would be jackslumber.com. If it’s not taken then it could be the best bet for you; but what if it is taken? What then?

It’s much more important to have a domain name with your most important keyword in it. In other words, if you had a choice to have a domain name with the word “Jack” in it versus a domain name with the word “lumber” in it then you’d be better off with using “lumber.” The reason is because you want to rank for your important keyword as much as you can and as high in the rankings as you can. While the domain name is not the most important part of your web rankings calculation, the search engines do consider domain name. It’s just one of the criteria that they look at.

Therefore, when coming up with a domain name for your company, try to find one that best represents your company brand and that uses your most important keyword. It’s OK even to create a separate brand online that will serve as an extension of your off line business.

Need links? Here are three link building techniques that work like a charm:

• Directory Submissions - You can’t get by online without directory submissions. We’ll find all the right directories for your niche and submit your site to those, plus you’ll get a site submission to every general directory we can find. Great links.
• Relevant Links From Sites Like Yours - There is no better place to start your link building campaign that with sites just like yours. All you have to do is ask. You might have to link to them in return, but that’s OK. You are looking for traffic. And other sites like yours is a good place to get it.
• A Blog - A blog can get you inbound links in one of two ways. Put the blog on your website and write every day. Trackback to other blogs on the same topic and you’ll get links to your site from theirs. Plus, many bloggers will write about topics you cover and link back to you. The other way to make a blog work for you is to put it on a separate domain name and link to your website from the blog every day. By being on a separate IP block and on a separate domain name, the search engines won’t care if it is owned by the same person. It’s relevant and it links. That’s all that matters.
• Article Marketing - Write frequent articles and submit them to article directories. When those articles are picked up by publishers then you’ll be building links to your website.
• Social Bookmarking - Traffic building on steroids. Get your blog or website known by more people in a shorter period of time. Some social bookmarking sites will actually give you link juice.

So what are you waiting for? Start your link building today.

I think there is a bit of confusion among new Internet marketers about what constitutes a good keyword phrase. Many new marketers will perform their keyword research then use every phrase that is offered as related by whatever tool they are using. It doesn’t matter which tool you use for your research - they will all return keyword phrases that make no logical sense. It’s your job to turn those phrases into something meaningful.

Here’s an example of what I mean. This marketer is obviously targeting the phrase “online advertising internet marketing online businesses” as it is repeated verbatim several times throughout the blog post. Can you tell me what that phrase means?

If your keyword research tool returns something of this nature as a suggestion for related keywords, take that phrase and massage it into something that makes sense. Don’t just use it because your keyword research tool suggested it.

As a general rule, don’t use any keyword phrase that repeats a word. The redundant use of “online” in this phrase is useless. The search engines will likely view it as spam and your pages won’t rank well. Secondly, choose one synonymous phrase and stick with it. “Internet marketing” and “online advertising” mean almost the same thing. Not exactly, but they are close enough that you should focus on one and let the other drop. If both phrases are important to you then write one blog post or web page that focuses on one of the phrases and another that focuses on the other. Don’t combine them. Your watering down your phrases when you do that.

Thirdly, do a little more digging on the research. Do that many people really search for “online advertising internet marketing online businesses”? I really doubt that people are searching for that exact phrase. If they are then they probably aren’t finding a lot of information because savvy marketers use phrases that actually make sense. Remember, you are writing for humans and if humans can’t make sense of your content then they aren’t going to buy what you are selling so give extra thought to how you use your keyword phrases.

When 73% of Internet users first start their research online, it pays to spend some time ranking well in the search engines. If you don’t then you don’t exist.

That’s why I’ve put together a new workshop to address the needs of small business owners who are just now trying to take their business online. The title of the workshop is The 7 Things You Can Do to Make Google Fall in Love with Your Website. In addition that workshop, I’ve a great bonus: How to Turn Your Business Blog into a Search Engine Magnet.

The beginning of your Internet marketing should be your own website. In my workshop I’ll tell you how to go about optimizing your website so that it can be found by people searching for your products online. The topics I’ll cover in depth in this workshop are:

• Search Engine Optimization – what is it?
• Why Search Engine Optimization is critical to your online success
• The 7 things you can do to make Google fall in love with your website
• Blogging – what it is and why you should care
• How to launch your own business blog – the right way
• How to use your business blog as a search engine magnet

In this workshop I’ll cover everything you need to know to make your website the best that it can be and to rank well in the search engines. The cost is a measly $50 and you can register online by going to www.SocialWebTraining.com. Oh, and just in case you’re wondering what date it will be, look for us on September 16, 2008 from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. See you there!

Michael Martine says generalists are better than specialists, and makes a convincing case. Has this ever happened to you?

Take SEO (search engine optimization) and web design, for example. You hire an SEO specialist after you hired a web designer who you thought knew everything about web design. In your mind, you lumped in a bunch of stuff in with “web design” that your web designer was clueless about.

After all, a web design specialist does not study SEO. He or she studies web design, and that’s it. You later find out you have zero SEO, and you’re ticked off. Now you hire yet another specialist who is going to do all kinds of changes to your site and other things you don’t understand. if this stuff had been done as part of the original design, you would have saved thousands of dollars.

Of course, he’s making a sales case for himself, but his point is right on. There are many times when it is good to hire a specialist and that’s exactly what you need. But if you are just starting out in business, or you are just making your first foray into Internet marketing, which is new territory for many small business owners, then what you really need is a guide, a generalist who knows how to get around in the field. There is more than one reason for this.

Michael pointed out of the reasons, which is the ignorance of specialists regarding other specialists specialties. But sometimes it’s not even ignorance. It could be differences of opinion.

You’ll run into some specialists who do things one way and another specialist who does things another way. Neither way is wrong, they’re just different, but they don’t go well together. You need someone who can reconcile the differences, someone who can analyze your situation and determine which direction is the best way to go - and sometimes that direction is between the paths of the two specialists.

What it all boils down to is directorship. Who’s going to run the program? Can you? Do you know enough about the different specialties of online marketing to direct the show and not end up lost? Most small business owners can’t do that. That’s why they need someone who can communicate across specialties to steer their business in the right direction. A director can tell the web designer not to include certain code, or to place it in an external file when it needs to be, based on the SEOs recommendation. Then she can convince the SEO not to be so adamant about the use of image files like Flash because in small doses and appropriate optimization techniques those elements can be implemented successfully. Your director doesn’t have to do the work; she just has to know how it should be done so that she can direct those who will do it. And if that’s the kind of expertise you need to steer your business in the right direction as you make the transition online, well then I’m your girl. And the best part is, I’m knowledgeable of online marketing and traditional marketing so I can help you integrate the two. Ready?

Page load time is a very important SEO factor that many new webmasters overlook. It can affect your PPC quality score, your search rank, your PageRank, and ultimately how much traffic you get to your site, which affects your conversions and your ROI. That’s pretty important, right?

I highly recommend that you test your page load time every now and then. I recently found a good tool that lets you do that. It’s a pretty useful tool that I found easy and simple to use and I went to SEO Chat to compare their tool, but I found out that they don’t have a page load time analyzer. Instead, they have a code-to-text ratio tester, which is useful also, but not the same thing. In fact, your code-to-text ratio does affect your load time, but that’s not all that affects it.

Other things that can affect your page load time include:

• Big files like Flash and multimedia files
• Lots of graphic images
• Image backgrounds
• Javascript code
• An abundance of CSS files
• Slow server

Many of the items that increase your page load time can be placed in external files on your server and referenced in your HTML. It would do your site good to have it tested for page load time and get your weaknesses fixed.

Duncan Morris at SEOmoz gives a pretty good discussion on the pros and cons of sitemapping your website. Here’s the lowdown on the nitty gritty from a business perspective:

Competitive intelligence. If you are telling the search engines the relative priority of all of your pages, you can bet this information will be of interest to your competitors. I know of no way of protecting your sitemap so only the search engines can access it.

How much do you want your competitors to know about you? Anything you let Google know will also be known by your competition. Do you really want to disclose information like the priority of each of your web pages?

I think Duncan’s list of cons is a lot more interesting than his list of pros. Perhaps the most compelling argument against sitemaps is the architecture argument. A sitemap will hide any crawlability issues you have by making inaccessible links accessible to the search engines. If you have a problem then you likely will never know about it. So your XML sitemap may actually be a bandaid for a problem than needs surgery. Personally, I think if you have a small website then you don’t need an XML sitemap. If you have a large website then I like Duncan’s advice: Work out all of your crawlability issues first then once you are satisfied with where your site it at, add a sitemap if you want one. Most websites probably don’t need them.