Austin SEO and Web Design

Austin SEO and Web Design - Search Engine Optimization, Design, Tips and Utilities

A must read… Google Search Engine Penalties - Avoid common penalties

Posted by seo services team: You may not be ready to jump into having an SEO specialist fix your website. But, chances are - your website is breaking the most common Google rules. At a minimum, you may want to consider reviewing your website so that the quality is acceptable enough - to avoid being penalized!

There is something called the Google 50 penalty, and the Google 950 penalty. Keep this in mind if significant changes happen to your website. Google evaluates consistent quality changes. Therefore, if your website drops 50 places, or drops to the last pages of Google, your site will be penalized.

Over-Optimization Penalties
Many web developers can penalize your website if they do not know the basics of Search Engine Optimization. One of the most common mistakes is to ‘over do it’ by repeating certain key phrases too many times. If you have repeated your key phrases many times in the <TITLE>, <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, <B>, and <I> tags, ALT and TITLE , domain, sub-domain, directory name, and repeated several times in the content of your website, chances are you will not have any significant rankings. Search engines look at usage and saturation to evaluate the quality of your website. It checks to see if you know what you are doing. In fact, correct saturation is a very low ratio - meaning your key phrases should not be repeated that often, just more often than the rest of your common text.

Duplicate Content penalty-this is still VERY common. Consider this, if you have copied any of your text from another website source, then Google and other major search engines have already crawled it, and you will be penalized for copying even a few sentences, since they have already been recorded by Google.

Meta Keywords-again, do not over do it. In fact, meta keywords do not help any more. Back in the day, when search engines were unsophisticated - meta keywords did matter. Now, they do not help your rankings but will hurt your rankings if spammed. Do not repeat a word too many times or fill up your meta keyword tag with too many words. This is also a good way to figure out if you are working with a professional SEO consultant that really understands the business. If anyone suggests to you that your website will achieve rankings from meta-keywords, then it is scam and a sure way to penalize your website.

Changing hosting companies-unfortunately, if you change your hosting account, there is not way to preserve your rankings. How long your hosting has until it expires is also a minor factor. Make sure the length of your hosting account expiration date is always maxed out, and if possible, try not to change your hosting account.
Buying and selling links-dont, there are are few that you will not be penalized for but it may not be worth the time and effort to find out which ones.
Linking to banned/bad websites-maybe you like a particular website, but linking to a website that has irrelevant content, a low PR/SERP ranking, or penalized itself - will penalize your website. An SEO specialist can evaluate your inbound and outbound links to see what needs to be changed/removed.
Hidden links and text on your site- this was banned a long time ago! Hidden text(making it the same as your background), and making a link hidden is also one of the classic best ways to have your website penalized.
Incorrect Redirects-this one is a one of a few more technical issues, basically, when you create links out there that point to your website, try to avoid using both links with and without the www. prefix. This is because all of your backlinks will not be counted together. So stick to one - create your backlinks using the www. prefix or without it.
Hope this helps you remove some of the most common and obvious violations.

 

Web Design Firms - Austin, Texas is a great place for web design.

Austin has great weather, an eclectic population, a fantastic live music scene and a booming technology sector. Technology makes Austin a great place for web designers of all skill levels and anyone looking for a web designer. Austin’s web design is a growing and booming part of the technology sector in Texas. Austin’s technology thrives on creative web designers, as well as the majority of businesses out there today. Let’s face it.  If your business does not have an online presence, you’re dead in the water before you ever even start out.

Austin web design is a booming community with fantastic opportunities for web designers to find work or get their own companies off the ground. The technology industry is a big part of the draw for Austin website design. Many companies there need the business that web designers Austin can bring to them. The youthful vibe of the city, coupled with the superb live music scene makes Austin a draw for web designers from across the United States. Take a survey of web designers currently living in Austin and they’d be sure to tell you that Austin is a great place for web designers.

Austin Web designers have amenities that few other cities can claim. Where else can you be in a thriving, hip, youthful state capital with a major college town vibe? UT Austin dominates the NCAA in both football and basketball and can be a fantastic way for web designers to blow off some steam after a week of hard work. The yearly SXSW conference combines the best of film, music and Internet for a kick butt week of activities. Whatever your preferred leisure time activity, Austin has it. Lake Austin is home to some of the most fun water sports in the state. Austin Web designers have it all. Not only do they have a thriving technology community to work with, but they have world class leisure activities as well right outside their doors.

Austinis such a great place for web designers that a simple Internet search will turn up article after article extolling the virtues of being a web designer in Austin’s tech community. And if you are a company in Austin, you need to look no further than Internet sites that offer the best web designers you can hire. Austin is the place for web designers.

 

How to set up Google Adsense - Do it yourself!

Posted by Austin website designer: A website firm can help manage proper keywords and proper usage of those keywords. However, these steps may help you get your account started. Google Adsense and displaying Google Ads is becoming increasingly popular. More places to show your Google Ads is also the case. Social Media is on the rise with bookmarking websites, blogs, forums, article and press release sites. The obvious reason for this is because they promote interaction. The other less talked about reason is for ranking and popularity. The fact is, is you stay on top of the rankings trends you will notice that Google and other major search engines are beginning to re-evaluate and give better rankings-visibility to social media sites and links.

We can help you set up Google Adsense. However, we would like to help you understand how it works and give examples as well.

Step 1: If you do not have a Google account, create one. Do so by going to Google.com and creating a new account. Click on ‘Sign In’, ‘create an account now’

Step 2: After creating your Google account, Log in. Select the ‘My Account’ option which will display all of your Google products ranging from Blogger and Analytics to Adsense. Select ‘Adsense’

Step 3. You have to have a website in order to use Adsense. The reason for this is because when someone clicks on a Google Adsense Ad, it requires having a website to link to.

Step 4. You will be required to fill out your personal information, website name. When complete, it will take a week for Google to confirm your account.

Step 5. Begin creating Ads. Select ‘Adsense’, select ‘Adsense Setup’, ‘Get Ads’. You will be prompted for the type of Ad you are wanting to set up ranging from a content Ad(that has no pictures) to an Adsense Video unit.

Step 6. Select ‘Adsense for Content’ to select the standard Ad unit. You are then prompted to select an Ad Unit(text and grahic images) or Link Unit.

TIP: I suggest selecting the ’single page’ option, it may be difficult to notice but will be visible once you select the type of ad you want to set up. The great advantage of this option is that it will ask you for all of the options you would like on one single page, so that you do not have to continue clicking on ‘Next’ through the options.

Step 7. Select ‘Ad unit’ to create an Ad. Select the size of Advertisement you want to place. For example, I will select 468×60 Banner. Channels are available for tracking your Ads if you wish to do so later. Name your Ad, and select ‘Create and Get Code’ to finish you Ad!

Step 8. Copy that code, and place(paste) the code in the html of your website - for were you would like the Ad to appear.

Here is an example, this is the 468×60 Adsense Ad I just created. As soon as you place your Ad, you make it available for visitors to click on. If you have found this information helpful, feel free to click on this Ad to help us out.


Here is an example of what a link unit looks like…
……………………………….


……………………………….

One of the most common questions prior to setting up an account is what sizes can be displayed, here is the Google page that shows the different Google AdSense Ad Formats.
https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/AdFormats.html

One more interesting tip. Who doesn’t use Google. You can actually provide a Google Search bar on your website that is a Google Adsense Ad. When users use it to search Google it helps you generate clicks… It is called ‘Adsense for Search’. When you are creating Ads, select ‘Adsense for Search’. Select the look and feel of your search box and finish to get your code.

Quick tip for website web design conversion - how to convert more leads into customers from searches

Posted by Austin website designer: We continue to evaluate and fix existing websites for conversion problems. The most common problem found, remains to be the number one rule breaker for lost leads. The number one problem is phone number and overall contact information. It is common for a website designer that is not familiar with conversion tactics to quickly create a website and the pages that go with it - including the Contact page. The problem with this - is that it is proven that not providing your phone number - visibly on the home page will result in lost leads. Many website hits, and visitors, will not look past the home page of a website. If the phone number is prominanly displayed on the home page as one of the first objects to catch the eye, it greatly increases the chances of a visitor/hit - picking up the phone to call you. Having an email link on the home page is also a good idea. This is one of the most overlooked rule breakers that continues to be broken. What good is a pretty website if you are not maximizing the potentional for a customer to pick up the phone and call you or email you? Make it easy for your customers to contact you and make it fast for your potential customers to call you. Many searchers do not ever look past the home page. And lastly, keep in mind, that whatever your product, services or ideas are that you are offering on your website - not everyone likes to read, and not everyone likes to look at all of the pages of your website. Always keep in mind that there are a handful of customers/leads that will only contact you if the 2 second rule is available. The 2 second rule is that - it only takes 2 seconds to pull up your website and call and/or email you.

Choosing an Austin Search Engine Optimization Company

One of the Austin search engine optimization companies noted recently that if you have been a part of the web community for a long time or even if you are just starting out as a newbie, you are going to see or hear the words Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is more commonly known. SEO has become very popular these days, as there are so many different sites that are popping up on a daily, if not hourly basis. With so many options coming online everyday it becomes more difficult for your website to be seen. Many of the search engines that are available have the ability to pull up your site at the request of a user, but how does it work exactly? How are these all-powerful search engines able to pick your specific site out of the millions of other options that are out there?

Originally, the search engines would keep a list of all the sites, or at least key words that belonged to the various site. When a user visited the search engine it would run through that list looking for the keywords that matched what they typed in. In our modern day, it is not that simple to get yourself listed in the search results because of the vast enormity of the number of websites that compete for the same keywords. This list literally grows by the hour. As a result, new techniques had to be developed to ensure that your website comes out on top of the list. This is exactly where an SEO company comes into play. You are going to need someone to help you get your site to the top. When it comes to choosing who will do the job for you, you need to keep a few important aspects in mind.

The most important thing is what approach are they going to take? What methods are they going to use to help you get to the number one spot? To be honest, if they are just going to submit your site to a search engine and charge you for it, then you might as well keep that money and buy yourself something nice for Christmas, because you can do that yourself. You need to make sure that they will make necessary modifications to make your website search engine friendly. They must be able to provide you with content that have special keywords listed within the body of the text. They should offer to help link your site to other sites so that the frequency of your site is picked up by the engine is increased.

These are just a few search engine tasks to help your site achieve online visibility. Findmycompany.com is the best place to start and are a leading Austin search engine optimization company that has great experience in offering SEO services. They employ all of the latest SEO strategies that will help you boost your site’s ranking. Visit Findmycompany.com to get more information about their services.

SEO Services - How to prmote your Business with effective marketing. How to evaluate your marketing firm.

Search engine optimization is a vital element that makes any website or business visible to the consumer world. Having a website online without optimizing it properly would be a total waste. And the website’s presence would not be known to anyone and obviously, there would be no sales happening through such a website. There are hundreds of search engine optimization companies around the world that offer complete web design and SEO marketing services but not all of them are experts. As professional experience is something very important in search engine optimization, it is advisable to select a reputable company with hands-on experience in search engine optimization and related techniques. Though new companies promise guaranteed results in promoting a website online, they might not be able to keep their promise as they might not have enough experience applying the latest SEO techniques. Moreover, with regard to SEO, no one can guarantee 100% success as the algorithms that search engines use to position websites are changing and being updated almost weekly. A professional SEO firm will be aware of these changes. 

There are even companies that convince their customers to try their search engine optimization services in order to experiment with different SEO techniques that may only not work but can penalize the site’s rankings. This can prove to be highly risky especially when at a minimum, your website needs to retain the traffic it had prior. Additionally, why would anyone want to put his  or her own website at risk even after paying a huge sum of money? An appropriate way to select a professional Austin search engine company would be to check the experience they have in the field, their success rate in completed projects, reputation and reliability. The company you select should also be trust worthy, as the relationship would involve money, access to the administrator information of the website and much more. The time factor is also important in search engine optimization.  Every minute without an optimized website in search engines, is a lost chance for the search engine spiders to crawl your website and to improve your rankings.

Promoting your website on the Worldwide Web can increase sales for your business either directly or indirectly. Even enquiries through the web can be considered a bonus as it gives you a chance to review a potential customer with a specific requirement. A website enquiry additionally gives you the opportunity to collect your thoughts prior to making contact with a new prospect for the first time. A reliable Austin SEO services company like Findmycompany.com promises success and keeps the promise and commitment to increase your rankings and traffic within the project’s timeline. A company like this can be trusted upon as they have a proven track record and excellent relationship with their past customers. This of course is a point for consideration as good relationships indicate satisfaction in the services provided. Your website should be properly optimized by the professionals before it is actually launched and made available for customers. This can be accomplished only by experienced Austin Search Engine optimization companies such as Findmycompany.com. Take into consideration, that this is not an area that you can afford to experiment because your timing and budget is limited for online website positioning.

Qualifying your Web Design Firm - Attention to Details - Professional Website Designers

Qualify your Web Designer. If you had to compare the Worldwide Web from as far back as twenty years ago, you would easily see that the Worldwide Web today has become a highly competitive virtual environment. A company’s or a person’s presence online is just as real as it can be outside of cyberspace. I’m sure that you will agree with this, and I’m sure you will also agree that if you decide to make your presence felt, seen and heard on the internet, then you need to take every precaution to ensure that the job gets done perfectly every time. Small things like attention to detail are critical and the resources for this kind of work are, more often than not, limited.

It is really easy to just pick any web designer from a website that has a listing of web designers on it, but in doing this, you may be costing yourself more money, more time and more effort than you can afford. I can’t recall the countless times I’ve had to send a job back to a web designer, because of a blatant lack of attention to detail. For some reason they seem to think that there is no problem with poor alignment and bad design quality in general. It all boils down to checking the work before sending it back to a client. After doing some design work myself, I know all too well that attention to detail is required to produce high standards of quality work for clients. I also know that it’s a cut throat industry to be in sometimes and you need to be able to produce professional work – quickly. However, if the designer just takes a bit more time with the finer details without being sloppy, he will be guaranteed more work purely because the quality is great.

In my experience, I have come across many good web designers that come from Austin. Many of them have been well trained and they have the experience and talent to show for it. However, not all of them are known for their ability to pay attention to detail. You can easily tell the difference between a professional Austin website design company and a second rated company. For example, Findmycompany.com is one of the top-rated Austin website design firms. Their ability to pay attention to detail puts them way above the rest in the city. They are diligent, sharp, and highly creative. They are always dedicated to producing top class web design. All these aspects combined, make them the best website design company.

Findmycompany.com, web design Austin is professional in almost every way. If there is anything that you need to have developed, updated or fixed, then they are the ones you need to talk to. They can keep their deadline, and still deliver high quality websites. They offer a wide variety of services including Austin website marketing, SEO services Austin and much more.

Why is it important to NOT hire the cheapest website designer?

When evaluating and searching for a website design firm most of us try to find a firm that offers the cheapest deal for creating our website. There are number of Texas web design companies and freelance designers that are ready to offer you their web design services at a very low price. However, when you fall victim to such cheap services you need to be extra cautious because you may be getting poor quality websites in return for the low price that you are paying. Since the competition is too high amongst web designers Austin, they are ready to take up your work at rock bottom prices. To stay profitable, a website design company that emphasizes quantity over quality will task to many website projects to their hired employees. More specifically, a company like this will also take in – accept too many similar web design projects at the same time.

You can easily imagine what will happen to your website when a company takes up too many web design projects at the same time. First of all, it will affect the quality of the work because the website designer who is handling your website work will also be assigned many other similar assignments. Therefore, this person is going to work under tremendous pressure. Creativity will be impaired when someone works under pressure so this will have direct impact on the quality of your website. Secondly, since the designer’s concentration is not fully invested into your website work, it is going to take longer for the website designer to complete your website because of the multiple assignments that he or she is handling at the same time.

Many companies have burnt their fingers by hiring a cheap web design Austin company. Continued delay of not having a website designed within the timeline agreed upon will result in more internal company targets and timelines missed. Some companies even suffer heavy loss because they never manage to launch their new website in time. For example, if you are planning to launch your website before the holiday season to attract the holiday shoppers and if your website is not completed in time, then you need to wait for one full year to tap the full potential of the holiday market. This can punch a big hole in your financial statement. By trying to save a few dollars you end up losing your market and you don’t need to be a financial expert to calculate your losses.

When you sign up with a company for your website design project make sure that they are capable of delivering your website promptly within the agreed deadlines. Findmycompany.com is one of the most reliable Austin website design companies. They are highly professional in their approach and their professionalism helps them in delivering their work promptly on time. They ensure that their resources are not stretched thin with work, which allows their designers to engage in creative website design work. Moreover all their services are very competitively priced. Besides web design services they also offer search engine optimization and website marketing services.