SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is one of the key steps in creating, maintaining, and promoting a high-traffic website. Freeing you from spending thousands of dollars on advertising and promotion, SEO allows you to grow your traffic organically with the help of page rankings. What many web designers learn only after much experience, however, is the difference meta tags make in how your pages rank.

There is no facet of search engine optimization more frequently overlooked than ensuring meta tags are placed on every page. Meta tags, written into the code of your page so that they are not visible to visitors, provide the search engines with specific identifiers for the page. Some websites create listings almost entirely with meta tags, yet many site owners never implement them to full effect.

There are two different kinds of meta tags that have a high impact on SEO. Take, for our first example, the META KEYWORDS tag. This meta tag enumerates keywords to spiders, informing them what the website is all about. If you visit www.nytimes.com and right click on the page, and then click on “View Source,” you will encounter a meta tag about half down the first page reading META KEYWORDS. This tag will show you a long list of keywords starting with “New York Times, international news, daily newspaper, people, regional news, national news?” and so on. This keyword list includes dozens of words that relate to the New York Times but also to newspapers in general.

Most search engines detect these keywords in content, too, but it can be helpful for you to include keywords that are especially low-density in text, such as odd spellings of names and places, related topics not specifically discussed on the page, and any other keywords you have trouble injecting into your content in a user-friendly way.

The second important tag is the META DESCRIPTION tag. The search engines employ this tag to present information about your site when it appears in their search results. Most search engines allow 160 characters here. This is also a place you include keywords to boost your page rankings for targeted phrases.

There are other meta tags, but these two are the most vital to effective SEO. It is critical that you maximize your use of META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION tags by making sure you do not stuff them full of words not related to your content. And, of course, it is important not to use the same keywords too many total times on the same page. Excessive keyword density, like putting in too many keywords on a page, will cause the search engines to mark your pages as spam.

Finally, be sure you use different meta tags for every page. It is useful to target tags to the content included on a particular page. If you repeat meta tags throughout your site, you will not benefit from valuable differences in keywords on particular pages.

Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.

Every web designer knows that there are two essential qualities in every good websiteappearance and how it performs in the search engines. There is no doubt it is critically important for pages to look good so they keep visitors on the page. But visitors will never arrive at the site to appreciate even the best design without search engine optimization (SEO). Integrating these fundamentals of effective website design can be complex, and compromises are almost always required.

The place to start finding the balance between appearance and performance is SEO. If you never generate traffic, your beautiful page design will never be appreciated. The essentials of SEO include keyword density, linking between pages, meta tags, and proper tagging of images. Each of these factors is something to consider as you begin designing your site.

A successful site has to have enough content to allow for appropriately low keyword density. Unlike the ranking standards of the late’90s, search algorithms in 2009 penalize sites, and sometimes penalize them very severely, for cramming too many search terms into too little text. Content must long enough to dilute keyword density, but concise enough to hold visitor attention. It is also not possible to make use of every screen shot or image you might happen to have, no matter how attractive and beautiful they are, on every page, or even on every site. The search algorithms have not yet designed means of indexing images. Words, and not images, are what drive SEO. That is the reason every designer has to provide every site multiple pages with text that can be optimized.

Depending on the competition, your keyword density, which, again is the percentage of all the words on a page that are keywords, should be no less than 2% but no more than 5%. Sometimes 7% density will be alright, but any keyword that is used by other sites as spam will hurt your rankings with the search engines.

Another vital step in search engine optimization is linking the various pages of your site. Visitors always appreciate internal navigation. The search engines also appreciate internal navigation, because internal links are places you can insert keywords that identify your pages. For instance, if you have a page called “White Sand Beaches” you can link to that page from every other page in your site with a link entitled “White Sand Beaches.” This way you not only tell all search engines have created a page, but you tell the search engines what the page is about.

How many keywords can you include your homepage Your list range anywhere from 3 to 10 or even 20, as long as you have enough content to keep the percentage keywords acceptably low. The most competitive niches almost always require a narrow focus to ensure that your content is what your visitors are searching for. On the other hand, an excessively narrow focus can eliminate certain visitors before they have a chance to search for your site, so be on the lookout for ways to place additional keywords on your page without triggering spam filters.

Always take care that the search engines do not mistake your content for spam. Beyond keeping within the 7% limit, your respect for your readers and your providing genuinely content will make all the difference in how well your site will perform.

Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.

Although Adobe Dreamweaver is a visual editor it is not a word processor; and, therefore, the text it allows you to create is HTML text and HTML handles text in a different way to print-oriented environments such as word processors and DTP packages. Although adding text to your web pages feels kind of similar to working in any text editor, you will sometimes find a few quirks in the way that Dreamweaver handles text.

Text in HTML is all about structure. Browsers assign a structural importance to text based on the HTML element which contains them. Text inside a heading element, such as h1 or h2, is given more prominence than text contained within a paragraph element. Dreamweaver uses the paragraph element as the default container for text; so, if you create a blank page in Dreamweaver and type some text, as soon as you press Return, your text will be placed inside a paragraph element.

The same result is achieved whenever you paste text from another environment. Dreamweaver will recognise returns and use them to split the text into paragraphs. It will also attempt to translate any formatting to its nearest HTML equivalent. Thus, if you copy some data from an Excel spreadsheet and paste it into an HTML page in Dreamweaver, you will end up with a table containing the Excel data. Similarly, if text from Word which has been formatted using Word styles such as “Heading 1″, “Heading 2″ and “Normal”, Word will place all “Heading 1″ text inside h1 elements, “Heading 2″ text inside h2 and “Normal” text inside paragraph elements.

Most of the time, users edit text using Dreamweaver’s Design view and those who are unfamiliar with HTML may be occasionally be confused by the fact that Dreamweaver treats text as a separate entity to the element that contains it. Thus for example, in design view, if you triple-click on a heading to select it, what Dreamweaver actually selects is the text inside the heading. The heading element itself is not selected. Once users are familiar with HTML, this behaviour becomes less confusion.

Dreamweaver offers a neat way of keeping an eye on HTML elements while working in Design view: the tag selector. This is the area on the left of the status bar at the bottom of the document window. It displays the tags representing the element which contains the currently highlighted item. These tags can also be used to select an element and its contents. Thus, to select a heading, ignore the text and just click on the tag representing the element which encloses it.

Another piece of advice I often give to newbie Dreamweaver users is to stay away from split screen view. This is where code and design views are each allocated half of the screen. Unless you creating something fairly intricate, like a complex form, split view is a bit wasteful. Just looking at the tag selector is usually enough to let you know what HTML elements you are working with.

You can get up to date information on Dreamweaver training courses, visit Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering Dreamweaver training courses at their central London training centre.

Are you a new comer into the field of IT and hoping to start a career in website designing? To get you started, in this article I will give you a little introduction on the technical things you need to learn.

Basically, the web is a group of interconnected computers communicating to each other. The computers are connected by cables, satellite signals and other type of mechanisms.

Computers can be connected all the time to other computers over the internet. There are computers however that are meant to be connected over the internet all the time, these are called servers.

Servers are very much like normal computers, the only difference is they are using specialize software and their hardware specifications are higher than typical computers. Basically, the server contains websites. When people desire to access these websites through the browsers (Google, Yahoo) the server will send them out.

Now that you already know about servers, let us discuss about getting your own domain name.

A domain name will be the address of your site in the World Wide Web. This must be a unique address. Now to be able to obtain your own unique address you have to purchase it from certain vendors. You might be wondering why you need to purchase and why you cannot just create your own domain name. Well the simplest answer for this is that there are companies who are making sure that domain names are unique, they update and take good care of those list and of course they need to be paid for that and that is the very reason why you have to pay when you get your domain name.

Now that you have your domain name, your next task will be to put that domain name in a certain server where it can be access by people anytime anywhere as long as they are connected to the internet.

Renting a server is like finding an apartment where you can stay. You need to lease the space. Renting a space in a particular server is called hosting. There are many companies offering this service and they are often called as “hosting companies”.

As a summary, when you create your website, you need to purchase your domain name and then find a reputable hosting company where you can save it and have it available to the world wide web users anytime anywhere. There are a lot of companies who are providing both services together, so less troubles for you.

Find out where to get the best and most effective Web Designs created by the top notch Web Design Singapore Company.

At first it looks as though there is not much you can do with ecommerce web designs. On the contrary ecommerce applications have their own particular functions that lets you to be artistic and play with the web design. You can use your resourcefulness and smarts to create a web design that can convince the visitor to make an online purchase, book for a service and add sales to your business. The web designer needs to consider a lot of online selling principles in ecommerce web design. We will have a look at some of the major web design aspects that needs to be considered in your ecommerce web site.

Ecommerce web designs are more complicated, intelligibly because they need to be more attractive, well arranged and pleasing to the shopper’s eyes. They should also carry the appropriate colors that can blend the web site’s main theme, products or services.

An ecommerce web designing should give the user a pleasant online shopping experience. The ecommerce site should have a web design that showcases sufficient, relevant information on who owns the web site and why they are trustworthy. The web site must also be easy to utilize. The web design must permit for simple navigation. If the web site is not easy to navigate, your possible buyer will move to your rival where he or she will most probably have a better shopping experience.

So how do you create a web design that grants a user to navigate easily? You should create an imaginary path that guides your visitor to make an online purchase. You should make a web design that shows your products in the best possible light. A good ecommerce web design will guide the visitor to the right page in one click or two.

Choose professional web designers who will practice tried and tested techniques that will not be taken in ordinary web sites but are utilized in ecommerce sites.

Learn where to get the best and most effective Web Designs created by the top notch Web Design Singapore Company.

There are a lot of elements that make web designing successful. One of the most important among those is to remember that websites designed to be scanned has a higher possibility of being successful than those that are not. In this article we will discuss what is scanning in relation to web pages design.

When visitors come across a particular website, scanning is the first thing that they do. They scan through the pages and search for something that they need, and when they do not find anything they will immediately hit back and move on.

Since you cannot make people read, as a web designer you need to know how to aid them to scan successfully.

When visitors scan a particular website page, they do it in certain patterns: the “F pattern” or “E pattern”. As a web designer, when you build your site, scan it the way your visitors will, that is in a broad horizontal strokes. The vital part of this technique is to not to read your text. Just scan the pages in a very relax but fast gaze.

Now after performing the above exercise, try to answer these questions:

1. Do the things you have seen give a clear purpose? 2. What is the first thing that has captured your attention?

To help you reach your goal of helping your visitors scan your pages successfully here are the points you can follow:

1. Write meaningful section headers. This helps visitors to get an instant summary of the pages they are scanning. Think of the insights that will be most applicable and important to the user.

2. Put the most important things above the fold. This is one of the most common error designers make. They are using the above fold for fancy images, banners and logos that do not show anything at all about the true function of the site.

3. Put related items together. Do not make people hunt for contents. When you are talking about a certain topic make sure to put things in one place.

4. Use contrasting colors. This is one of the ways on how you can say to your visitors what is and what is not related on your page.

5. Use different font sizes. Big fonts are usually being used for section headers or for significant keywords that you would like your visitors to remember.

There you go, all the best to your web designing career for now.

Find out where to get the best and most effective Web Designs created by the top notch Web Designer Singapore Company.

Dreamweaver’s Assets panel offers a convenient way of using and reusing web page elements such as images, colours and Flash movies. It also contains two types of assets which are unique to the Dreamweaver environment: library items and templates. Templates act as master pages which control the layout of all the pages in a site or in a certain section of a site. Library items contain web fragments which you may insert anywhere you like, on any page you like. The power of library items stems from the fact that if you update the library item, you can simultaneously update all the pages into which you have inserted that item.

It’s worth pointing out that library items are a Dreamweaver feature and are not part of the Worldwide Web Consortium’s specifications. This may make them unattractive to some developers, especially bearing in mind that the functionality they provide can also be obtained through the use of server-side includes and that server-side includes is a standard feature offered by most web servers. If you decide to stop editing your pages in Dreamweaver, library items will simply cease to be recognised.

In my opinion, library items are nothing but good news. They offer a great way of adding such items as navigation panels, headers and footers to a page and being able to update the item right across the site simply by updating the original library item.

There are two ways of creating library items. The first and most common method is to highlight some content which already exists on the page and convert into a library by opening the Assets panel, clicking on the library icon then choosing New Library Item from the Assets panel menu. The second method is to simply create a blank library item and then add content to it. To do this, simply choose New Library Item from the Assets panel menu while no content is highlighted on the current page. In fact, you don’t even need to have a page open.

Library items can be edited at any time by simply double-clicking the name of the item in the Library section of the Assets panel. The library item opens in a window similar to an HTML document window. However, since you will often be editing elements out of context, you will often not be able to see the item as it will appear when inserted into a page.

Whenever you save the changes you have made to a library item, Dreamweaver will offer you a chance to update all instances of the item on all pages into which it has been inserted.

If you would like to learn more about Dreamweaver training courses, visit Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Dreamweaver training courses at their central London training centre.

It’s not surprising that Adobe Dreamweaver is so popular and so widely used. It offers the general user a way into the world of web development without first having to learn too much about the technologies which are used in building modern websites. Among the powerful features which Dreamweaver makes available to inexperienced users are preset CSS layouts, accessibility guidance, HTML guidance, CSS guidance and standards compliance. Let’s look at how these features are implemented and how Dreamweaver can make you look good as a web developer before you know enough to look good on your own.

Whenever you create a new web page in Dreamweaver, you are given the option of basing the new page on one of the preset CSS layouts built into the program. Using CSS for page layout requires a fair amount of experience of the quirks of CSS and is no job for a beginner. Simply by choosing the layout which is closest to their requirements, users can go ahead and create CSS web pages which will work and which can be customized to suit their requirements.

Dreamweaver’s accessibility preferences by default cause the program to display useful alerts to remind the user to incorporate accessibility features into the elements being placed on the page. Thus, for example, each time an image is added to the page, a dialogue box will appear which contains a box for the user to enter the alternate text. Similarly when adding a form element, the form accessibility dialog prompts you to enter both and ID and the label text.

Many users who are still new to Dreamweaver will also be fairly new to web development and may still be a little shaky on HTML and will typically build web pages visually using Dreamweaver’s Design mode. Whenever I run a Dreamweaver training course, I always make new users aware of Dreamweaver’s tag selector feature. This consists of a hierarchical display of the element which is currently selected on the page, the element which contains that element? and so on, all the way up to the BODY element which of course contains all elements on the page. Clicking on one of the tags displayed on the tag selector cleanly selects the corresponding element. Also, right-clicking displays a useful set of options such as “Remove Tag” and “Set Class”.

Dreamweaver’s context-sensitive Properties panel is another rock on which new users can always count. Unlike previous versions of Dreamweaver, version CS4 makes a clear distinction between structural attributes (which are displayed in the HTML tab of the Properties panel) and CSS attributes (which are displayed in the CSS tab). For example, if you select an element which is already controlled by a CSS rule, the Properties panel will allow you to edit the rule. If there is no rule, it will prompt you to create one.

If you would like to learn more about Dreamweaver training courses, visit Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Dreamweaver Classes at their central London training centre.

Every designer knows that there are two basic qualities of every good website appearance and performance in the search engines. It is critically important for pages to look good to keep visitors on the page. But visitors will never arrive at the site to enjoy that good design without search engine optimization (SEO). Integrating these two fundamentals of effective website design can be complicated, and compromises are sometimes required.

Finding the balance between appearance and performance starts with SEO. If you don’t generate traffic, it doesn’t make any difference how beautifully you design your pages. The essential aspects of search engine optimization include linking between the pages of your site, backlinking to other sites, meta tagging, proper tagging of images, and keyword density. Each of these factors plays a role when you begin designing your site.

Every site has to have enough text to allow for appropriately low keyword density. Unlike the standards of the’90s, modern search algorithms penalize sites, and sometimes penalize them severely, for cramming too many search terms, or even words that look like search terms, into too little text. Your content has to be long enough to dilute keyword density, but concise enough to captivate your visitors. This also means it is not possible to put every screen shot or image you might happen to have, no matter how attractive they are, on every page. The search engines have no way to index images. Words, not images, drive SEO. That is why every website designer has to give every site multiple pages with text that can be optimized.

Your next step is to make sure that you tag any images you use on your website with the “alt” tag in HTML. Each and every image must have this tag. It allows you to tell the web browser which text will pop up when visitors run their mouse over the image. Moreover, make an effort to name every image with a title that is SEO-friendly. That means if you use a picture of a giraffe on your website, you should choose the name my.pet.giraffe.jpg over 7893A86giraf98My.jpg. Doing this, you put more keywords into the HTML for your pages. Just be sure not to get carried away. Too many keywords in your meta tags and file names will look like spam.

Another vital step in search engine optimization is linking the various pages of your site. Visitors always appreciate internal navigation. The search engines also appreciate internal navigation, because internal links are places you can insert keywords that identify your pages. For instance, if you have a page called “White Sand Beaches” you can link to that page from every other page in your site with a link entitled “White Sand Beaches.” This way you not only tell all search engines have created a page, but you tell the search engines what the page is about.

The ultimate rule for integrating page design and SEO is to keep design simple. Using flash sparingly, avoiding excessive images, and shunning complex design will boost your freedom to do SEO. You don’t have to make your website unattractive, you simply need to do more with less.

Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.

As soon as you log on to Google AdWords, you will encounter a large number of very useful tools. Adwords tools enable you to proof your ads for errors, choose their placement, optimize your content, and generate an incredible number of useful reports. These reports enable you to assess how your ads are performing against other sites, or in their chosen demographics, and a whole lot more. But probably the most powerful tool you will find is the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool, an indispensable aid that uses ad data to generate a list of powerful keywords along with their recent search data and cost.

To begin, you should generate your own list of some basic keywords. This list of no more than 15 words will give AdWords the data to generate new words and phrases for you. You can either find these keywords directly on your web pages, and Google can do that for you automatically, or you can brainstorm you own list based what you think your most profitable visitors would search for if they wanted what your website provides.

Next, enter your list into the keyword suggestion tool, one word or phrase at a time. You could enter multiple keywords all at the same time, but if were to do this, there’s a high probability the suggestion tool will return a list of hundreds of keywords that don’t really relate to your site. Usually it is a great deal more efficient to limit yourself to entering just one keyword at a time. Allow the keyword suggestion tool generate related terms that you may be able to use.

Whenever you enter a word or phrase into the keyword suggestion tool, it will come back with other keywords or phrases that match websites with similar content. It will also find keywords and phrases from the Adwords campaigns of other site owners who bid on the some of the same words you chose. The suggestion tool estimates traffic per month, tells you how much competition there is for the word or term, and gives you current prices for placement at various levels of the page.

Moreover, Adwords gives you dozens more options that will tell you even more about your keywords. You can generate monthly traffic charts, telling you how the popularity of your keywords goes up and down throughout the year. You can get an estimate of the position of your ad on the page at various prices, and you can get an estimate of the number of clicks you can buy based on last month’s search volume, average search volume, and which month the search volume for that keyword is the highest.

One thing you will learn quickly is that each of these bits of information is equally important in choosing your keywords, but it is still up to you to choose select words that you know are valuable to your service or product. Don’t choose a low competition, high volume phrase just because it is cheap, if it does not help you sell your site. That would be just throwing your money away. But if you do your research and then still stay creative, you can ensure that every keyword you use in your campaign will drive traffic to your site.

Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.