No background music for your web pages! Music files take time to download. Most visitors won’t wait, and music can be very annoying.

Keep the structure of your web pages consistent throughout your website.

No automatic pop-up windows! Pop-ups are typically used to present ads and other ‘non-core’ material to users, and are annoying

Use standard design styles for your navigation. People are used to left side navigation and top navigation.

Make your web pages viewable for the current standard resolution, or resize to the monitors size

Make a site map page, helps your visitors find their way around your site, loved by search engines

Keep your web pages at about 100k in size, although most people are on DSL now, so that number is growing.

The Web Design Team at
mackeywebdesign.com

Always wanted your website to have that little icon that shows up in your bookmarks and in the tab display of some Web browsers? That is called the favorites icon or favicon.

First create your image , make it 16 x 16 pixels. Save the image as a GIF or BMP file with 256 colors or less.

Once you have an acceptable image, you need to convert it to the icon format. There are many icon editors available, such as IconForge by CursorArts. Save the file as favicon.ico.

Upload the icon to the same directory of you website as the file you want bookmarked, and that’s it!

The Web Design Team at
mackeywebdesign.com

What search engines want is good content. When you write the text for your website, write about what you sell and who you are in plain English, naturally incorporating your keyword phrases. If you’re not getting good traffic from your website, make sure your web pages speak to your target audience and solve their problems. 

How do you choose keywords to target on your web site?

Brainstorm to create a list of keywords. Then run it through a keyword research tools such as WordTracker to determine the best keywords and phrases to target.

There are different types of keyword phrases:

- General and highly competitive terms - not good choices, as it will be very hard for your website to compete with.

- Long phrases - uncompetitive terms - generally easy to rank for, might not bring you much traffic.

- Relevant and specific terms – These are the best to choose because they highly searched, and are targeted enough to bring qualified traffic.

 Where do you put your keywords?

- Anchor text

- Clickable image alt attributes (alt tags)

- Headlines- body text copy
- Title tags

- Meta description tags

More on search engine optimization here.

The Web Design Team at
mackeywebdesign.com

Best way to choose keywords to promote  for your website:

Use 3-4 Keywords Per Group

Break your keywords apart, in small groups-phrases, to rank for more keywords combinations.

Be Specific

Stay away from broad and generic keywords. Use a precise search phrase to guide a motivated buyer to your website.

Go After Longer, More Precise Keywords

Instead of “web design”, use keywords like “miami web design” and “miami web design company”. When serious buyers are doing research, they know what they want, and are most likely to buy from your website.

Attract Local Clients Through Geographic Targeting

If you draw most of your business from a local area, target your keywords to your area. This will bring the local market to your doorstep.

The Web Design Team at
mackeywebdesign.com

If you want to improve your website rankings in the search engine results of the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, you have to learn what makes a site rank well. Many website owners are often disappointed once their site is up that the site is ranking poorly or not at all. There seems to be this assumption that “if you build it, they will come”. Good search engine optimization or SEO strategies are critical to help your site rank well. If you want your site to rank well in search engine results, your web page must have these 4 essential factors of search engine optimization:

Search engine optimization strategy #1: web page content.
Search engines look for good quality, relevant pages with the keywords people uses when they search online. Each of your website pages should have the keywords and phrases your clients are searching for on.

Search engine optimization strategy #2: meta tags.
Meta tags are elements of HTML coding on a website. Search engines use these meta tags to help them determine what the site is about and assist with indexing a website.
 

Search engine optimization strategy #3: internal linking.
By optimizing your linking structure, you’ll be creating a rich web of interlinking within your site.

Search engine optimization strategy #4:  reciprocal linking.
The most common tactic is obtaining quality back links or inbound links to your site from relevant websites.

With these 4 strategies, you’ll be on the path to higher search engine ranking. SEO is not about tricking search engines, but making it easier for them  to determine the relevancy of your site.

The web design team at Mackey Web Design
mackeywebdesign.com

What is RSS?
In the internet world of billions of web sites, keeping abreast of ever changing information is quite a challenge. It would be easier to have the latest news and features delivered directly to you, rather than you having to click from site to site, wouldn’t it?

RSS allows just that. It allows you to see when sites from all over the internet have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and articles in one place, as soon as they are published, without having to remember to visit each site each day.

It takes the hassle out of staying up-to-date, by showing you the very latest information that you are interested in. Not all websites currently provide RSS, but it is growing rapidly in popularity.

For more information on RSS or any web design question, please contact Mackey Web Design

The web design  team at Mackey Web Design
Mackey Web Design

Miami Web Design Blog,  by Mackey Web Design, giving you web design advice since 1999.

Information on different web design related topics, such as web design, web hosting and search engine optimization, as well as answering your questions.
We serve mainly the Miami Florida area, and have been making websites since 1999 for the whole United States as well.

Whether you need a brand new web site, or you would like help with an existing site, you can count on our talent, creativity, dedication and attention to details.

The web design  team at Mackey Web Design
mackeywebdesign.com