Small Business Design Resources

Quick Tip: Comment on Forums to Drive More Traffic to Your Website

Whatever industry you’re in there’s a forum for it. Choose a forum that best fits your business and start interacting. The best way is to answer questions, this will show that you’re an expert, and give you more value. Be sure to have a signature that includes your name, business name and contact information. Adding your website to your signature creates an extra entrance to your website. So the more comments you leave the more links you bring to your website.

Website Critique: Relieve stress with Lavender products

Lavender Dreams 4ever offers Aromatherapy products that help relieve stress and tension. The video website critique of their website www.lavenderdreams4ever.com offers improvements to their homepage and suggestions for the navigation menu among other things that will make a user experience more welcoming.

Overall Improvements

• There should be contact information in a visible location on every page. Best to include a phone number in addition to email so users can trust you better.

• Add relevant images where appropriate to break up the long text.

Homepage

• Create a call-to-action so users can immediately know what to do when they arrive on the website.

• Give more attention to your “Free Sachet give away with every purchase”. Everyone loves free stuff, make sure they know about it.

Products

• Reposition the products navigation menu so it’s easily accessible.

• Restructure how all products are displayed on the main products page. The slider makes it a little hard to tell how many products you have to offer.

Other recommendation

• Add a blog with articles about stress issues and relaxation methods. Having a blog is great to have new content on your website, which search engines love to see.

More website critiques

Of course there are more things to dive deeply into making this site better such as search engine optimization, but this is a whole different subject and will require it’s own review.

If you’re viewing this review and want to add more suggestions, please add your comments below.

Disclaimer

The video website critique and suggestions are for you to review and take what you feel will better your business website. There’s no guarantee that the suggestions mentioned will improve your business. Design Leap is not held responsible for any negative outcome.

5 Tips on How to Stand Out Among the Competition

Every business small or large has competitors and yours no doubt has them. Read my 5 tips on How to Stand Out Among the Competition in my post on The Entrepreneur Connection.

Quick Tip: Create a 301 Redirect for Your Website

A 301 redirect is basically telling the search engines that the page that you’re looking for does not exist and seamlessly directs the user to the page they should look at instead. The most common use of a 301 redirect is for directing the search engines from a domain name that starts without the WWW to one that starts with WWW or vise versa. For search engines a website that starts with WWW and the same one that starts with out the WWW are essentially two different websites. So for example if your website is www.websiteaddress.com but a user types in websiteaddress.com , the search engines will rank the two addresses separately even though they’re the same website. To eliminate this issue make sure you create a 301 redirect (ask your hosting provider to do it for you). So when the 301 redirect is set, anyone who types in websiteaddress.com they will automatically be redirected to www.websiteaddress.com and that’s what search engines like to see.

Understanding and Improving Google PageRank

There’s no question that having your small business website on the first page of Google results is good for traffic. Google has been used for more than 70% of U.S. Internet searches so far in 2010, making it by far the Internet’s most used search engine. One reason Google is so popular is that Internet searchers trust the results it returns. Google’s method for putting together a list of great search results relies heavily on PageRank (PR), a number from 0-10 that reflects a web page’s importance. Average PageRank is 3-5; a PageRank of 6-7 is considered extremely good. Only a few elite websites have PageRanks of 8 or above, and only Google and a handful of others have PageRanks of 10. PageRank is a logarithmic calculation, meaning that each level is harder to reach than the last. For example, moving from PR 2 to PR 3 is easier than moving from PR 3 to PR 4. It also means that a PageRank of 4 is more than twice as good as a PageRank of 2.

The formula for calculating PageRank is patented and a closely guarded secret; according to Google, PageRank is determined by looking at more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. But even though you can’t know all the details of Google’s formula, there are some things you can do to increase your PageRank.

1. Inbound Links
   The most important factor in determining PageRank is the number of high-quality websites that link to your webpage. Think of it as a voting system: when one page links to another page, Google considers that a vote for the other page. The more votes a page gets, the more important that page must be and the higher its PageRank. Votes from more important pages are considered more important, meaning that a link to your site from a page with a high PageRank will increase your PageRank more than a link from a page with low PageRank. Links from sites that have content related to your website’s content are also more valuable than links from unrelated websites.
2. Internal Linking and Structure
   How you structure your website is important to maximizing PageRank. Here are a few tips:
   • Make sure your website has a clear hierarchy and important links are made up of text rather than images.
   • Don’t let the structure of your website get too “deep”; having to follow several links in order to get to a page from your site’s homepage generally decreases that page’s PageRank.
   • Make sure every page is linked to by at least one text link, and avoid dangling links (links to pages that don’t contain any links themselves).
   • Include a site map that links to your website’s important pages.
   • Don’t put too many links on any one page.
3. Quality Content
   Having a lot of interlinked pages is good for PageRank, but only if the content on each page is original and useful. Good website content will encourage other websites to link to your pages (see Tip #1), and Google penalizes websites for containing content that is duplicated elsewhere on the Internet.
4. Use SEO Techniques
   Don’t forget to optimize for your target keywords, so Google knows what your website is about. Good Search Engine Optimization is key to improving your search engine ranking and is a factor that Google takes into consideration when calculating PageRank.

Following these tips should improve your Google PageRank, but be prepared to wait a few weeks before you see results–with the millions of websites on the Internet, it will take time for Google to reevaluate your website.