Web Development Tips

What to consider when looking for quality website development

Once you are ready to make a website and are done planning and preparing for your website, the next step in establishing an online presence is finding the right company, contractor, or consultant to deliver the web development services you need.

However important a websites appearance is, the performance and results of any website rely largely on what's beneath its surface; that which is not seen or fully understood by most. This information is not intended to be a general how to guide on comparing prices and services, but rather advice from us on what you should consider when looking for professional website design, web development, and internet promotion that you may not already be aware of.

Differences between Building, Designing & Marketing web presence

Understanding the differences between designing a website, building a website, and making a website visible online will help ensure that you choose a website developer that can meet all your goals and demands.

Building proper and professional websites which perform and operate optimally is a highly technical process. This includes a website's load time, certain aspects of its speed of operation, the ability for the website to work properly and coherently across the many different web browsers and operating systems, and many aspects of potential online visibility. Each of these factors are dependant upon the build of the website - the way in which it was programmed and created. Properly building a website is something many web designers and online marketers fail to be concerned with or take interest in, and frankly they are often unable to handle the process correctly.

Creating effective and appropriate custom website designs on the other hand is an artistic and creative process. You want your website to be easy and intuitive to use and navigate. It should be enticing and interesting to browse through, and you want the mood and emotion your website portrays to reflect your identity and image branding. Not only will this catch your audience's attention - it will enhance your credibility to deliver the products or services you are promising. The design of a website is extremely important, and should be managed accordingly.

Online Promotion and Marketing of websites encompasses all aspects of a websites online visibility, including internet advertising, visits from search engines, links from external web pages, and so on. Depending on a websites goals and purposes, market, and competition, internet marketing is often the most beneficial and cost effective form of promotion available to a company. A website that pulls in around 10,000 visitors a month and generates, say, $30,000 a month in income, could possibly generate $100,000 a month if only it had 40,000 or so visitors. The problem is, as a highly technical and constantly evolving area, most websites are not developed with search engine optimization (SEO) or other important aspects of internet marketing for websites in mind. In fact, studies reveal that as many as 90% of all business-related websites currently on the internet are not built or developed with any regard to online visibility!

Evaluating prospective Web Developers

It is important for anyone who is seeking website development services to understand that many website designers know surprisingly little about properly building or marketing websites. Likewise, many website developers know very little about design and online promotion, and many internet marketers are not concerned with web design or properly building websites. Understanding what you need and what you will be receiving is imperative to the success of your web presence, and automatically puts you at an advantage over 9 out of 10 websites.

Evaluating Web Design - Portfolios

The only place you should have to look to evaluate a web developer's designs is to their own website's portfolio. Any established website developers will offer a portfolio they have created for other clients, as well as links to the websites. Depending on what you are looking for in a web developer, some things you may want to look for in regards to this portfolio include;

Is their work generally similar in design, or do their clients' sites look unique and appropriate for their purpose?
Are their designs and websites consistent and appealing throughout?
Are any of the websites flashy and largely graphical?
Are there videos, animation, or custom graphics?
Are there any e-commerce websites, shopping carts, or other interactive elements?

Evaluating Website Builds

Unfortunately, the people who can spot a good website creator are usually website builders themselves. Whereas a website appears to most people as simply presentation and function, the truth is that the elements most detrimental to many online presences' success rates are factors that most people and even many website developers overlook or are often simply unaware of.

There are only a few things that someone without a website development background can easily evaluate in terms of building websites properly:

Look for any inconsistencies across pages, odd characters, missing graphics, forms not working, pages not found, or any other technical problems you may be able to identify on the websites.
If you have access to several different computers with various operating systems (Windows Vista, Windows 98, Mac OS, etc.) and web browsers (Internet Explorer, Fire Fox, Opera, Safari, Netscape, etc.) you can visit the websites on different browsers and computers and check for consistency and functionality.

Evaluating Online Promotion and Web Marketing

Trying to evaluate web promotion services can easily become confusing. With all the technical terms and fine print, it is often hard to know what you are really getting. For instance, many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies guarantee such things as first page listings with a major search engine. Often, however, they will use technical terms to provide clients with something else - usually a paid advertisement that appears on the first page, which is not nearly as valuable.

The best advice We can give for evaluating online promotion performance is to obtain actual performance results, and preferably references. Evaluate what was promised by the website promoter, what was actually delivered, and the value of the marketing. There are no set limits to the performance of a website; all you can do is try to figure out who can provide you with the biggest return on investment and the service most valuable to your website.

Also, be weary of any companies that make specific search engine result guarantees - no one can directly control their results, as algorithms and competition evolve. No search results are set in stone.

Choosing the right web developer for you

There are companies and consultants who specialize in single areas of design, building, or promotion of websites, offering only these services, and others who specialize in the entire aspect of web presences. While choosing the right solution for your particular website depends on your specific needs and goals, having an idea of the various options and knowing what to look for in a web developer allows you to make a more informed and better decision.

Reasons to link

Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It's an accessibility thing.)

Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your website.

Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your website seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

PPC as a Link Building Tool

Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your website more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your website, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News & Syndication

Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article websites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

Submit an article to industry news website. Have an SEO website? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it really good . Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc.

Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

Trade articles with other webmasters.

Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

Write about, and link to, companies with "in the news" pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.

Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Bookmarking

This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your website to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.

Submit your website to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.

Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own website, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

Tag related websites on sites like Delicious. If people find the websites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your website.

If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your website gets on the front page of Digg or on the Delicious popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your website, and potentially link to it.

Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular spreading ideas with plenty of original content (and link to some of the original resources), your website may get listed as a source on the meme tracker website.

Local & Business Links

Join the Better Business Bureau.

Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (Easier in some countries than in others.)

List your web site at the local library's Website.

See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your website.

Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other's business cards.

Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional "normal" links.

Easy Free Links

Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.

It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.

It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. If it is hard to list your web site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your website.

It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your website.

Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your website. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.

If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content.

Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your website, link at your website, and/or buy your products.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews

Most brands are not well established online, so if your website has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.

Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.

Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).

Review related websites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.

Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority.

If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere

Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, ad relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.

Design as a Linking Element

Web 2.0-ify your website. People love to link to anything with AJAX. Even in the narrowest of niches, there is some kind of useful functionality you can build with AJAX.

Validate and 508 your website. This (indirect) method makes your website more trustworthy and linkable, especially from governmental websites or design-oriented communities. There are even a few authoritative directories of standards-compliant websites.

Order a beautiful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from websites like CSS Vault.

Hire Help

Hire a publicist. Good old fashioned 'PR' (not PageRank) can still work wonders. Andy Hagans now offers a link baiting publicity service.

Hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building. Just make sure to go with someone good.

Link Trading

Swap some links. What?! Did we really just recommend reciprocal link building? Yes, on a small scale, and with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks.

In case you didn't get the memo — when swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

Buying Sites, Renting Links & Advertisements

Rent some high quality links from a broker. Text Link Ads is the most reputable firm in this niche.

Rent some high quality links directly from Websites. Sometimes the most powerful rented links come direct from websites not actively renting links.

Become a sponsor. All sorts of charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, and links.

Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the profits to a charity. Many charities will link both to the eBay auction and to your website.

Many search algorithms seem biased toward older established websites. It may be faster to buy an old website with a strong link profile, and link it to your own website, than to try to start building authority links from scratch.

Freebies & Giveaways

Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links. Enough said.

Build a tool collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think ranking for mortgage calculator is worth?

Create and release open source website design templates for content management systems like Wordpress.

Offer free samples in exchange for feedback.

Release a Firefox extension. Make sure you have a download and/or support page on your website which people can link to.

Conferences & Social Interaction

It is easy to take pictures of important events and tell narratives about why they are important. Pictures of (drunk?) "celebrities" in your industry make great link bait.

Leverage new real world relationships into linking relationships. If you go to SEO related conferences, people like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan are readily accessible. Similarly, in other industries, people who would normally seem inaccessible are exceptionally accessible at trade conferences. It is much easier to seem "real" in person. Once you create social relationships in person, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire.

How To Increase Your Alexa Rank

Here is a collection of methods you can use to boost your Alexa Rank. Most of these tips are derived from several fellow webmasters we know who claimed to have derived positive results through their experiments with the Alexa Rankings.

Some of the other tips were derived articles and sources.

Do these tips work? According to some, yes they definitely do work. But do note that most of them require active effort of some sort and hence, they will work as long as long as you are consistently performing specific actions.

To increase your Alexa rank in the long run, pixelhabits.com would highly recommended that one focus on developing quality content which attracts and maintains a large audience instead of purely focusing on artificially increasing your Alexa Rank.

Great link-worthy content it will lead to a natural increase in website traffic and is an excellent way to passively increase your Alexa rank.

It is important to emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your website audience alongside integrated implementation of any of the following tips below.

Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension and set your blog as your homepage. This is the most basic step.

Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website. According to some, each click counts as a visit even if the toolbar is not used by the visitor.

Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. This includes friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers. Be sure to link to Alexa’s full explanation of their toolbar and tracking system so your readers know what installing the toolbar or extension entails.

Work in an Office or own a company? Get the Alexa toolbar or SS Firefox extension installed on all computers and set your website as the homepage for all browsers. Perhaps it will be useful to note that this may work only when dynamic or different IPs are used.

Get friends to review and rate your Alexa website profile. Not entirely sure of its impact on rankings but it might help in some way.

Write or Blog about Alexa. Webmaster and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has effects on your Alexa ranking.

Flaunt your URL in webmaster forums. Webmasters usually have the toolbar installed. You’ll get webmasters to visit your website and offer useful feedback. It’s also a good way to give back to the community if you have useful articles to share with others.

Write content that is related to webmasters. This can fall in the category of domaining and SEO, two fields in which most webmasters will have the Alexa toolbar installed. Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.

Use Alexa redirects on your website URL. Try this: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.pixelhabits.com . Replace pixelhabits.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will count a unique IP address once a day so clicking it multiple times won’t help. There is no official proof that redirects positively benefit your Alexa Rank, so use with caution.

Post in Asian social networking websites or forums. Some webmasters have suggested that East Asian web users are big Alexa toolbar fans, judging by the presence of several Asia-based websites in the Alexa Top 500. I suggest trying this only if you have the time or capacity to do so.

Create a webmaster tools section on your website. This is a magnet for webmasters who will often revisit your website to gain access to the tools. Aaron Wall’s webpage on SEOTools is a very good example.

Get Dugg or Stumbled. This usually brings massive numbers of visitors to your website and the sheer amount will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank. Naturally, you’ll need to develop link worthy material.

Use PayperClick Campaigns. Buying advertisements on search engines such as Google or Exact Seek will help bring in Traffic. Doubly useful when your ad is highly relevant to webmasters.

Create an Alexa category on your blog and use it to include any articles or news about Alexa. This acts as an easily accessible resource for webmasters or casual search visitors while helping you rank in the search engines.

Optimize your popular posts. Got a popular post that consistently receives traffic from the search engines? Include a widget/graph at the bottom of the post, link to your Alexa post or use Alexa redirection on your internal URLs.

Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites. A prominent and well displayed ad will drive lots of webmaster traffic to your website, which can significantly boost your rank.

Hire forum posters to pimp your website. Either buy signatures in webmaster forums or promote specific articles or material in your website on a regular basis. You can easily find posters for hire in Digital Point and other webmaster forums.

Pay Cybercafe owners to install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as the homepage for all their computers. This might be difficult to arrange and isn’t really a viable solution for most. I’m keeping this one in because some have suggested that it does work.

Use MySpace . This is a little shady so I don’t recommended it unless you’re really interested in artificially inflating your Alexa Rank. Use visually attractive pictures or banners and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. This will be most effective if your website has content that is actually relevant to the MySpace Crowd.

Try Alexa auto-surfs. Do they work? Maybe for brand new sites. I think they are mostly suitable for new websites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so we suggest using with caution.

How To Increase Your Google Rank

Background: Google's Page Ranking Algorithm

As many of you are probably already aware, Google ranks a page according to the number and quality of links leading to that page. For example, if your page has 100 quality links leading to it, it will rank higher than another page that has only 20 links pointing at it. Quality links come from pages that are themselves "important" (Google's own terminology).

Note that this is not a secret. Google actually publishes information about their ranking algorithm on their website. You can read it for yourself at http://www.google.com/technology/.

Improving Your Page Rank on Google

There are numerous tips floating around in webmaster circles about how to improve your ranking in search engine results on Google.

Get Those Inbound Links

Since Google ranks your pages according to the number of links pointing at your page, it stands to reason that you should try to get as many links pointing at your pages as possible. This is so obvious that I'm only mentioning it for completeness sake

Your Title Tag

Google seems to give weight to the title of your page. By title, we mean the text that is sandwiched between the HTML <TITLE> tags in the <HEAD> section of your web page. If you use a Web editor that automatically inserts a title like "New Page", remember to change it to some meaningful text with your keywords inside to reap the benefit of this feature.
Content-Laden Pages (Keyword Density)

It has often been observed that Google considers keyword density a large factor in ranking pages in search engine results, more so than many other search engines.
Keyword-laden Links?

According to a paper published by one of Google's founders, if the links pointing to your page has the relevant keyword text in them, it will cause your page to be ranked higher in search engine results. For example, a link with the text "Cheap Web Design " pointing at your site will cause your site to be listed earlier if a visitor searches for "cheap web design " than if the link simply said "click here".

Will Disabling Caching of Your Page Affect Your Page Rank?

Some time ago, it was claimed that Google would penalise pages that forbade it from caching their pages. As you know, Google caches the pages it indexes unless otherwise instructed. To avoid problems with people who feel that this is a copyright infringement (and other reasons), they allow sites to instruct the Google spider not to cache those pages using various means.

Google has apparently publicly denied that disabling caching would affect the page's ranking in any way. we tend to believe their claim.
Dynamic Pages and Google

Unlike some other search engines, Google is able to index dynamically generated pages, so long as a link exist to those pages somewhere.

So if you have a dynamically generated page that you think should be indexed, make sure you put a link to it somewhere on your website.
ALT tags on Images

If you have been placing images on your website without bothering to place ALT tags, now is a good time to add ALT tags. Google apparently indexes the text given in the ALT tags of images.
META Keywords Tag is Ignored

Google ignores the META keywords tag, so, the optimization of this tag is not going to help you any with Google.

The Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar can be obtained free of charge for Firefox and Internet Explorer. It gives you an idea of how important Google thinks your site is (in general) by showing the Page Rank of any page that you visit.

Unfortunately, to obtain the page rank of the pages you visit, the toolbar actually transmits information about the pages you visit to Google. Thus if you are worried about people tracking your Internet activity, you might want to restrict its use to times when you check your site's ranking. You can easily enable or disable the Page Rank feature from its Options menu.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online," call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to: