Web Impakt

When looking at a lot of the websites in Idaho Falls, many of them serve the purpose web pages did initially for businesses. As was mentioned to me in a conversation, they are just putting up a billboard in cyberspace. Still not understanding the power of the internet for their businesses, many business owners are feeling the need to get online and are simply creating a web address with content that is no more than a virtual sign on the information highway called the internet.

In order to save money, these business owners turn to do-it-yourself website design programs and many of them do a good job of getting things started. But, there is more to creating a website if you want it to be an effective means of creating business through it. 

A new trend in adding professional media interaction to websites is the use of Flash Media. Flash introductions, banners, boxes, and now coming to the scene are Flash transparent videos. The Flash media offers you a method of providing visitors to your website with information you feel they should know about your business without having to click for information. The new trend of transparent videos allows you to do a virtual greeting to your potential customers and explain what your site has to offer. If you are camera shy and don’t want to put yourself on your website, you could hire a company to provide you with a virtual spokesperson that can put together a video with an explanation of your company and website. These actors go off of a script provided by your business. 

When applying Flash media to your website, you will need to work with a company that will make sure the file sizes don’t impair your potential visitors’ ability to load your website. A completely Flash driven website isn’t a good idea because of search engines not being able to read the content of your website, however, according to an article on WebProNews, search engines are expected to rank websites higher if they contain images and video in the upcoming year.

There are many important components of website design. The average visitor to a website may only see images and content but are other important elements involved in creating a successful website. Those components will be covered in the next three blog posts:

1. Sound Programming and a well planned framework
2. Goal-Driven Design, Accessibility and testing
3. Search Engine Optimization and a strong web marketing strategy

It is a well known analogy that a successful website is like an ice burg. The website visitor only sees the images and content but there is a large hidden foundation that ensures the website visitor leaves the site trusting the source and finding what they were searching for.

The Google sandbox effect is the theory that Google will not index new websites until they have proven their viability for a certain number of months. Therefore, a site in the sandbox when it is new and does not rank for keyword phrases that are NOT competitive like a company name.

According to this article at seochat.com, not all search engine optimization professionals blame the Google sandbox effect for slow indexing sites. These professionals believe that it is the Google indexing algorithms that produce this effect.

This “How to beat the Google Sandbox” article at seomoz.org details the sandbox effect and offers some suggestions on how to get out of it.

Wordpress is an amazing piece of software that allows everyday users create and update their own blogs. There are hundreds of plugin’s and options available that it is easy to get lost in all of the options. In my opinion, the necessary steps should be taken to achieve the best results when installing Wordpress.

1. Install Wordpress by going to http://wordpress.org/download/

Installing WordPress will walk you step by step through this simple installation.

2. Change the custom structure of your permalinks.

3. Install Akismet

Akismet checks out all of the comments posted on your blog and determines if they look like spam or not. You have to sign up for Wordpress and receive a WordPress.com API key for it to work.

4. Install Enforce www. Preference

This article by dailyblogtips.com explains why this is important.

After performing these four steps you should be on your way to SEO friendly blogging.

There are many benefits to creating a custom web application for your small business. The number one reason is that it will save your small business time and money. Creating custom web applications for your business will enable you move your small business ahead.

Does your small business manually perform any of the following tasks by hand on paper:

Tracking inventory
Tracking customer information
Data entry and re-entry
Employee schedule

There are many small business processes that a custom application would streamline. Web Impakt is will create custom software that is specifically priced to small business. We provide software solutions that are customized for your small business needs and processes.

SEO is a daunting task for even the most experienced web designers. Many businesses pay huge fees every month to ensure they stay in the top rankings for specified key words. For those of us who don’t have the money to spend on reaching the top of the search engines, this article is for you.

Below is a list of specific items that we at Web Impakt build into each site we create for clients:

Title Tags – The title of each page should be a short description of the page content. This is one of the most important and basic fundamentals of SEO.  The title tag is displayed at the top left corner of the browser.

Meta Tags – These are hidden tags that the SEO spiders use to help index your site.

Heading Tags – Your web designer will use these in all of your pages. Important keywords like your business name should be enclosed in <H1> tags with secondary words followed up with <H2> tags.

Search Engine Submission – Each time Web Impakt completes a site we submit it to the top engines.

If you don’t go through Web Impakt for your web site creation, make sure your web development company has completed the above tasks.  These are very rudimentary tasks that every web design firm implement.

The SEO work is not complete after the web site is created and posted.  The following is a list of SEO tasks that non-technical people can accomplish to boost search engine rankings:

Inbound Links – SEO spiders measure the popularity of your site by calculating the number of incoming links to your site. Be aware that there are good and bad backlinks. Keep all of your inbound links coming from reputable sites.

Quality Content – Quality content will skyrocket you to the top of the search engines. Web Impakt provides content writing packages but most of the time our customers opt to provide content. After all, the customer knows about their product and what they want to say. As noted in our business blog posting, a blog can assist with the content portion of SEO.   When writting content, make sure to include your keywords.  Go here or here for keyword suggestions.

Search Engine Optimization is a delicate operation. You can’t use any of the above methods to much or they will lose their effectiveness. Good luck and may high search engine rankings be with you.