Benefits

In a marketplace where many web services providers offer very specialized services, it is often cumbersome for businesses to manage their online presence. It is common for businesses to have one company maintaining their website, another implementing their search engine optimization strategy and yet another managing their paid search campaigns. This disconnect often results in increases in expenses and time management for the business.

There are considerable benefits to enlisting the services of a web development company that also provides search engine marketing and usability testing services. Not all web development companies are alike. Some build beautiful site with little attention to prominent “calls to action” and search engine friendliness. Others build sophisticated applications that fall short on user experience and aesthetics. Sadly enough, a considerable amount of the work we do consist of redeveloping sites that were created by designers with little understanding of SEO. When these sites fail to achieve prominent search engine rankings, our services are enlisted.

You may have heard a similar horror story

A business pays a small fortune for the latest and greatest flash website only to find that they are nowhere to be seen in any of the search engines. Lots of money spent and no traffic to the site. They then resort to paying another small fortune every month on a pay per click campaign to generate traffic. After reviewing the ppc expenditure they decide to hire and seo firm to help with their organic search engine optimization strategy. The seo firm tells them they need to redesign the website in a search engine friendly manner since search engines cannot currently extract and index flash content. The frustrated business owner then moves forward with the redesign. Months later they finally begin seeing qualified search engine traffic based on the seo’s work. I recently heard of one company that had spent $ 60,000 on a flash site that had to be completely redesigned because of the above scenario! Don’t let this happen to you! Hire a company that not only understands search engine marketing but also implements best practices in web design.

We develop sites with the following principles as mind:

• User Experience It is not uncommon for websites that have had seo work done to them to be very non user-friendly. Once again not all seo firms work under the same guidelines. Often in an attempt to load a page with many keyphrases, inexperienced search engine optimizers dilute a site’s message and make the content burdensome to read. Our approach is to never sacrifice the marketing message for the sake of optimization. Making the site easy to use, and achieving consistency in messaging is always our priority.
• Search Engine Visibility & Ease of Syndication Generating website traffic is an expensive proposition. We therefore code our sites to make the most of the “free traffic” a site can generate by achieving prominent organic search engine placement. We also encourage clients to use a robust content management system that has built in RSS capabilities. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS allows users to consume your frequently updated content such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts via special browsers called aggregators.
• Web-Standards Compliance Advantages of developing standards-compliant websites have been well documented in an article titled, "The Business Benefits of Web Standards” put forth on the Mozilla Developer Center website. Here is a summary of some key points:

  1. Transforming a table based layout to CSS usually reduces page size by 25 – 50%. The means quicker load times and a better user experience.

  2. Well-formed code significantly reduces rendering differences in various browsers.

  3. Coding with standards (particularly CSS for positioning, and strict HTML) makes accessibility an easier goal to achieve, as standards have been created with accessibility in mind.

• Measurability We want to empower our clients to measure the performance of their websites and email marketing campaigns. We therefore incorporate Google Analytics in all sites we build. We also suggest our clients use Aweber Communications as their autoresponder and email marketing platform because of its excellent reporting and A/B testing features.

Simplify the process of achieving a successful online presence by selecting one service provider that can meet all your needs in a professional, timely and affordable manner. Give us a call today at 970.946.5387 to give your business the competitive advantage.