There’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” SEO campaign. In much the same way that your business offers something different from your competitors, your search engine optimization efforts should also be individualized according to your unique needs. Delivering targeted SEO efforts for our clients is one of the things that set eVisible apart from our competitors and it’s something you should consider in everything you do with your website.

Much the same is true when it comes to developing the code and design elements on your website. You need to apply analytical thinking when it comes to how you create and deploy your website. Even experienced web developers can make mistakes that can impact the ability of their website to perform its best. Here are a few things that you should consider:

Start Small: Instead of launching your website with a huge set of features, start small with a clean, basic layout and design. You can always build it out as your business grows by choosing individual elements to add that have been carefully developed and beta tested.

Keep Your Code Flexible: While your platform doesn’t need to be completely scalable from the start, you also don’t want it to be so inflexible that making additions or changes in the future is impossible.

Make Your Code Easy to Deploy: Instead of trying to create a site based on the limitations of your code, work from the opposite direction and plan your features and try to come up with easily-implementable code that will get these features to happen.

Launch Your Website at the Right Time: Don’t rush your website to go live if the elements aren’t all in place. If customers come to your site and have problems with it, chances are they won’t be repeat customers.

Focus on the Customer: Think about how you can create a website that meets your customers’ needs. This should be more important than implementing any one piece of code.

Along with these code-based tips, there are other elements to remember as you start your business. eVisible – Internet Marketing Firm – can help you with this along with all other aspects of getting your company off the ground. A few things to consider include:

Focus on Big Picture Problems: Instead of developing a product or service that fills a niche need, try to make sure you have a model in place that will attract the largest amount of people possible.

Stay Involved…But Not Too Involved: No matter what your role is in the company, you need to know about every aspect of how the business is operating. At the same time, you need to let the experts that you hire or contract with take the lead in their areas of expertise.

Whether you are launching a new website or redesigning an existing site, the temptation is to pack as much content and information onto the site — particularly the front page — as possible. This can include lots of pictures, videos, product descriptions and content information. Unfortunately, this is a mistake that can cripple a site before it launches. When it comes to creating an SEO friendly design, simpler is better.

More specifically, you need to design your website to reflect the visual expectations that customers have for sites like yours. This doesn’t mean that you should exactly copy the look and layout of one of your competitors. What it does mean is that you need to do some research to understand what the major design elements are that similar sites to yours have in common and why they are so frequently used.

If you think about certain types of sites such as online clothing stores, real estate offices or news sites, you’ll find that many of them naturally have similar elements laid out in similar ways. A big reason for this is because of a concept called “cognitive fluency,” which essentially means that people feel more comfortable looking at a site if the information they need is where they expect to find it. This means having graphics, headlines and logos in places that are comfortable and familiar if they have also looked at other sites in your space.

In addition, customers don’t want to be confused with an array of visual elements when they go to a site. Studies have shown that complex sites essentially make the eye and the brain work too hard to process information, causing people to find the sites ugly and leave them quickly. Instead, people prefer sites that are not as complex. This includes simple images, only a few colors and liberal use of white space.

The bottom line is that every element on your website – especially your front page – should communicate something important. Research has shown that an adult is only able to store about five to nine pieces of information in their short term memory. You need to identify the big points that you want people to take from your site and make sure they are front and center in your design. Doing professional website development with this in mind will lead to a cleaner, more user-friendly site that results in conversions.

If you are looking at launching a corporate blog for SEO purposes, you likely understand that the quality of the writing is critical to its success. You need to move beyond bland SEO copywriting and create content that is unique, educational and helps readers understand the industry that your business is in. But having a successful corporate blog is about more than just the content. Much of your blog’s success will depend on the four steps you take before you write a single word of copy.

Branding: You want your blog to be memorable so that people come back to it. Along with creating compelling content, you can do this with the branding of your blog. Come up with a creative name that goes beyond COMPANY NAME Blog. Create a logo that is fun and will tell readers what to expect from your blog. Use color schemes in the design that are eye-catching (and match your corporate branding if you do this). You can often do this while choosing the theme of your blog if you are using a popular blogging service such as WordPress.

Develop a Content Strategy: Depending on your line of business, you might be overwhelmed with potential blog post ideas or trying to figure out how to create content on a regular basis. Having a content strategy in place from the beginning will help you determine the right topics to pursue with your writing. Do research on the content already on your site to see what topics, keywords or types of content is most popular with your visitors. You can use this as a guide to help you determine where to focus your blog writing energy.

Build Social Media Hooks Into Your Blog: If you want your blog posts to spread and potentially “go viral,” you need to give readers a way to share them. Making it easy for readers to share links to your blog posts via social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit is a must. Make sure that every post ends with a way for people to share your story with one click – there are several services you can use to automatically generate this at the end of each post. It’s also important to give readers a way to subscribe to your blog so they automatically receive new blog posts.

Set the Tone of Your Blog: As much of the success of your blog will come down to how you say something versus what exactly you are saying. The tone of your blog should match the expectations of your readers. If your company is a retail business selling fun items, you can have a quirky, humorous tone that will get people to laugh. Blogs that are aimed toward a more technical audience will need to be drier and be straightforward. No matter what your tone is, the blog needs to provide useful and educational information about your products and your industry.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending weeks or even months to redesign your website, only to see traffic plummet soon after the new version of the site goes live. It’s especially frustrating because you obviously did all the work because you expected to improve your search engine ranking, get more traffic and see more conversions. Where did it all go wrong?

In most cases, there is no single culprit; it’s usually a series of small mistakes that, on their own, would create minimal damage to your traffic but when taken together can be disastrous. Here are four of the most common problems we’ve found at eVisible when people try to relaunch their sites and their traffic tanks:

Check Google Analytics

It’s possible that your site’s analytic tracking didn’t automatically restart when your new site was launched. Manually check Google Analytics to make sure that it’s enabled and working properly; if it isn’t, check individual pages for issues like missing tracking code placement.

Recheck Google Analytics

You can also go deeper with your analytic research to see if there are unforeseen problems. Make sure that you have 301 redirects for any pages whose address structures have changed and thoroughly look for any 404 pages. Do a keyword search to see which keywords are underperforming and if they have been removed from poorly performing pages.

Review Your robots.txt File

It’s possible that your site has been deindexed for some reason. One possible explanation is with your robots.txt file. Check the head of page source code for a meta robots tag exclaiming noindex and also check for anything that says “disallow:/” in the code.

Check for Host or Server Issues

Changing your hosting or server can lead to communications issues that will make it impossible for search engines to index your site. There are several tools available for checking your DNS health; one thing you absolutely should do is look at your DNS errors and server connectivity in your Google or Bing Webmaster Tools.

Reworking your website to have a more SEO friendly design is a great way to boost your online business’ potential; it can also be intimidating, especially right before your new site goes live. Before you relaunch your site to the world, you need to go through a last-minute checklist to ensure that the launch will be a success. Here are 20 steps that you need to take when finalizing your professional website development:

Onsite Content:

1. Check that all of the content you’ve created – and the old content that you haven’t touched – is free of spelling errors, typos or other problems. Also make sure that the content is compelling for visitors.

2. Open your site in Google Chrome and press F12 and then open the “Network” tab to see your site’s speed and page sizes.

3. Test drive the forms on your site to make sure they work properly.

Web Development:

4. Verify that your site links are correct when they have transferred from the test site to your live site. If you have any 404 pages, develop a custom page with search to encourage visitors to go to other parts of your site. If pages are moved or have a new URL structure, make sure to use a 301 redirect.

5. Validate your W3C code and fix any errors you might have.

6. Add custom Favicons to your address bars or the tabs of users’ browsers to create a custom feel for your site.

7. Minify your site to compress the code and make it load faster.

Web Design

8. Cross-check your site on different browsers to ensure multi-browser compatibility.

9. Check that your display text is coming up when you hover over an image. You should also make sure that your images aren’t too large and that you don’t have issues with fonts not rendering correctly.

Search Engine Optimization

10. Make sure that all pages have title tags and meta tags.

11. Upload an accurate site map in both XML and HTML to make your site easier to navigate for users and search engines.

12. Have your Google Analytics package ready to go along with your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also contact your ad rep if you have any PPC campaigns running to avoid a disruption.

13. Submit your site to the popular search engines to ensure they are indexed immediately.

14. Check to make sure that your SERP display is correct and your pages are displaying properly on search engine result pages.

15. Make sure that your social media buttons go to the right pages and allow people to “Like” the right parts of your site.

Network Administration:

16. Install site monitors to ensure visitors can get to your pages and use enhanced monitors for your key landing pages.

17. Run tests with load test software tools to simulate what will happen to your site in times of heavy traffic.

18. Have a backup system ready to go in case your site does crash.

19. Check password-protected pages to make sure people can’t get into them without the proper credentials.

20. If you have a secure certificate, check it to make sure it is valid on launch day.

Using SEO tactics to get customers to your website is great. After all, people need to find your site in order to use it. Companies know this – it’s why many spend significant amounts of time and resources on professional search engine marketing. However, getting people to visit your site is only part of the battle. If the content is weak or poorly written, or the layout is distracting and confusing, what is the point?

It’s easy for a web development consultant to spend so too much time worrying about SEO considerations and not enough thinking about customer usability; this often leads to websites that rank highly with search engines but have low conversion rates when it comes to translating web views into actual sales.

Don’t fall victim to this short-sighted approach to web development services. Instead, utilize these five tricks that will help boost your search engine rankings while also improving the interface and user experience for your customers:

Know Your Customer: There’s no such thing as the “typical” customer. But by doing some market research. you can understand what drives a potential customer in your category to make a purchasing decision. Remember that a website that works for one type of business might not be appropriate for another business.

Make Your Content Have a Point: The content on your website isn’t just there to fill space or serve as filler between optimized keywords. Think about the types of questions that you customers might have and design your text to clearly answer these questions.

Keep Graphics Simple and Clean: It’s easy to try and go overboard with graphics, colors and other design elements with laying out your website. After all, you want your site to be memorable and eye-catching. But in many cases, this means that your website will also be distracting and keep people from finding the links and information they need to make a purchasing decision.

Make Navigation Easy to Follow: One of the main reasons that people leave a website before making a purchase is because of poorly development site navigation. If they can’t easily find a link to the information they need, they’ll likely leave and try out a competitors’ site. Check your website design and make sure that customers can quickly get to the pages that lead to sales.

Track and Change: The work isn’t done when your website goes live. You need to track visitors, clickthrough rates and sales to determine what does and doesn’t work and make changes quickly if necessary.

Reaching customers using smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is valuable for any website. Mobile customers are often looking for products in a hurry and are ready to make a purchase. To respond to the needs of mobile web users, many websites have “mobile” versions of their website that are text-heavy and meant to load quickly on web browsers. While this help improve loading times and the customer experience, it also makes it difficult to optimize a page to increase conversion rates.

One solution to this problem is creating a responsive design. This involves the implementation of a flexible code structure that allows the design elements to adapt to the parameters of a mobile device. How the on-screen elements are presented to the reader will depend on the type of which type of device the person is using. A smart website conversion for mobile devices using responsive design also incorporates elements that work well on smaller screens (such as video and audio) and eliminating elements that will distract people reading the page on a phone or tablet.

What are some of the elements that you might want to consider during a conversion to a mobile site using responsive design?

Minimalism is a key element to mobile webpage design. Create a scrollable slideshow of product images instead of having them all appear on the screen. Smaller thumbnails are great for touchscreens.

Enhance the call to action by making it a prominent part of the display. Create a large button or banner that is easy to find and clearly states what the call to action on the page is. Doing this avoids customers not being able to click through to the sales point on your site.

Make pricing clear and don’t force people to search through the site to find it. Because of the small size of the screen, customers might get frustrated and leave your webpage if they can’t find the pricing information they need. This includes sales offers and deals such as free shipping on products.

Highlight reviews and ratings to give customers a sense of confidence before purchasing one of your products.

Make content expandable with one-touch rather than forcing people to click on tabs with small text in order to find out more information about your products.