About

What is Web Design? In today’s world it can be anything from an email-blast to a social networking tool.  At Elm Street Design we pride ourselves in our knowledge of today’s technology, but not as much as we pride ourselves in our service.

When it comes to optimizing your website, the ideas should be in place before the first line of code is written and the first color is imagined.  Too many times we see people asking for Search Engine Optimization after they have a beautiful flash-based website in place. Unfortunately, here at Elm Street, we have to tell them that they spent their money on something pretty, not something that is there to be nice to the search engines.  The fact is, in today’s market, you have to think about how you are marketing your website, even before design.

Whether your company is large or small, you must have a web presence that works for your business. Commanding a powerful presence on the World Wide Web has become a table stake. A company’s web design details and web presence has replaced a wide array of communication vehicles. Nowadays customers, suppliers, and even potential investors form a first impression from a company’s web presence.
And it’s not just the homepage – a good cover followed by unfriendly navigation, hard to decipher visuals, or simply too many graphic images will ruin a visit

Most search engines place a lot of weight on the content of your TITLE tag. Your page’s title is very important and you should design it properly. Do not set the title of your page to something totally unrelated to your site. For example: “Welcome!” or “Thank You For Visiting!” simply will not do.

Your TITLE tag should clearly represent what your site is about. If you’re building a page that talks about your company’s products, the title should thoroughly reflect that topic. “Our Products” or “Product Listings” is a bad choice for a page title – people are probably going to be searching for your company by name or by the type of product you sell. Thus, using our website as an example: “Vancouver Web Design, SEO Vancouver, BC Web Design”. What ever business you are in, make sure your title tag reflects exactly who you are and what you do.

Also consider using keywords in your TITLE tag. For example, let’s say you’re selling real estate. You might want to make the title of your main page “Seattle Real Estate, Real Estate Agency in Seattle, Listing Homes, Property and Commercial listing for the Seattle Area!” As you can see, this title gets right to the point about the topic of the page. It also uses your keyword: “Seattle Real Estate,” and more specifically “Real Estate Listings in Seattle” (twice). Someone searching for “Real Estate” is more likely to find YOUR page than a page titled “Homes For Sale.”

Over the years, META tags have been hawked as “the” way to get good listings in the search engines. Early on, this was true – when META tags were first created in the HTML specifications, search engines put a lot of weight on them. However, META tags have now become the most abused part of web pages. People routinely add META keywords to their page which have no relevance to their site’s topic. For example, many webmasters use META keywords like “pics” or “mp3″ even if their site has nothing to do with those categories. They’re hoping that people who search for hot topics will stumble across their page and stop by.

Those tactics do not work anymore. META tags now carry a surprisingly low weight in all of the popular search engines. What is important now is the overall content of your page. Search engines have algorithms (methods) for determining what your web pages are really about. These algorithms are closely-guarded secrets, for obvious reasons. However, they all focus on one thing these days: the REAL content in your web page. If you create a web page about “The CompanyABC Business Opportunity” but include META keywords like “free pics” and “download music,” your site’s not going to be indexed under the topics you defined in your keywords. In fact, it might be rejected altogether!

Not only should you make sure that your META keywords tag appropriately reflects the content of your page, you should ensure that the text content of your page contains a good distribution of your keywords. Mention your company name often (and evenly) throughout your site.

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