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Internet Marketing Central > FAQ FAQsThe following questions include those most asked of us by people new to the web site development and marketing process. If your particular question is not addressed below, please use our contact form. Site Development Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing Site Maintenance The first and most important step is to assess your Internet objectives. By knowing where you want to go and what you want to accomplish, you will get the most out your Internet marketing dollars. The best place to start is with a little research. Search on Yahoo! or Google for web sites within your industry and for your competitor's sites. By doing so, you can get great ideas and develop a better understanding of the market and your competition within it. For a detailed description of the process, see our Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Business on the Internet. What are the steps of the development process? The basic steps in the site development or renovation process are:
Client will be notified via email whenever changes have been made to the project work space that require review and feedback. How do I deliver the content for my web site to denning e-solutions? All content for your web site, unless otherwise agreed to in writing, must be delivered to denning e-solutions in an electronic format. Specifically:
What are the payment policies of denning e-solutions, LLC? Unless otherwise agreed to, our payment structure includes a 50% up front deposit required in order to begin work on the site with the balance due prior to posting the new site files to the client's domain name. In the event that the site development process extends past 120 days due to lack of content delivery or feedback regarding the site design by the client, the balance of the development fee is due at that point unless we both agree to different terms. > see also, development timing If you see extra space to the right or on both the right and left of your site design, then your monitor settings are larger than the site width. Some users will see no extra space; it is entirely determined by the monitor resolution settings of the user. We design most sites at a fixed width to accommodate resolution settings of 1024x768 and higher; this is the accepted standard and will present your site in the best way for the vast majority of Internet users (see data below). As of January 2011, the display resolution usage statistics are as follows:
Statistics provided by W3Schools The other alternative is to build the site with tables set at 100%. In doing so, the width of the design would fill the user's screen width, regardless of their settings. However, the downside to this method is that you lose precise control over the placement of the page's design and content elements. They are stretched or condensed depending on the user. This can render an otherwise well-designed site strange-looking. The applicability of this method depends entirely on the site itself and whether the design, content and layout lend themselves to this treatment. If you need to scroll left and right to view your site, your monitor settings are likely still set to the 800 pixel width. On a Windows computer, simply go to Control Panel > Appearance and Themes > Change the Screen Resolution. From there, change your setting from 800 to 1024. Well, that depends. Isn't that a helpful answer? Really, there are both fixed costs and variable costs associated with getting your business on the web. Fixed costs include:
Variable costs include: The design and development of the web site is variable depending on the size, technological complexity, and level of custom graphics involved. For reference, a small, custom-designed html web site with 10-15 pages will start at about $2,200. Please contact us for a free consultation and quote for the development of your web site. A web site that is launched onto the Internet with no attention to the marketing of the site is money wasted. People must be able to easily find your site either by searching for your company name or by searching for keywords related to your business. The search engines "crawl" or "spider" web sites and store information about them in their databases. Therefore, you must ensure that the information they gather from your site is the most relevant to your business. This is done, in part, by developing targeted title and META tags in the code of the web site. Those tags include a description of the site and a series of keywords and phrases that people are most likely to use when searching for a site like yours. Your site must then be submitted to the search engines so that they know to crawl and record your link. denning e-solutions includes Internet Marketing Services with every new site that we develop. We are certified in web positioning/search engine placement by the JER Group. Do the Search Engines Cost Money? Yes and no. Historically, submitting your site to the major search engines was free. Increasingly, that is not the case. However, most search engines still have a free option for submitting your site (both Yahoo and Google, the two largest search engines, have free submission options). They will typically make no guarantees about adding the site to their database nor will they commit to a timeframe for visiting and adding your site, but they will still allow you to submit your site for consideration without cost. For many of the major search engines, this method is still perfectly acceptable and effective. At d.e.s. we use a two-pronged approach. First, we optimize the site for the search engines and submit the site to the free options (the important ones), as available. We then evaluate the site's performance and make additional recommendations about the various paid options (pay-per-click, paid submission, paid inclusion) if necessary to bring the site's traffic levels in line with the client's expectations. If you are pursuing a search engine strategy on your own, we recommend a similar approach. Try to get all you can through search engine optimization tactics for free and then supplement those efforts, if need be, with targeted paid options. How often should my site be submitted to the search engines? Because the search engines regularly spider the sites in their databases and the Internet generally, there is no real reason to submit and re-submit your site at a determined regular interval. Instead, it is a good idea to re-submit any pages of your site after they have undergone a significant change or updating. What is a domain name? How do I get one? A domain name is the address of a web site, e.g. www.yourcompany.com. One company that administers the licensing of domain names is Network Solutions. You can check the availability a name by clicking here. There are many extensions (*.com, *.net, *.org, etc.) to choose from, but for most companies, you will want to stay with the *.com extension. The costs related to this process are discussed above. Web hosting is essentially the rental of Internet server space on which to house your web site. The hosting company will place your site on their server so that it is accessible to all those on the Internet. See above for cost information. As with the cost, it all depends on the complexity of the site that you will need. A good gauge for a 5 section, corporate web site without custom programming is between three and seven weeks. This timeframe includes the custom graphic design phase, assembly of needed content, and the construction of the site. After an initial consultation regarding the specific needs of a client, we give a more specific estimate of timing. A simple, one-page site with corporate logo, a description of services, and contact information can take as little as a week depending on scheduling. Can you guarantee my placement? No. And, anyone that tells you they can is misleading you. There are ways to ensure that you will appear on pages for certain keywords (see PPC for example), but these are paid advertising options. There is no way to guarantee a particular placement within the organic search results of any search engine. What you can do is create a site that is as appealing as possible to the search engines (read: easily spiderable), load it with meaningful content, submit it properly, constantly analyze and refine your site - and cross your fingers. How will I know if my site is placing well? You can check your site ranking with any number of tools that are available online, both free and for a fee. We use a program call WebPosition (follow link to their site to learn more) and highly recommend it. This program allows you to analyze how your ranks for a specified set of keyword phrases in a specified group of search engines; you can define your analysis to be as broad or as narrow as you feel best fits with your site and its goals. In our search engine booster program as well as our monthly site maintenance programs, we provide a summary report of your site's performance. The report shows how many upward and downward movements you had since the last reporting as well as which exact pages within your site were found (this helps you to further understand which of your strategies is most effective). We are happy to provide a sample report, simply contact us. Not an easy question to answer. Each search engine has its own ranking criteria and what may mean great rankings in one search engine may penalize your site in another. However, there are some general strategies that will optimize your site for most search engines. While the below tactics are not all inclusive in terms of developing the most effective SEO program, they are a very good starting point in terms of evaluating your site:
You can obtain more information on our SEO services by clicking here. Some times when you do a search on Google for a phrase, you will occasionally see among the results a collection of links which will appear below the result of a website. These are Google Site Links. For example: if you search for the phrase "birmingham web design" on Google, you will see in the SERPs: Title/Link Snippet/Description NOTE: this is snippet is taken from the meta description tag if one exists. If there is no meta description tag in the site's code, this snippet comes from Google-selected text on the page. Following the snippet and link to the web site comes Site Links. Using the sample search above as an example, you will see the following Google site links below the snippet description.
To which sites does Google assign Site Links and where do the links come from? The answer to this question is not known, really. But, the following general rules seem to apply. The following rules are provided by John Alexander of Search Engine Workshops.
(Source: SEO Tip of the Day: http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/) How will I update my web site once completed? You have two options when it comes to updating your site's content. First, you can have us do it either on a case-by-case, per hour basis or with pre-paid (read discounted) blocks of time. Or, second, you can update your site yourself using any number of inexpensive software programs. Many of our clients choose the latter option, and we can build in training time into the upfront proposal if that is your preference. However, updating your site yourself should not be tempted unless you, or someone in your office, has experience and a pretty good understanding and comfort level with the Internet and computer-related issues (windows-based software programs etc.). Click here for more information on our maintenance programs. Content updates are done on a per hour basis. We have recently raised our hourly rate to $100.00. For reference sake, small text changes to an existing page take only a fraction of an hour. These types of updates can be without a contract and on an as needed basis. If your site is in need of more extensive updates, it more efficient (and economical) to work on a cost per project basis. You detail the scope of changes you need to make to the site, and we will give you a flat rate for those changes. What are natural or organic listings? Also called "natural" search results, this is the term given to the search results that are returned from a search engine's database and are uninfluenced by whether or not the company paid to be there (as with "sponsored" results.) Having good organic search results for your company's name and its targeted keywords is important because searchers perceive the organic listings as more legitimate. |
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Web Design Birmingham by denning e-solutions,
LLC
3324 Eaton Road, Birmingham, AL 35223,
p: 205.298.7655 . e:
info@denningesolutions.com
