It’s ideal when you have quite a few accounts in webmasters tools. It’s quite surprising how faster it makes locating the account you need. The most important thing is when Google implements something it’s usually for a reason.  Could we soon see favicons displayed in search engine results?

If favicons do make it into the search engine results this could have a serious negative affect with brand hijacking. If people start to trust the small logos rather than the domain then this will become a serious problem.

First of all do your market research, ask to see some examples of a web design companies work, generally speaking they will have a portfolio of what they have done. Next thing is get at least 3 quotes in and to make sure you get the best price. You need to be looking to get good quality for a good price. Remember just because it is the most expensive doesn’t mean that it is the best quality – they might just be over charging. In the same breathe don’t just go for the cheapest option either.

The next point is to be aware of what you are looking  for your website to do. Do you want to buy online? Or are you looking for a simple brochure website? If you are looking to sell online you will also need to consider SEO or Search Engine Optimisation for your website and  this really needs to be done each month. SEO is when somebody searches for a search term, for example web design lancashire and Google will then rank thousands of websites based on their SEO authority and content. What SEO will do is get your business ideally to the first page of Google as this is where the majority of potential customers will click and give their business too.

The top ten things any company needs to ask themselves when they set out on a web design project are the following:

1. What do you want to achieve from this web site. Do you want to sell online?

2. What is your budget to build the web site? How many pages do you want?

3. Do you want to have SEO included in your budget? What can you afford to spend each month promoting your website?

4. What is your competition doing? Can you get any ideas from them?

5. Do you have any other marketing material such as brochures already done as you will want them to match the design of your website.

6. Do you want to generate business? Do you want to just have a presence?

7. Do you want to run a Pay Per Click Campaign?

8. What search terms are popular within my market?

9. How competitive is the online market for your product or service?

10. What time scales do you want to see a return on your investment?

If you can get the answers to these questions then it will help you significantly to pick out the best web site designer and SEO engineer out there. One of the main things you need to understand is that when starting a new web project, there are so many different avenues to go down, you need to know what you want to your website to achieve before you set out.

Currently no other service offers such a competitive link intelligence which could possibly hinder SEO for the foreseeable future. Hopefully the functionality offered by Bing Webmasters Tools will be a solution to this problem.

Basically the tool provides information regarding on site performance and gives a comparison to other websites regarding page load speed. We all know how frustrating it can be when you reach a website and it takes over a couple of seconds to load, something which we didn’t mind in back in 1995.

With the average speed of internet connection in the UK being at least 3.6 megabits per second (Mbit/s) is there any excuses?

Below is a taken from our own website, the two high point are related to us changing the overall site and design during this we did have some downtime (but nothing to worry about). You can see that Google says our website loads 56% faster than other websites. With this amount of information being provided by Google, surely it must carry weight in terms of SEO.

What money is lost during server or hosting downtime?

Revenue
When a website is becomes unavailable the revenue stops.

PPC
Depending on the budget utilised on PPC, each visitor sent from the PPC is wasted money.

Loyal Customers
It’s no surprise that your next competitor is just two clicks away, if your competitors dispatch times, response times or general customer service is better. This is lost repeat business.

Repeat Business
You lost the conversation or sale initially could have seen your competitor benefitting from your downtime and gaining a new customer and repeat business.

SEO
Depending if you use an SEO Company to promote your website, you might be wasting your money; every time the website is unavailable this could prove as setbacks on progression in the SERPs.
Below is a simple diagram of natural traffic Vs. time with downtime.

SEO Vs Downtime

Web hosting is the most important unseen part of a website and its success. The best way to think of web hosting is relating it to a physical property or structure. If the foundations of a property or house are poor then expect problems in the future.

• www.example.com/new-page this method uses a dash
• www.example.com/new_page this method uses a underscore

When visiting websites I always find that there is a mixture of methods, Matt Cutts (Google software engineer) finally explains the correct method via his video blog. He talks about how they did look into the possibility of using underscores but at the current time he does advise using dashes.