It’s not enough these days to design a beautiful, functional website that addresses your clients needs. If you truly want your client to reap the benefits of having an online presence, then SEO is a necessity. Search Engine Optimization is a method of improving the visibility of a website in search engines through organic search results, and is now a viable online marketing tool for a lot of businesses.

Through the following design practices you can improve a website’s SEO and ultimately their visibility. With these foundations in place, you’ll have the peace of mind of knowing the website you spent hours designing (and developing) is now a top contender for search engine visibility. You may also find some of these tactics also go far in improving user experience as well.

Keywords
Keywords are an important part of any search engine optimization campaign. If you’re using the wrong keywords, search engines and your target market may never find you. It’s important when starting a website to first establish what the business objectives are. Do you want to target a local area, national or global? With this plan in place you can then build pages that target these specific keywords, or decide where these pages may go down the line once the foundation is built.

The process of creating

1. Create a list of potential keywords (i.e. words that are relevant but not overly used)
2. Input your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool (i.e. Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, Wordstream, etc)
3. Finalize your keyword list based on research (Create a list of both broad and targeted keywords)
4. Prepare them for launch (typically go after 3-4 related keywords per page)

Keyword Placement
For a website to successfully integrate into Google you first must tell us what a particular page is about. It’s important to get keywords on the right position on the page, but don’t overdo it. Here are the best places:

• * Title tag
• * Meta description and keywords
• * Website slogans
• * Navigation
• * Breadcrumb trails
• * H1, H2 and H3 tags
• * Bullet points
• * Alt text
• * Title attribute on links
• * The main website copy
• * Internal links
• * Footer links
• * URL’s
• * File / folder names

Search Engine Friendly Navigation
Having Search Engine Friendly Navigation basically means creating a structure that search engines can follow. A major culprit in search engines not being able to find a website is due to the links being images instead of text. So make sure you address this and all links and buttons are text-based. CSS3 can achieve the same effects that Photoshop can, which has contributed a lot in terms of modernizing the web and speeding up load times. Wherever possible, try to avoid the use of JavaScript, as search engines find it difficult to understand and may result in crawling issues. With the push towards mobile devices supporting the web, using advanced scripting languages on your website won’t fly so well, either.

URL’s and Filenames
Having an SEO-friendly URL means search engines can quickly identify what a page is about. It’s also a good tactic to include keywords in the URL as this increases Search Engine visibility.
An example of a not too friendly URL:

http://www.websitestore.com/products/item1?=20193

A better, more descriptive URL would be:

http://www.websitestore.com/home/furniture/ottomans

As you can see, the second option has a better selection of rich keywords, which will help the search engine in their efforts to index you.

It’s also a good habit to name your images using descriptive keywords. An appropriate file name can be the difference between your image appearing in Google images searches or not. For instance the name “1234.jpg” isn’t going to be as successful as “midcentury-furniture.jpg” when someone is looking for design inspiration.

Website Images

• * Images are often an overlooked aspect of SEO, but play just as an important role in the process.
• * You need to optimize your images to achieve faster loading times and subsequent search engine visibility.
• * Try to keep your images’ file size as small as possible so mobile visitors in addition to those with slow internet connections can get the same intended, fast experience.
• * An optimal image size is anywhere from 30-100kb and the best resolution is 72dpi.
• * You can also set the image size as part of the corresponding tag for the image.
• * It’s best to place your images on context in the page. The more relevant the text around your image, the better results you’ll get for rankings.
• * Place your images inside a folder named “images” or something similar so the final URL of the image looks something like this: /images/image.jpg.

Social Media
Social Media should be part of your SEO strategy as building relationships and interacting with connections can help build your brand enormously. Not only that but it gives you exposure and helps build a trusted community and gain credibility.
Link building is perhaps the number one reason to jump on board the Social Media bandwagon: the process of visitors sharing links within their own network can result in a large number of inbound links. In summary, social media can provide an organization with an affordable channel that accomplishes results.

Get started by joining:

• * Facebook
• * Twitter
• * LinkedIn
• * Digg

Additional Resources
This guide by Google is a very helpful guide in learning about SEO.
55 Quick Seo Tips Even Your Mother Would Love.
Monitor where you stand with Google Toolbar and Alexa.

Conclusion
These are a few important ways to ensure your website reaches visibility in search engines. Although there are methods in place claiming you can reach the top spot in Google overnight, nothing is as effective as first having a solid foundation for a website in place first – the rest will fall into place. Of course, nothing can help you sell yourself as much as having a trusted, reliable product or service to begin with but with these measures ensure your online presence is seen. Take inventory of your web marketing goals and use the tools that are most appropriate to achieve the results you’re looking for.

Below are some blog platforms you may choose from.
WordPress – this is the mostly used and very first established open source blog platform known in the market. WordPress.com is different from WordPress.org. If you going to monetize your blog, then you should go with Wordress.org. It’s hosting is not free like WordPress.com but you can have your own domain separate from WordPress.\

1. Since WordPress was originally created for blog purpose and it’s already an established platform, there are many available widgets to install and help enhanced your readers’ experiences.

View Sample WordPress Blogs Here

2. Blogger (Blogspot) – This is the Google blog site. If you do not have budget for hosting yet, you can start doing your blog here and set up to monetize your site. They are also hosting personal domains like WordPress if you decided to brand your blog.

Blogspot has a very manageable admin pages. You can also host many blogsites in only one blogspot account.

View Sample Blogspot Sites Here

3. Typepad – Is a non-free platform that offers different packages for the bloggers. You can set up your own choice of template in a few clicks, they have several of templates to offer.

View Sample Blogspot Sites Here

4. Moveable Type – like Blogger and WordPress, they are also offering free and hosted blogs. Their fees are per license.

View Moveable Sites Here

5. Joomla or Drupal – These two are both open source website builders that can be created and customized dynamic websites. If you are planning to create a blog with ecommerce site, you can choose either one of these two.

View Joomla Sites Here
View Drupal Sites Here

The above are some of blog platforms available for you to build your blog. However, you also need to consider whether you will choose a free or a hosted site based on the goal of your blog. See below:
Free Platform

Primarily, your blog is not branded. You have lesser control on functionalities and some features are not available for you such as limited templates and disabled widgets.
Hosted Platform

With Hosted Platform, you can choose your own domain and your blog will be branded how you like. You can have more control with your blog functionalities, widgets and template redressing.

Starting a blog is easy, but establishing a successful blog requires time and commitment, when choosing a to set up a blog, ensure you choose a platform that you can work with, now days you can easily move your data from one platform to another, but why go though the hassle moving, and time, when you can get it right first time round.

Email

One of my close friends debit card details got stolen and his bank account was empty by someone shopping at the Apple Store (he always wanted an Apple Mac, poor guy someone used his money to buy it), getting back to what I was saying, the funny thing was that the hacker gave him a call and even told him that “I have just emptied your bank account, you should be more careful, as I bought your information online for $2”.
This hacked or thief bought stolen information for as cheap as $2 and bought goods worth of $2,000
How to Know Your Email Account Has Been Hacked

1. Your sent box has items that you never send or your contacts received claimed emails that you did not mail.
2. Your emails are going directly to spam box.
3. You cannot login to your email anymore.
4. You are receiving bounce messages of your own email.
5. You are receiving notifications from your provider that there is an unusual activity happening on your account.

These are some of the signs that you should look out for, and if experienced alarm bells should start ringing, as something is not right here.
Some Weaknesses in Email and How to Overcome Them

1. Assigning Password. As we all know, together with the usernames, passwords are first and foremost the protection of our emails. When we say a web page or file is password protected, we say that it is private to certain people only, those who know the access code. It also means there are contents being protected inside the web page or file. To compromise this content protection is to compromise the password.

Be careful and tricky in assigning your password. If your username is “gelpen”, do not assign a password such as “gelpen123”. It is too easy to guess. Think of a far different and hard to guess password, you can also combine uppercase with lowercase letters, put some numbers and allowable characters too like “_$%*…etc”. It is also not advisable to use your own name, birthday, pet’s name or some trademarks that may describe you. However, if you do not want to go too far from your username, you can try something like “Gx1pxnGx1pxn”. This is a longer password; we also just change “e” to “x” and “l” to number “1”. You can try combinations such as these to make your passwords.

2. Relying on Security Questions. Security questions are set up by email providers in case you forgot your login details. However, it is not secure to set a security question like “When is your birthday?” with an answer “January 25, 1984” and this answer is your true birthday. Try tweaking a bit by having the answer as if someone knows couple of information of you, they can always put the two together and access your account.

3. Provider’s Email Server Configuration. In this case, you cannot do anything unless you change your email server provider. But if you are using emails like gmail, yahoo or hotmail where you will not be able to change hosting for your email server, you can monitor your sent emails and change passwords periodically.

4. Negligence of the Email Owner. Make sure you will not leave your emails open at any internet cafe. Also, never give your password to others and be careful in putting your password with someone behind your back or with someone on your shoulders looking at you accessing your emails. This can ruin your online reputation. You may have heard this point over and over again, but trust me people forget and do it all the time, whether they are in a rush, or they get side tracked.

For example, your in a coffee shop, talking on the phone, buying your coffee and loading up your computer, now your mind is on the conversation that your having, your pulling out change from your pocket to give to the waiter, and at the same time your entering the password of your laptop. The people around you can easily peep over your shoulder and see what your up to without you even noticing as you already have so much to focus on. Everyone forgets, and it’s just the way our lives are full of stuff, but we should always be more conscious when it comes to security and personal protection.

Protecting your email is very essential for your reputation whether your in business or just personally using an email account, what ever the case, take extra precautions and steps to secure your details. Remember, bad online reputation is like bad reputation to the whole world, as it is open to every corner of the globe.