Search Engine Optimization has become the most important aspect of web marketing as it applies to getting visitors to your website. To date, there is a vast amount of information, guidelines, and rules for developing successful web optimiation.  Putting all of these great SEO tools into effect is rather simple - its keeping your company up-to-date on the surplus of new data and information pertaining to SEO that gives us abit of a run for our time and money.   Just a few of the key concepts behind SEO are listed below (just keep in mind that there’s a lot more where that came from):

1. Key words.  Key words are your bread and water of the SEO survival guide.  Yes, SEO is all about the words, but most importantly, its about which words your using and how your placing them.   IF you don’t choose the right keywords, they won’t even be skimmed during a search.  Check out various sites that help provide inforamtion and assistance on how to improve the quality of key terms your using in your SEO implementation.   There are several sites that are good for this. Check out a favorite of ours at, Keyword Discovery
2. Title.  A good title with your main keywords is important. For instance Westchester Web Design is an important keyword I link to. So I have that in my title as the first thing.  I also include my companies name in the title as well.
3. Header Tags.  It’s important to have header tags with key words in them as well. Google wants to give users who are searching the best possible site that is relevant to what they’re looking for. *hint* Make sure you only have ONE h1 tag!
4. Description Meta Tag. Although these are becoming less and less important, it’s still important to have a good description.  Make sure not to forget about those key words, and make the description relevant to what the page is about. Key word meta tag – One mistake users make is that they pile up the keywords in their key word tag. Sometimes google will look at this as spam and will automatically disregard your site. Watch out for that! Content – It’s important to have your keywords within your content. Again to not overwhelm the paragraphs with keywords, but make sure you have a decent amount.
5. Use title and alt tags for your images. It is important not to have too many images on a page because google cannot read the image. Alt & Title’s are another way for google to see what the image is.
6. Inbound Links – Inbound links are links from other websites that link to your website. Google looks at this as a ranking system. The more links you have the more important your site must be. However, there is a trick, because it actually does matter which sites are linking to yours. If you are linking from a website that as a google rank of 0 and you have about 20 of these, it won’t do you as good as if you had 1 link from a website with a google rank of 5 or higher.
7. Pages Index – The number of pages indexed by google, along with the amount of inbound links & your traffic rank determine what your overall google rank is. Pages indexed is very important, so the more pages you have index the more important information google thinks you have. That is why blogs are a very big - plus because google will spider each and every one of your pages within your blog and trust me they add up.
8. Create a sitemap for the users- It’s important that you have easy navigation so people can follow, and sitemap is where you have every page on your website listed. This will allow all web crawlers to quickly find the content that is needed for users.
9. Include a robot.txt file – All you have to do is open up text edit on your computer such as notepad and type in: User-agent: * and then save the file and name it robots.txt and place it in the root of your website (where your index file is). This will tell all robots to index every page of your website. If you want to make sure the spider doesn’t index certain files and folders (particularly ones that have nothing to do with the context) you will want to place underneath the user-agent* -> Disallow: /folder or file name/
10. Include a sitemap.xml for search engines. This is a file that will allow search engines to view all your pages. Here is an example of what the sitemap should look like: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc><lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>       <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset>

Creating a website is not the easiest task. Yes it may seem easy, but if you want the best results there are a lot of things you must put into perspective.   The following are the top 10 things one worries about while creating a site: 1 – Design – Your design is the most important aspect of your entire website.  If visitors can’t look at your Home page and determine what your site’s about within the first 10 seconds of their visit, then you’ve failed at establishing yourself and your message.   Format and structure (while they might not be the most exciting pieces of the puzzle), are an extremely important contribution to the site’s design.  They organize information and images to properly target your market.   You should decide what your target market is and then figure out if a flash design or an html design is where you want to go.  Format and structure also play a role in your site’s SEO (search engine optimization). 2 – Content – The reason why people come to your website is to get information. Your content has to be readable and your site’s information must be easy to find. Bullets and short paragraphs are the best way to display content.  Content eventually will play a role in SEO.  Make sure that all your content is relevant, legitimate, and grammatically correct. You want people to bookmark and recommend your site. This happens when your content is good and makes people want to come back. 3 – Graphics & Load Time – Graphics are a very important feature on a website. Having attractive designs and graphics can determine if someone wants to return to your site. You don’t want your site to be visually displeasing or plain.  Even if your content is good, visitors might be deterred by the lack of an entertaining or appealing user-interface.  As a web designer you have to worry about load time, which is another thing that plays a major role in creating a great website. Too many graphics and hover images can cause your website to load extremely slow, which can be a negative for customers/visitors and for SEO.  4 – Links – You want to create links to connect content, however, you don’t want too many main links.  Sub-links are a  very popular thing and a good web site will not have all the links across the Home page. The most links a website should have is 8.  Too many links on a page can create confusion and clutter within your site.   Keeping a consistent 8 links is the way to go.  One alternative to multiple and separate links for various things is to have one link that goes to products (for example) and then have sub-links that go deeper into your product line. This allows customers to easily find things, rather than search through all the links on the top of your page. 5 – SEO – Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important web marketing tools for your website.  In order to take advantage of SEO, you must create a design that is easily navigable (no tables use divs!), and you must utilize the right content, keywords, descriptions, etc.  There are so many different aspects of SEO I could write a book!  In fact, many people do write books about it.  If you have the time, I suggest picking one up.  One thing to remember is that you need to have a good title, keyword, description, and content in order to help you on Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines. 6 – Email – It is important to look professional and keep your email with the @yourcompanyname.com – For instance my email is adagostino@blackrhinosolutions.com – It looks professional, unifrom and it’s convenient because people will remember it rather then alexadagostino@gmail.com. 7 – Consistency – You want your website to stay consistent throughout. You want all your links to be in the same spot and you want your content to be in the exact same place on each page.  This promotes consistency, which allows visitors to navigate through your site much quicker and easier.    8 – Maintenance – Maintaining your website is the most important thing. You don’t want old – outdated, content on your site. You also don’t want your designs to be out of date. They say that 80% of people’s web marketing funds go to Maintaining their websites. 9 – User-Friendliness – Make sure that every link has a destination.  You do not want people to get lost in your site or leave your site because they hit a 404 error.  You also want visitors to easily find the info they need from your website. 10 – Stand Out – You want to look at competitor’s websites and figure out a way to make your site unique and different from theirs. You want to give your customers a reason to choose your website or remember your website over your competitors. The above is just a guideline for the very basic things one must consider before starting a website.  As a web designer, I see the endless amounts of new information that develop each day surrounding these topics.  If you feel your ready to tackle your own designs and web creation that’s great.  But if your looking for up-to-date, quality work, my personal recommendation is to go with the professionals who have made what they love doing and what they have an aptitude for their life.  Hire a web designer so you  can leave worries like the ones above (in addition to so much more) up to the people who make these types of worries into works of art. If you have any questions please feel free to comment on this article and I’ll be glad to help you!

Pumped up and raring to start this incredibly historic New Year, Black Rhino Marketing has officially become a company and is ready to make some history of its own. Partners Jermain Smith, Stephanie Biscow, and Alexa D’Agostino have put together their expertise to form this brilliant new web marketing company. More information about Black Rhino’s website, it’s mission, and so much more coming soon!  To read more about how Black Rhino came to be, please visit our site’s About Us tab.