What People are Saying about the latest Freedom Florida client website

Gabriela of spa98.com sends in another great testimonial about her new website built by Freedom Florida recently. One of Gabriela’s future customers states “Impressive website! Now, I’ll have to do something about my sun damage!”.

You can view Gabriela’s new website at spa98.com

If you would like a free quote for your company’s website or website redesign, contact us today!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practices

To leverage your PPC ad spend, it’s crucial to have a website and/or landing page that is optimized for search. The following is a list of some of the processes we perform in order for your website to be easily found on the web.

1. 301 redirect - This is a server setting (in our case Apache) For example, http://yoursite.com will automatically redirect to http://www.yoursite.com This is important since you always want Google to index the “same” URL version of your website.

In the .htaccess file on the Apache server, the following code needs to be inserted

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^emeraldcoastdesign.com [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.emeraldcoastdesign.com/$1 [L,R=301]

 

2. Create a “robots.txt” file in the root directory of the server. This tells Google what directories to index and what directories not to index. For example, if there is a directory where all of your video media is stored, you would want to “Disallow” that directory to be read. Whereas, if you have a directory that contains the majority of your keyword-rich content, you would want Google to read that and only that content since it is relevant to the search terms that you would like to be found for.

3. Always separate the “style” from the “content” by creating a separate style sheet. This makes it easy for the Google Bot to distinguish between your relevant “content” and your source code.

4. Always provide keyword rich descriptions in the “alt” tags of your images.

5. Try to use text in your navigation bar rather than images. This is because text can be “crawled” by the search engines.

6. Name your directories with good descriptive words. For example, if you have a “beach condo” website, name your main content directory “beach-condo”. By doing this, the search engines “see” your site as very relevant to “beach condo”!

7. Use a blog powered by Wordpress. Wordpress blogs are already fairly optimized for search engines and blogs are simply a great way for you to get great content uploaded quickly that the search engines love.

8. Use includes where possible. If you need to make changes on a site, make it easy on yourself by having common elements on your site split up into “includes”. There’s nothing more agonizing than wanting to make a small tweak for SEO sake, and realizing that the change has to be made on dozens of individual pages:(

9. Create individual titles for your pages. The “title” tag is one of the most important, from an SEO perspective.

10. Customize the meta content and keyword tags. This is important in that these are the tags that “describe” your page’s content to the seach engines.

These are just some of the search engine optimization techniques we use here at Freedom Florida. Contact us today for a free analysis of your website.

A Web Building Myth

Truth? Everybody needs a website. In the global marketplace, you have to put up shop.  Maybe a myth? Consider this.

You need a message and strategy.

The message is what you want to communicate, sell, accomplish. This is the Internet where content is king. There are all sorts of reasons people can come to your website, but they won’t come back without stuff they want.

The strategy is how you market the message. Market - “I thought that I’m on the Internet - that is marketing.”  No, kemosabe, you have to market your website, either through old fashioned promotion and advertising or SEO- search engine optimization - making it easy to find you in search engine results. For most people the search engine is “Google” - Google results are today’s internet currency. The better you are in Google, the more traffic you get to your website.  In case you haven’t noticed, just because you “build it” on the Internet doesn’t mean that visitors will come to your site and hang out, just waiting to do your bidding.

At EmeraldCoast.com, our goal is to build custom, easy to navigate, easy to find websites that are geared toward your visitors. We don’t pile on on unnecessary graphics and animations, just enough to give your site a flair and style that is you own.  We can help you gain the traffic you want through online advertising, search engine optimization and special techniques like email campaigns and video advertising. Call us for more info at 850.650.8233.