Web Appeal | Strategies For Your Online Business Success

Why Planning Your Web Design In Advance Is Essential For Every Online Business

Web Appeal July 28, 2017

As a business owner, you should be aware that good web design is essential for your business whether it sells physical products or services. Your website is the storefront to an audience of thousands of potential customers and just like any brick and mortar store it must look professional and welcoming.

Excellent web design is about more than just making the home page look appealing, and if you want your website to be effective then planning its design and functionality is essential. There are three main web design factors to consider.

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Basic SEO For Small Businesses

Web Appeal February 7, 2017

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, carries with it a mystique that many business owners believe belongs to some type of secret society. Others believe that website sites get ranked highly in search engine results using a combination of voodoo or Harry Potter magic.

In fact, according to SEO Perth Experts, SEO is not magic and is in fact based on algorithms which rely more on programming and logic than they do on any kind of wizardry. The reality is, rather than everything being kept a secret, Google and the other search engines publish lots of updates and advice that tell the online world what they are looking for when it comes to ranking websites.

For the search engines, their number one priority is to make the results they produce when someone enters a search term the most relevant they can. This is achieved by special programs called ‘bots‘ visiting every website that exists, to establish what that site is about. To help this process search engines tell businesses, web designers, and SEO consultants what will help optimise a site in terms of its relevance to a search term.

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Five Ways Your Business Benefits From Effective Branding

Web Appeal October 17, 2016

If you speak to several business people about branding many of them will tell you ‘We’re too small to think about branding ourselves’, or ‘It’s just fancy marketing’ or worst of all ‘Branding won’t help us sell more’. The sad fact is that people who think like this are preventing their businesses from reaching their full potential.

Effective branding doesn’t need to cost a fortune and the return on anything invested in branding your company properly will be enormous. Here are five ways effective branding can bring significant benefits in terms of customers and profits.

Customer Loyalty: If your customers have received an excellent buying experience, including a quality product or service, they are more likely to give you repeat business if your branding is memorable. They’ll feel an affinity with your brand if it is easily identifiable and are thus prone to purchasing again. Even better they’ll more readily recommend your products or services to other potential customers.

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Branding

How to Ensure Your Logo Design Boosts Your Branding

Web Appeal March 1, 2016

Logos are everywhere. Global corporations have them. Medium sized companies have them. Small businesses have them. Logos help with branding and marketing a company as well as creating an easily recognisable identity.

But simply having a logo isn’t enough, especially if it is poorly designed and has no impact when seen. It must be designed and created so that it is effective in promoting your brand in all manner of ways and mediums.

The first step in designing an effective logo has nothing to do with graphics or text. It is research, both internal and external. Identify what you want your company branding to convey, and what its mission is all about. Also, think about the sort of customers you are targeting and what appeals to them.

Externally, look at what is working well, both within your industry, and within others for potential ideas. Never copy another company’s logo, but by all means ask your designer to adapt design elements of other logos that have proved to be successful.

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Using eCommerce Platforms To Start Your Online Business

Web Appeal December 8, 2015

The internet has given the world many benefits and one of the most significant is to make it easier for anyone wanting to start their own eCommerce business to do so.

Just 30 years ago, if you wanted to start a business selling physical products your only option was to acquire premises, purchase stock, pay for advertising, employ staff, and then open the doors hoping to turn a profit. Often this could take months or even years to achieve. Unfortunately, in many cases the returns proved insufficient to cover the large outlay already invested and the business folded.

With eCommerce today, the risks and upfront investment required are minimal compared to what was previously required and incredibly the time taken to get started can be as little as 24 hours.

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The Benefits Of Email Marketing For Businesses

Web Appeal June 22, 2015

Since entrepreneurs first started selling their products and services on the internet, numerous marketing methods and tools have come and gone. Today, there is one strategy used by online businesses which continues to be highly effective and that is email marketing.

The benefits of email marketing are such that many business gurus say it should be essential for all businesses and if your business does not use email as part of its marketing armoury then it is greatly disadvantaged compared to those competitors who do.

The first benefit of email marketing is that it’s very cost effective compared to most other forms of promotion. Other than a monthly fee to your email service provider there is normally nothing else to pay, even if you send out emails every single day. Compared to media advertising, social media marketing, or mail shots, the cost of email marketing is a fraction of the cost in comparison.

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How To Make Visitors To Your Website Stay Longer With Good Web Design

Web Appeal March 28, 2015

Having spent time, money or both attracting visitors to your website the last thing you want to happen is for them to click away almost immediately because of poor web design. This can be avoided by ensuring some basic web design elements are implemented when building or updating your business website.

Firstly, you want to ensure when anyone clicks through to your website, that it loads in their browser quickly. Nothing makes visitors click away faster than having to wait for more than a couple of seconds for the page to load. To help loads times media elements such as video and images should not be overused when designing your website and their file sizes should be minimised where possible.

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Effective Ways To Make Adwords Marketing More Profitable

Web Appeal August 15, 2014

Millions of words have been written about Google’s search engine and how SEO can get you to the top of the first page. Often it is a much harder than you are led to believe and in a lot of cases virtually impossible. Thankfully, here is another way to get your website on the first page of Google’s search results and that is by using Adwords marketing.

Adwords is Google’s paid advertising platform and it is paying advertisers whose results you’ll often see at the top and on the right-hand side of the search results. Please note when you use Adwords and even though you are paying Google, there is still no guarantee you will be on the first or even the second page. To achieve this, and to get the best return on your investment. there are some simple rules you should follow when using Adwords marketing.

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Why Black Hat SEO Is A Ticking Time Bomb For Your Website

Web Appeal February 11, 2014

If you have been researching SEO for any length of time in the hope of boosting your company website’s search engine ranking you may have come across the terms ‘White Hat‘ and ‘Black Hat’. These are terms which identify SEO techniques, and strategies at either end of the scale when it comes to whether the search engines, and in particular Google, approve of them.

With white hat SEO, all the actions which you or your SEO consultant take will be those which Google, and in turn the other search engine companies, accept are legitimate ways to try to help your website’s ranking. These actions include:

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Do Not Believe These Design Myths

Web Appeal April 21, 2013

If you are a web designer, there’s a chance that you have heard quite a few design myths over and over again. Whether it is from your friends, your parents, or the clients you work with, there are plenty of myths to go around. Sometimes designers will even agree with them! Note that this doesn’t always make it true.

Let’s debunk a few of these myths and get the better answers:

Myth: Design is an Artform
Not really. Design is design and there isn’t much else do it. by Professor Nigel Cross in his book, Designerly ways of knowing, as he defined design as the following: “Everything we have around us has been designed. Design ability is, in fact, one of the three fundamental dimensions of human intelligence. Design, science, and art form an ‘AND’ not an ‘OR’ relationship to create the incredible human cognitive ability.”

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Elements That Determine A Quality Backlink In Google’s Eyes

Web Appeal April 13, 2012

Getting backlinks to your website is one of the most basic actions needed to improve the SEO of your website. In the past, the measure was purely how many backlinks you had so webmasters would obtain thousands of backlinks that were nothing more than spam.

Google got wise to this so now the amount of links you have going to your website is not as big a ranking factor as the quality of those links. Nowadays, if you have two identical sites, the one having a thousand backlinks from insignificant sites will be outranked by a site with maybe only 50 links, but with those links all being of high quality.

There is no single element of a backlink that determines whether it is considered by Google to be any stronger a link than another. Instead, it is the cumulation of all the traits that a backlink has that will establish its power.

So, let’s look at some of these factors and whether you can influence them or not.

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