Responsive Design OR Mobile Design

Mobile Website vs Responsive Design - CSS to the Rescue 

Google took a definitive stance on the situation last June. Google stated that sites should serve all devices with the same set of URLs, meaning each URL should deliver the same HTML to every gadget accessing the page using only CSS to render the information.

Now we're talking about one version of your web site delivered to phones, iPads, tablets or laptops. Google has said their piece and the chore of updating multiple platforms just disappeared from your to-do list.

Why Google appreciates responsive design 

This isn't difficult to understand. Your website will return better traffic numbers if it has only one URL for each page as opposed to the same page represented with multiple URLs. Publishing a mobile website vs responsive design configuration only dilutes your traffic and the all-knowing search engines will notice.

Search engines index responsive designs not apps 

Staying with the simple-to-understand theme; we find that search engines don't index apps. If you have an app instead of a site with a responsive design, your site does not benefit from mobile visitors and the search engines can't find/explore the information on the app. A responsive design that delivers well-designed information on a mobile device will be found and indexed. Plus, the crawler, used by search engines, doesn't need to work as hard.

Shopping on a PC? That's so three years ago 

Statistics from Google's Mobile Ads Blog show 79% of shoppers now use their phone for information while shopping, 70% use their phone in the store and 77% have directly contacted a business by mobile. The message here is mobile shouldn't be some add-on to your website and neither should your ads. As we explained, usage and traffic on a mobile app won't be indexed on search engines. If you're using a pay-per-click campaign, Google may not be able to place ads in your mobile app - like when someone is using their phone at the store. Deploying a mobile website vs responsive design is now costing you money.

Responsive design flexibility looks better

Have you noticed sites attempting to cater to tablets these days? Creating a site that caters to one visitor alienates another. Make your site "touch friendly" for the tablets and still usable for PC users with CSS and responsive design. Make buttons and calls to action bigger while keeping them normal on a desktop.

enoxmedia.com

SEO Tips & Techniques for 2014

There are many on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques that we can use for each of our websites, some that often get overlooked. So, here is a checklist of the most important techniques that we can use for 2014.

TITLE TAG

The best and most effective way to use the title tag is to not to make the title tag longer than 70 characters. The title should be according to your page; try to use the long phrased keyword within the title tag.

DESCRIPTION TAG

Use this tag smartly. Describe your page content and try to use your most competitive keywords in the text. Use no more than 160 characters.

KEYWORDS TAG

We all know that Google stated that this tag does not affect your rankings but there are many SEOs, who still use this tag for other search engines. Target your 5 most competitive keywords within the tag.

HX  (HEADING) TAGS

Use HX tags with each of your main article headings / sections. Use h1 for the main headings and the rest in h2, h3, h4 and so on. Try using your keywords in the headings and highlighting them in the eye of search engines with these HX tags.

IMAGES

Optimize each image with ALT and Title tags. Image name can also be optimized; try to use the keywords smartly within the tags as well.

SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY URLS

Try not to use signs like &, Spaces, ?, etc in your URLs otherwise it can come across as spammy. Ask your developer to make the URLs look easy to read, short and clean.

QUALITY CONTENT IS KING

As we all know “Content is King” in the SEO industry, so we can’t ignore this one. Each page should have a minimum of 500 words of great quality content.

NAVIGATION

Make sure your navigation is crawlable, whether it be text or image based.

JAVASCRIPT/CSS EXTERNAL

Externalize the JS and CSS codes to make your website pages load faster. Take this with a grain of salt as it’s not always the best choice in any case. Sometimes it’s better to use pregressively inline JS and CSS for faster rendering and perceived time.

INTERNAL LINKING

Internal linking will help you to engage your customers within the website. Internal linking will also help you to control the bounce rate as well.

EXTERNAL PAGES

Adding links to external high quality website (not just popular) resources builds a good relation in the eye of search engines and this trust will help the websites to get higher positions on search engines.

GEO-TAGGING

Use geo-tagging to let your users and search engines see your actual business location.

AUTHORSHIP MARKUPS

Use authorship to take the ownership of the content you publish on your website.

SOCIABILITY

Add social media buttons to encourage your readers to share your website’s content on their profiles. Websites with social signals can get better rankings in search engines.

XML SITEMAP

Create xml sitemap and add each of your website in it. You can submit to sitemap in Google and Bing webmaster tools to make your website index soon.

ROBOTS.TXT

Updated: The robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl and index pages on their website.

ANALYTICS

Make sure you have added and setup the analytics code so you can properly analyze your website.

WEBMASTER TOOLS

Add and verify the ownership of your websites via Google Webmaster Tools. These webmaster tools will also help to analyze the on-page validations.

XENU (BROKEN LINKS)

Xenu is free software to find broken links within your web pages. Find and fix those broken links as soon as you find them.

HOSTING

A website hosting server should be up and running 24/7, with at least 99.9% uptime. A website with too much downtime can be de-indexed from and won’t be able to rank higher on search engines.

By Faizan Khamisani

Advantages of HTML5 and CSS3

Every business should posses a website that exhibits the entire operation of the business carried out to deal with all types of clients. A business can present itself in a global market only through a website. So a business owner opts for a professional web designer to design a well structured website for his business entity. A designer should design a website with all the elements that will attract visitors and improve its usability. This can be achieved only with the usage of perfect tools.

HTML5 and CSS3 have become popular tools that help in building a well-defined website. Each of them have many advanced features of their own but nowadays, they are used in combination with each other by expert web designers, to create refined web pages with semantic accuracy. Let us have a look at some advantages of HTML5 and CSS3.

Advantages:

• The first benefit you get is that the readable codes are semantically accurate. When a web design is not semantically accurate, it cannot attain a good rank. HTML5 and CSS3 help you to overcome this. The readable codes are very simple and easy to understand.
• The tutorials in the language help designers in developing a better web page. This paves way for the designers to make use of apt tools or elements in the language for a website.
• Many websites need some extra plug-ins to view the videos in the web page. In case of  HTML5 and CSS3, the audio and video effects are tagged and viewed without the support of third party plug-ins.
• Using separate codes for the purpose of updations are important for all types of websites. These codes do not give a proper output at times. In HTML5 and CSS3, as the scripting is not necessary for validation you can avoid the usage of confusing complex codes.
• Many browsers do not support all types of web pages but HTML5 and CSS3 help the designer to develop a web page that is compatible even with previous versions of your browsers.
• Some elements in HTML5 and CSS3 allow you to handle graphics and photos efficiently. These elements use some procedural methodologies to draw up the graphics directly into the browser.
• Flash applications are bound to cause problems. HTML5 combined with CSS3 provides you with many alternative features to support media. As CSS3 has enhanced itself with many  features, there are many added elements that bring in the wow factor, when it is used with HTML5.
• Creating Box Shadow requires numerous images and this process is made simple by using these new technologies. The text shadow is an element added to make the webpage more attractive. This can be carried out using the simple codes in CSS3. It makes the web layout very simple.
• One of the popular elements in web design is the use of rounded corners for buttons, layout elements, menus and much more. Using the ‘border-radius’ property, you can easily create rounded corners.
• Many websites have contact forms, that help the clients get in touch with the company. Some forms may not be supported by browsers. There are many types of forms designed with HTML5 and CSS3 which have a unique design and are compatible with all the common browsers.
• Using these technologies you can have full control over the colors in the templates, thereby eliminating the need to use separate codes for the color theme.

By Brian Taylor