Important website terms to understand

[ Website terms menu] Is it important to have a website? and what is an important website?

A few important website terms to understand, before you hire a business website designer

While a basic understanding of website terms is important to making good design decisions, some are more important than others. We believe the following, are some of the most important business terms to understand before you get talked into a business website that isn't very important to search engines, or your potential customers! Important business information is most important to every business website. Good links to good information helps to create a user friendly website.

Important website terms need to be defined

A domain name is the text equivalent of your website's ip address. Domain names are between 1 and 63 characters long. A very good domain name will describe who you are, what you do and where or why you do it. Unless your company name is a very well-known, household word (in your trade area), don't use your company name as your domain name.

Your Domain Name identifies who you are to the world. The DNS database labels your IP Address with your Domain Name. This makes it much easier for people to remember your address. It also allows you to move your website to any server (different IP address) and still keep the same name. The DNS database updates each time you move, to point to your new location. Many website owners falsely believe that a short, simple domain name is best because it's easy to type in the address bar. When you understand that less than 10% of your website visitors will ever need to "type" your address, having a keyword rich domain name makes more sense. Our domain name is www.seowebsitesdesigners.com. We could have registered www.seowd.com, and lost the keywords websites and designers by making it shorter! A common SEO mistake. A good website name is a good description of what the website provides information about. A good domain name is the foundation of Good SEO.

Although the .com domain name extension (TLD) is the most recognized, it may not be the best for your small business. There are industry and country specific TLD domain name extensions (see list) that might better identify your business website.

.com or not .com? is an important decision. The use of .com, was originally intended for business or Commerce. However, since anyone can use it, business decisions must out weigh traditional thinking. The .ca or .net, might be a better choice? Unless your organization is a non-profit (or similar), .org should be avoided.

Pay per click or pay per hit is NOT search engine optimization. It is simply paid advertising! You are paying to have your website listed in the ads section of the SERP. Each time a visitor comes to your website (from the ad link), you are charged a fee (usually between 5-50 cents). If you get 3000 visitors @30 cents/visit, you will pay the ad company $900 just to generate curious visitors. When you stop paying, or someone else is willing to pay more for the "keyword," your link is replaced by your competitor's! Most people rarely use the ad section as a good information resource. They already know that real search results will provide a more accurate source of real information.

Paying for visitors is often a desperate attempt to overcome a poor website design. While some businesses can benefit (short term) from a paid website promotional program, the risks are usually not worth the reward. Important design decisions can usually eliminate the necessity of paying to have visitors see your website. search engine marketing is not SEO.

Keywords and key phrases are the search words that your visitor will have typed into the " search input" on their favorite search engine. Matching those input phrases with your web page's title, headings and text information, will give you a good chance of being near the top of the search results!

Keywords and keyword phrases are important components in building good web pages. Search engines rely on the text content of your web page to determine whether to rank it at the top or bottom of a search result. If you write about the concept of the information contained in the page title, keywords and key phrases will be scattered all over the page! Overdo-it and you lose ranking points! Ethical SEO means writing pages that contain the proper use of topic relevant keywords. When you understand that Nouns are powerful keywords and pro-nouns are nearly worthless to search engines, you will see the importance of using proper names and descriptions. They, us, we, them, don't mean much to a search engine.

Accessible websites are important to visitors that use assisted technology to access your information. This frequently requires that your visitor be permitted to choose display options or plain text alternatives to the business information contained on your web pages.

Computer accessibility to a small business website can make a substantial difference to your profitability. You might be surprised by the number of potential customers who need or use assistive technology. Proving that you care about your customers, is the first step to business website success. A user friendly website is accessible by design.

To understand the growing importance of writing good search phrases into your web pages, all you need to understand is: millions of new web pages are being added to the www every day! Without the proper use of key phrases, your entire website simply becomes part of those growing statistics.

Search phrases or keyword phrases are the "key" to your website's success. Discussing in detail, which search phrases your customer would likely use to find your website, prior to writing the webpages, is an important design step. Using semantics or variations of the words is a simple method for increasing the focus of your information. An example of this would be:

"Design, designed, designing, designer, designs." They all start from the root word "design," but are unique words. Search engines look for semantics to discover the real topic of every web page.

Every document will usually have a title. It is surprising how many web page documents are simply titled as "untitled". The webpage title tells visitors what the page information is all about. Page titles are what you see on search results pages from search engines. Each web page on your website needs a distinct and descriptive title. "About" and "products" are very poor page titles!

Good page titles are ones that contain the search phrase your visitor will likely use to find your web page. Page titles MUST reflect the information that the user will find on that web page. Good page titles are critical to good seo.

The W3C has developed a standard for every website to provide user information about the website's privacy policy. It is important to small business website owners that your visitors clearly understand your company's understanding of privacy issues and the steps you are taking to protect your visitors from identity theft, etc.

Your website's privacy policy is your promise to protect your visitors from the numerous threats to their personal privacy, when visiting a website. Small business websites need to take visitor privacy very seriously. Avoiding the use of cookies which gather information about a visitor is an important first step toward establishing professional credibility with your visitor. You can validate a P3P policy for this website.

Important website terms summary

Important website terms are too frequently misused as buzzwords in an attempt to impress web designer clients with terminology. Any web designer or website builder, who can't (or won't) clearly explain and discuss these and other important terms, needs to be avoided! Taking a few minutes or a few hours to understand the important web site terms, could save any small business owner thousands of dollars in wasted website design costs.

Should you find our website terms information useful and wish to link to this web page, simply copy and paste the following link text onto any of your site's pages:

<a href="http://www.seowebsitesdesigners.com/terms/important_website_terms.html">Important website terms?</a>

• More important website terms:
• Basic website terms
• Common website terms
• Definitions of website terms
• Business website terms
• Website terminology
• See also:
• Important website design questions
• Confused about SEO?
• Believing website myths can be expensive

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