Lytron, Author at Lytron Fort Lauderdale Web Design & SEO Agency

For Your Next Web Design project, Think Mobile

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Today, more people than ever use their mobile devices as the primary way to search for the information, entertainment, product and services they want.

So if you are focusing your energy optimizing your website design for use on PCs and laptops, you could be wasting your valuable time and effort.

Benefits of Mobile Design

The way websites appear on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices are different than how they look on computer monitors. For one thing, the screen smaller, so you have less room to create an effective package with your content and images.

Websites also load differently on mobile devices than they do on PCs. So if your website isn’t using a mobile-optimized platform, it could take longer for your site to load on people’s smartphones — putting you at risk of being dumped for one of your competitors.

For Your Next Web Design project, Think Mobile – Building a Better Mobile-Optimized Website

Creating a mobile optimized website for your business website lets you tap into the growing number of customers who are using their mobile devices as their primary web-access tool.

It also lets you convert more “window shoppers” into paying customers. Plus, it can increase your customer retention rate so you can achieve more repeat sales and develop loyal, long-term customers.

For Your Next Web Design project, Think Mobile – Get the Most from Your Marketing Budget in mobile

By focusing on mobile design for your website, you can optimize your web design budget by achieving a higher return on investment.

Mobile-friendly pages engage customers instantly and encourage them to act on whatever action your website is targeting: Buying a product, becoming a subscriber, clicking through to another page, or whatever your goal is.

Mobile-optimized websites can automatically direct mobile customers who click on your web link or type in your domain name to your mobile site. There they will find better screen definition, faster loading times, and user-friendly navigation.

Rocket Your Website to the Top of the Charts

When it comes to attracting new customers and new business online, SEO isn’t everything … it’s the ONLY thing!

Search engine optimization involves using techniques to make your website or web pages more attractive to the most popular search engines — especially Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Why Be Popular?

Popularity is something everybody has to worry about, but especially website owners. Why? Because if search engines don’t “like” your web pages, there’s a very good chance that the customers you want and need will never find them.

Here’s why: When people search online for the businesses, products, and services they want, they usually will go to the search engine on their phone, tablet, laptop or computer and type in the keywords that best describe what they are looking for.

For example, somebody needing a muffler repair in Florida might type in “Florida muffler repair”.

Rocket Your Website to the Top of the Charts – Search Engines Rank Websites

The search engine will instantly search through the billions of websites online to find those that contain these keywords. It will then return results to the search according to an intricate ranking process that is based on such factors as where in the content these websites are located and how many times they are repeated.

Search engines stay in business by giving their users the best results for the searches they want. So they also will consider such things as how many social approval signals a website has — such as Facebook “Likes”, how many times people have shared the site’s link on Twitter, and so on.

They also will look at how many other sites link back to the website, giving additional weight to those that are considered “authoritative sites”, or sites that most people would go to in order to find answers to questions they have. Examples include Wikipedia, About.com, and websites maintained by academic institutions and governmental bodies.

Is Email Dead as a Marketing Technique?

Customer Recognition Programs Pay Huge Dividends

Email has a bad reputation in marketing circles. Given that there are so many other ways to reach potential customers — including text messages, social media, and mobile apps — email has been marginalized by many companies.

Big mistake. If you need proof that email is still a highly effective way to reach people, consider this simple question: When was the last time you checked your email account? Was it this morning? An hour ago? Just before you opened this blog?

Most People Still Use Email … A Lot

Email isn’t dead as a marketing platform. While there are other ways to reach customers that are faster, better, and easier, most people still cling to their email accounts in the same way they keep paying for landlines for their home telephone service or relying on the postal service for daily mail delivery.

While times have changed, old habits are hard to break.

Startling Statistics Regarding Email Marketing

Need more proof that email is alive and well as a marketing tool? Consider this:

44% of people who receive email made a minimum of one purchase in the past year based on a marketing email they received.
33% of people say they open an email based solely on the subject line.
About half of the people on any business’s email list still open or click on the emails the business sends regularly.
70% of people say they used a coupon or discount code they received via email in the past week.
Monday is the best day to send out an email because emails sent on the first day of the week have the highest revenue per email.
27% of people said they wished their favorite businesses sent them more emails.

Email is far from dead as a marketing platform. If you want to keep attracting new customers, the road to their hearts is through their email inbox.

New High Tech Tools Help Target Terrorists

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, an entire discipline has been developed by the defense and intelligence communities around situational awareness and visualization.

These include the construction of Geospatial Intelligence, or GEOINT, which exploits and analyzes geospatial data to enhance real-time situational awareness and decision-making. This data includes such things as enhanced satellite imagery, terrain data collected by unmanned drones, and real-time data sources such as surveillance cameras and microphones.

New High Tech Tools Help Target Terrorists – New Government Oversight

There’s even a new government agency charged with managing all this data called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Never heard of it? You’re not alone. It’s not an agency that seeks out a lot of headlines. Its slogan is “Know the Earth … Show the Way … Understand the World.”

The mission of the NGA is wide-ranging and includes such things as collecting intelligence about warfighting from within the battle, humanitarian and disaster relief in crisis points around the globe, counterterrorism, counter-narcotics trafficking and border security, and transportation of domestic security efforts.

Spy RVs

Part of the NGA’s mission is achieved through the use of two Domestic Mobile Integrated Intelligence System vehicles – or DMIGS – which essentially are self-contained, highly-specialized vehicles that look like RVs but are used for domestic crises, natural disasters, and special events requiring intense security.

The NGA’s role also is to “defend the nation against cyber threats by supporting other intelligence agencies with in-depth analysis of cyber networks.” The NGA provides support for the DoD, CIA, NSA and other agencies within the defense and intelligence communities.

New High-Tech Tools

This little-known government agency provides real-time, on-the-fly data gathering and analysis using big data tools and techniques such as using GEOINT to track and analyze the actions of persons of interest, our own forces, and our allies and neutrals, as well as up-to-the-moment information on weather and other environmental factors.

This data can be accessed by analysts and decision makers who need it to respond to situations as they develop, many of which are new or have never been encountered before. Not all data gathering is visual. Some data collection involved analyzing vast quantities of text-based information or even audio clues. This new type of data collection system makes traditional intelligence gathering techniques obsolete.

Through the use of big data strategies, national defense, and intelligence agencies, as well as military forces, are better prepared to respond to imminent threats, as well as to use predictive analysis to anticipate how those threats are likely to occur. The value of instantaneous, high-quality intelligence gathering cannot be overstated in terms of protecting citizens and maintaining our national security.

How Your Website Can Increase Profits

Most businesses today have websites out of necessity. Customers today have an expectation of being able to interact with a company online to learn more about the organization, ask questions or leave comments, or to buy products or orders services directly.

In the past few years, a sea change has happened in global business: Most customers today use their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices to search for the products and services they want. So if your business doesn’t have a website, you probably are missing out on most of your new business.

Websites and Profits

But it’s not enough to simply have a website. It has to meet the expectations of your online customers. And people also need to be able to find it.

An outdated, confusing, or cluttered website may turn more customers away than it attracts. If you haven’t updated your business’s website in a while — or if you can’t remember the last time you gave it a facelift — it’s probably time to review it.

How Your Website Can Increase Profits – Search Engine Rankings

To capture the largest share of the pool of customers for your specific type of products and services, it has to be simple for people to find your website on Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other popular search engines.

Here’s how most retail scenarios work today: Somebody needs a particular product. Let’s say for example’s sake it’s a frisbee cannon.

They take out their smartphone, type “frisbee cannon” into their Google app, along with perhaps their hometown:

“Frisbee cannon Detroit”

Up will pop a list of businesses that offer this product. Here’s the important part: 7 times out of 10, the customer will click on the first business listed. And that’s the business that most likely will get the sale (if they are mobile-friendly, right then and there from the customer’s smartphone!).

Choosing the Right Format

Designers A lot of web designers choose to build their websites using the format they use most often, Flash, without even considering other options such as HTML, CSS or JavaScript.

Flash is one of the most popular formats among web designers because they think it has fewer browser compatibility problems and more user interface options than other formats. But does it really?

Benefits of Flash

Flash is a very powerful tool that allows web designers to create colorful, impressive looking sites that push the boundaries of multimedia. It also has a huge base, so it tends to be more compatible with a broader range of browsers than sites created using CSS.

And let’s face it: Flash lets web designers show off their stuff, impressing clients with the “wow factor” that keeps them on board with your web design.

Choosing the Right Format – Drawbacks of Flash

Yet Flash also has its downside. For example, sites created using Flash tend to rank lower on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines compared to sites built using HTML. Google’s algorithm still struggles when crawling through Flash sites.

Some web designers believe Flash sites also are less user-friendly than HTML or CSS sites. For example, Flash doesn’t let you highlight text for copy and pasting. You also can’t click the Back button to go back a page.

It’s also harder to increase font size and open links in new windows. So there’s often a price to pay in terms of navigation for the intuitive interface.

Mobility Is an Issue

But perhaps the biggest problem with Flash sites is that they are nearly unviewable on mobile devices such as smartphones. Unfortunately, this is the type of device most users today are using to access the content they want online.

So before you automatically choose Flash for your next web design, consider its drawbacks and benefits.

Are Backlinks Still Relevant to Your Website?

Just a few years ago, Google based much of its decision on where to rank a website on how many backlinks it had. The idea was that if a website had a lot of backlinks, it must be important and therefore of value to Google’s users.

But unscrupulous web page designers figured this out and started to artificially create fake backlinks using automated software programs. The result was that Google was leading its users to web pages that actually had very little content and value.

So Google changed its search engine algorithm to give weight to other things such as social approval signals, such as Facebook “Likes”, how many times a website’s link was Tweeted, and others.

So do backlinks still matter to getting your web pages ranked high on Google and other search engines? The answer is, “Yes, as long as the links come from authoritative places”.

Are Backlinks Still Relevant to Your Website? Authoritative Websites

Google considers websites to be authoritative if they are places people generally would go to get answers to questions they might have. That means sites like Wikipedia, Ask.com and About.com are considered by Google and other search engines to be authoritative sites.

So getting links to your page from these sites and other authoritative sites like them — including sites run by education institutions (in other words, sites with the suffix “.edu”) and governmental bodies (sites with the suffix “.gov”) can still improve your page rankings.

How to Get Backlinks from Authoritative Sites

The best way to get these high-value backlinks is for your site itself to be authoritative. In other words, make your website a place web users would go to find answers. Then it’s simply a self-fulfilling prophecy and your page will soar to the top of the Google rankings.

Another way is to plant these backlinks yourself. Go to places authoritative sites and interact with the content, leaving content, posting helpful information, and always remembering to include backlinks to your web pages.

How to Keep People On Your Web Pages Longer

When visitors arrive at your web page, one of your primary goals should be to keep them there as long as possible.

The longer people stay on your web page, the more likely they are to buy your products, subscribe to your content, or share your pages with other people.

Here are a few things you can do right now to keep visitors on your web pages longer:

Logos Build Trust

People trust web pages they think are maintained by professional, competent organizations. If you don’t already have a professionally produced logo, hire a graphic artist to create one for you and feature it prominently on your web page.

A great-looking logo will make people more likely to trust your content and stay on your web page longer.

Make Navigation Intuitive

Most people today visit dozens — if not hundreds — of web pages every day. So if your web page is difficult to navigate, visitors are more likely to click off more quickly.

Navigation on your web page should be intuitive. People don’t want to have to figure out which button they need to click to get where they want to go. Everything should be obvious. If it’s not, it’s probably time to redesign your page.

Make It Clutter-Free

Most people don’t like clutter — whether it’s in their homes or on the web pages they visit.

If your page is packed with unnecessary images or other non-essential content, it’s time to clean house. To keep people on your pages longer, strive to keep them as sleek and clutter-free as possible.

Use High-Quality Images

Given that practically every smartphone, tablet or other device today has a high-quality HD camera built into it, there’s no reason to include blurry, unappealing images on your web pages.

Make sure any image you include is professionally produced and appealing to your visitors.

‘Do I Need to Learn Photoshop to Master Web Design?’

How Virtual Reality Could Help Your Business

Photoshop is one of the tools that everybody says you need to learn in order to master web design. But is it really necessary given the advanced software and other tools available today?

The short answer is: Yes and No.

Benefits of Photoshop

The best thing about Photoshop is that once you master it, you can do pretty much anything with any image. You can crop, create and add filters, cut and paste elements into and out of images, and many other options.

When you are skilled at Photoshop, you can absolutely use these talents to improve the quality of the images on your pages as well as the overall look of your website.

Drawbacks of Photoshop

There are two major downsides to Photoshop: It’s cost and how complicated it is.

Photoshop isn’t cheap. If you are just starting out in web design and don’t have a big budget, there are other things that probably are going to be more important that you will need first.

Plus, it’s complicated to use. So learning Photoshop to the point where you are proficient with it can take a long time. If you have the time to devote to learning it, the long-term value is immense. But if you already are scrambling to handle all the other demands of your online business, having to learn Photoshop may be one of your lowest priorities.

Alternatives to Photographic Image

Photographic image has been around for a long time. But today there are many other tools that perform many of the same functions automatically.

For example, most newer model smartphones include cameras that have software you can use to add filters, crop photos, even manipulate the image all right from your phone.,

Another alternative is buying your images from a stock photo company or hiring a freelancer to develop better photos and other images for your website on a per job basis.

10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Rankings

Blogs Provide Continuous Contact with Customers

If you want your web pages to appear at the top of the Google Search Engine Results Page for your keywords, you have to use the most effective SEO techniques.

Here are 10 fast and easy SEO-related things you can do to instantly improve your page rankings:

Don’t include characters like “&” and “?” in your permalinks. Google doesn’t like them and they can slow things down.

To make your content more readable, separate ideas and phrases with hyphens whenever possible.

But don’t use underscores (__) instead of hyphens because these can confuse the search engines.

Any time you include an image or photo, always create alt tags and descriptions that include your keywords.

Anytime you can — if appropriate — use internal linking. This is when you link to somewhere else within your page or website, rather than to an external page or document. Search engines like to see internal links and will rank your pages higher if you have them.

Use sticky posts when possible. These are posts that include a lot of links that keep you on the page, rather than being sent off to another site.

Include a category description paragraph on your page.

Encourage page visitors to subscribe to your website, blog or other content using a category specific RSS feed.

Make sure you understand the target audience you are addressing. If necessary, do some research by looking at other pages that are aimed at the same audience you want. Then update your content appropriately.

Speaking of updating content, make sure you are continually providing high-quality content that your page visitors can actually use in their everyday lives. This will make it more likely that they will return to your pages again and again.

Use these 10 fast and easy SEO tips to improve the SERP rankings of your web pages so you can attract more visitors.