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When thinking about getting your first website, your first thought should be of choosing a good domain name. Depending on the overall purpose of your new website, there are a couple of important factors that you should take into account when searching for your domain name, which are, a) is the domain name brandable, b) does the domain name contain related and popular keywords, and c) is the domain name available to be registered.

Brandable Domains

If you’re looking for a brandable domain name that is highly memorable and will stands your company out from the rest, then it is more than likely that you will have to sacrifice having ‘searched for’ keywords with your domain name. This may mean that you won’t get that extra strength when it comes to ranking towards the top of search engines, but choosing a good domain name over a domain name containing keywords could be the right choice for your company in the long term because it means that you can create a more powerful and trusted brand.

Keyword Domains

Looking for domain names containing highly searched keywords will provide the perfect platform for starting an SEO campaign to get your website to the top of the search engines. By limiting your domain name choices to ones that only contain your chosen keywords does mean that you may have to sacrifice a long term brand. We recommend keyword domains to online independent companies that aren’t too concerned about building a catchy, well recognised name.

Lastly, you need to check if your chosen domain is available. You can do this by going to any domain name provider and performing a quick search to check that it hasn’t already been registered. We regularly use 123-reg.co.uk to register our domains and we would recommend them to anybody looking to buy their first domain name.

Web design forums along with SEO forums are a great source of information if you want to find out about everything from coding, optimisation, design and much more. Instead of reading tutorials and relying on search engines to find the help that you need, you can sign up to one of many established forums and ask for assistance from experienced design/developers.

To get you started we recommend webdesignerforum.co.uk for web design help and seoforums.org for search engine related queries.

SEO Benefits

If you’re a developer and have a few moments to provide answers to those looking for web related help then there is also a strong SEO benefit to take advantage of. If you’re contributing  good information on the forums then you are rewarded with the ability of including a signature on each of your posts, which is perfect for containing a link back to your website or to any other websites that you may be optimising. Perfect!

Many SEO companies promote link building as a large chuck of their SEO strategy and this is something that you should look into before signing up to any lengthy investment. Link building certainly does account for a considerable portion of having a successful SEO campaign to gain the results that you need BUT it’s the quality of the link building that’s being carried out, which will determine how successful your website is going to perform in the search engines.

Free, Reciprocal and Paid Links

In our SEO campaigns we focus on quality rather than quantity. You can gain the same benefit (if not more!) by researching authorative and relevant premium websites rather than wasting time and effort pumping out 1000’s of links to your website from unrelated, less powerful sites. In fact, by publishing your website using spammy anchor text on unrelated websites which link out to hundreds of other unrelated websites, may even have a adverse effect. This may see your website drop down the search engine rankings.

Not all premium websites cost the earth to add your website to, you can find several premium blogs, directories, forums and websites, which offer reciprocal and even free submissions. To find these websites you need to take the time to research relevant and industry specific websites, which provide useful information and are already well established in search engines. Sometimes it’s also necessary to contact the websites Webmaster to inquire about advertising rates, etc.

The general message that we are trying to explain in this post is that when it comes to link building for your website, quality is better than quantity. Build your links slowly and take extra time to find partner websites that 100% compliment the industry that you’re competing in.

For more information visit our SEO Services section.

Thanks for reading,
Professional Web Design

CSS3 is showing amazing leaps in the way in which designers can now manipulate various on page effects within CSS without using design software such as Fireworks and Photoshop. Today we are looking at creating rounded corners on a simple web banner using CSS3 border-radius.

So here is the standard web banner contained within a square <DIV> tag 400px x 100px.

Here is the same <DIV> tag and web banner with the addition of a few lines of CSS3 coding.

It’s so simple but really effective and time saving. Normally designers would need to create the rounded corner effect on the image and with a clear background but now we can code the effect directly in CSS.

Here is the CSS/HTML code used in the CSS3 rounded border-radius example above:

**CSS**

web-banner img{

/*Border Radius controls – Edit to change effect*/

-moz-border-radius: 1em 4em 1em 4em;

border-radius: 1em 4em 1em 4em;

}

**HTML**

<div id=”web-banner”>

<img src=”http://www.freshdeveloper.com/fd/fresh-blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/border-radius.jpg” width=”400″ height=”100″ alt=”CSS Rounded Border-Radius” />

</div>