As a web designer I am always excited when one of my clients; Frank of FrankshickorySyrup.com; gets noticed in a spectacular way. Recently, one of my clients in Ohio was written up in  the local newspaper as one of the top 5 Fabulous Food Finds at the Fabulous Food Show in Cleveland, Ohio. Here is a snippet of what was written by Lisa Abraham, Beacon Journal Food Writer:

[To Read the entire article, go to: http://www.ohio.com/lifestyle/abraham/lisa-abraham-fabulous-finds-at-fabulous-food-show-1.304200 ]

Way to go Frank – I am proud of you – keep up the good work.

And if you haven’t tried Frank’s Shagbark Hickory Syrup, you are missing a real treat. My wife and I bought some to try, and we used it to marinate chicken, as a salmon glaze before we BBQ on the grill, salad dressings.

<title>Is Your ‘Title’ tag Memorable or does it turn People Away?</title>

A well formatted ‘Title’ tag is the first step in a well formatted website design. Without it, all the SEO (search engine optimization) techniques in the world aren’t going to help you for long.

Below is a screen shot I took of a business website (we won’t name which one). Each page of the website was like the one you see below. The homepage title read: ‘home’; the product page title read: ‘product’; and the contact us page title read: (yes, you guessed it) – ‘contact us’.

No Help – No Benefit

Read More: Internet Marketing Oklahoma, Email Scams, Automotive Directory, Oklahoma Web Design, SEO Services, Website Tips,

If you were a business owner and you hired a web developer to build your website and he doesn’t put in a good, and unique title for you on every page of your website, then he didn’t do his job. Making a website look pretty to the visual eye is only half of the job. Making it look pretty to search engines is the other half, and that’s one of the things that makes it well-formatted.

If you are building your website on your own, then you need to pay particular attention to each individual page and give them a  UNIQUE Title. One that is relevant for every page of your website.

So What is a ‘Title’ tag and what does it do?

Your ‘title‘ tag is:

• a tag of html code in the top of every web page
• the first descriptive text that a person sees when they do a search in the search engines
• the descriptive line of text that appears at the top of your web browser when you open up a web page. Make it memorable.
• the text line that is saved in someone’s browser when they save your site under their most favorite bookmarks. If it is uniquely title, it makes it easier for them to find your information again when they are searching their bookmarks. [Can you imagine what your bookmark list would look like if every web page you bookmarked simply read 'home'?]
• it is databased by search engines to help people search for relative search terms about you, your products, services and your company. If those search terms are wisely used in your title, you will have a better chance at being found. If you don’t have a title, it is highly likely that when it comes to search engines, your website will be passed over for a well-formatted website with a relevant title.

How to Format a Website ‘Title’

Understanding the roll that your title plays in search engines is key to formatting good title text. If you ever hope to rank well in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN, then creating a unique text on every page of your website is paramount to your success and high rankings for your website.

1. Keep your ‘title’ text under 6-7 words – which equals approximately 74 typed characters. Seventy-four typed characters equals approximately half a Twitter – no more.
   “That seems so short.” you may be thinking.
   It doesn’t matter. Any longer and it will be cut off by the search engine database system and be lost anyway. So when you go to Google and put in a search term – the first line result you see will be your title.
2. Make it memorable: it is the first thing that your new potential client is going to see. You want to catch their eye long enough for them to read your description. You description is a short relevant description that entices them to action so they click on your link. [Read: The Value of a Good Description] It doesn’t have to be fancy or cute – straight forward and precise is usually the best. A simple title for a website design company in Oklahoma City might read:
   <title>Web Site Designs for Oklahoma City Businesses</title>
3. Use keywords or phrases in your title tag. A word of caution. The title is NOT the place to load up on keywords or phrase. It is necessary to use ‘a’ keyword, or ‘a’ phrase. Notice in the above title I used the keywords ‘web site design’ and ‘Oklahoma City’ and I still kept the entire title short and simple.
4. Try not to repeat words. You don’t need to repeat yourself in your ‘title’ tag. It should read like a short sentence.
5. Special Note: Your Title does not have to include the name of your business. If the name of your business doesn’t tell me what you do or what services you offer – leave it out.  What do I mean by that? Let’s say your business name is “Joe’s Services”. Who cares.  At this point they are not searching Joe’s Services – they are searching for the services that Joe has to offer.  Your title should give me some indication as to what those services are. And your ‘description’ draws me in even more – compelling me to action. Joe’s Services doesn’t tell me anything about your company and in fact, makes me leary to want to click on that link. The wrong title can scare away customers even if you are the #1 spot in Google. The fact is, I can make any website #1 in Google – but unless your title is descriptive and your description is compelling – people will skip over you and choose another company.

Check Your Website

Now is the time to go check each page of your website. If you ‘title’ tag is the same on all of them, you will want to create unique titles for each page if you want to rank better in the search engines. If you had a web developer make your site and they didn’t do it properly – go back and make them finished the job.

I hope that this has helped you understand the value of your ‘Title’ tag. It is just one step in the ladder to search engine success.

Don’t forget to Subscribe Now to our Email Newsletter so you won’t miss the next installment: “The Value of a Good Description” metatags and something really exciting called: “Don’t Follow Me on Facebook”.

Meta-Tags play a vital role in web development, especially in making your website “Search Engine Friendly”. Search Engines have been using ‘keywords’ to index website into ‘relevant’ topics since the beginning days of the Internet Boom.

A Brief History

Early web designers, and programmers who were savvy to keyword tags, used this technique to prosper early in the online revolution, shooting their way to the top. This created a ‘have’ or ‘have not’ senario. Others began to realize the importance of the ‘meta-tag Keywords’ jumped on the band wagon. However; not fully understanding how keywords were used; they flooded the meta-tag with tons of keywords believing more is better. This less reputable use of the meta-tag by some programmers became known as a technique today called “keyword spamming”.

Eventually the major search engines stopped looking at websites with tons of keywords or limited their algorithms (the method by which they study and index web pages) to only look at the first five or six, maybe even seven words. And it was not so much the words that were analyzed but the characters. In writing, when counting words each letter, number or space is considered a character. Six characters make one word and that is how you count words on a written page. Search engines counted up to approximately twenty seven characters (depending on the search engine doing the indexing). And this helped them to limit the amount of information they indexed at the same time ignoring the rest of the words so-as to not overload their databases.

Keyword Spamming

Today, black-hat web marketers still use this technique, however it can now have a very different effect on your search engine results. On a point scale system, your website can be given negative results actually pushing your website further away from the top positions. In some cases, Google has actually been known to ban web pages (and eventually entire sites) from their databases for using black-hat marketing techniques.

Because these black-hat spamming techniques water down the relevance of your web page and make your web page irrelevant to a search query – it is always better to build it right than take the chance of getting negative results.

Relevant Search Results

As search engines became familiar with unsavory programming techniques, they quickly changed the way they seek, store and post results. Relevant search results are results that relate to the specific terms you put into the search engine in order to get a specific result.

Search engines began to vary the amount of ‘keyword’ data it would collect. Google.com even implementes human follow up on websites as they were getting indexed. It was (and I believe that it still is) kind of a hunt-and-peck system of human verification as new websites were being discovered and come online, but when a website was found that was using less than reputable SEO practices it often resulted in either a ‘time-out’ in the infamous “Google Sand Box” (which they still deny exists), a bad ranking (if any) or banishment from the Google database – oooh! Not where you want to be.

How to format your ‘keywords’ meta-tag properly:

1. Keep them concise
2. Make sure each one relates to the topic of the web page you are using them on. Every web page is unique – so your keywords should also be unique.
3. Use no more than 3 or 4 keywords or phrases – see example below
4. Choose at least one major keyword or phrase – be specific
5. Choose at least one minor keyword or phrase – be specific
6. Choose a general topic phrase – more general to your topic
   A specific search term might be
   “#search engine optimization” or
   “#seo strategies“;
   “#internet marketing” or
   “#internet marketing services” is a more general category, but still related.

A good keyword meta-tag for a search engine optimization company may look something like this:

<meta keywords=”#search engine optimization, seo strategies, internet marketing services, oklahoma</ >

This short set of keywords is actually crammed full of useful variations. A search engine can put words together like:

• search engine strategies
• seo services
• internet marketing
• internet marketing strategies
• seo oklahoma
• etc…

Also, let me mentioned that the first keyword has more weight to the search engines than the last keyword, they can be helpful in almost any of the combination’s that you can think of. So without repeating words, and using strategically chosen words or phrases, you actually increase your marketing ability.

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NEW PROJECTS

In our new projects department we are excited to give you an early peak at three projects that we are working on.

The first is for a client who will be bringing a new entertainment & informational directory for Oklahoma City. We are excited to be working on the pr0ject.

The second will be a new restaurant website for a local gourmet Deli in downtown Oklahoma City. It will include their entire menu, location finder, daily specials and monthly specials. When we are finished, you will also be able to download a new PDF version of the menu and post it up on your business office community board so everyone can order lunch ahead of time and pick it up all at once.

And finally, we are getting ready to start a new magazine website that will kick off an edgy, stylish magazine in the Oklahoma City metro. We will also be doing the layout design for the magazine which we are really excited about – but that’s all I can tell you at this time. You’ll have to stay tuned to this channel for more updates and our progress on that subject.

NEW DEVELOPMENT

Under construction are two new theme designs for business that are sure to fill a welcome hole in the theme development world. Along with our new responsive themes, we have felt that the business world has always been losing the battle of the blog.  Instead of WordPress themes designed with the business owner in mind, much of the theme designing community has been creating blog themes and trying to convince the business world that that is what a new business website should look like.  However, there always seem to me key elements that are left out of most business designs.

Like the simple function of adding business contact information on the home page with a simple geo-map to their location.  How about a standard section so businesses can boldly put their telephone number so customers can call them? Yeah, we thought that also. It sounds like such a simple thing but far too many themes that are being promoted as business themes leave these simple equations out of the mix.

Your business website is not a blog – and shouldn’t have to look like a blog.  It is also not a social coffee house – leave that for Facebook. It is an online representation of your business, and we realize that. So as you look for new themes to do business – look for a theme with the essentials to do business – and you have found us.

NEW DESIGNS

We have also got some new designs coming out for the themes that we have because we believe that it just takes a little bit of inspiration to give you the necessary impetus to get your business running online. Keeping with the trends of light, color and easy to manage, we are sure that you can find a design you are looking for to get started.

So comeback often and check out the latest happenings at CreationIS.

‘Embrace’ – Business WordPress Theme is a simple and stylish theme that allows you to embrace the essence of your business and lay it out on your home page with optimal ease. From its feature slider that allows you to insert graphic or video, add text blocks and insert action buttons, you are going to love this theme.

As with all our themes, this one comes with a pre-built contact template that makes giving your customers easy access to getting in touch with you a breeze. Just click ‘pages’, then ‘add new page’. Give your contact page a title and link it to the contact template design built into your theme.  It is that simple. Of course, in order for you  to receive the email that is generated when someone fills out the contact form you want to make sure you add your email under the theme options panel.

Wow! What could make this theme more exciting?

21 Themes Styles come packed in this designer theme collection. We make it easy for you to do business.

Embrace the possibilities! The Future is Now!

Unique Runway Features

A Combination Made for Business. Runway combines grace and elegance with the most powerful e-commerce plug-in availabe for WordPress E-Commerce | the WooCommerce plugin.  It seemlessly provides your customers with a beautiful front-end experience while giving you the power of product and sales management in the back-end. Manage your product categories, product descriptions, cart and check-out and user account sections.

Built in are ‘reporting and analytics’, ‘shipping & tax’ features, ‘customer order  tracking’, ‘marketing and promotion’ capabilities, and instant payment gateways.  And if that isn’t enough, you can easily extend the plugin with more functionality.

Typography – 300+ Fonts

Remember when you could only use two or three fonts in a web design because browsers were incapable of processing anything more due to the inconsistency of fonts on personal home computers?  Now you don’t have to worry about it. We have built-in over 300 new font variations that are at your disposal for your navigation, page titles, post entries, and header text.

Design Customizability

Runway comes packed with 9 customizable color designs so that you can quickly match your business to your brand identity

Custom Homepage

The homepage contains three option product showcase areas: a featured product carousel, and two intuitive sliders for displaying your latest additions and your best selling products.  Each can be activated or deactivated as required.

Shortcodes

Shortcodes are built into the backbone of all our current designs. They allow you to add sales buttons quickly, spice up your quotes and add columns of specialized information with the click of a few buttons. Embedded into the text editor control bar, just click, enter your data and press enter.

Unique Sale Template

Runway also comes with a unique template to specifically showcase products which are currently on sale.

21 Custom Widgets

Spice up your sidebar with any number of the 21 unique customized widgets that come with our theme. Add Twitter streams, Connect widgets, Shopping Cart, Featured Products, Price Filtering, On Sale Widget, Best Sellers and much more.

Business, E-Commerce, Responsive WordPress Theme

Like a bolt of lightning, this responsive WordPress theme is packed with potent energy. ‘Whitelightning’ is the latest addition to our Business WordPress Themes Collection, and our E-Commerce WordPress Themes Collection and it is loaded with powerful features that will make your life easier. Several things make this theme stand out above the rest:

Special Features

1. Modular Web Design: Just like the homepage text module, the other modules on the homepage can be activated, deactivated AND moved to which ever position you like.  What does that mean?  It’s simple.  If you want the main text and sidebar on the top of the page – just go to your widgets panel and move it up.  If you want the products module up – just move it. The same with the Mini-Features module and your Portfolio module.  All of them are interchangable. Now that is customizability. The text area (although at this stage is not interchangable, can be activated or deactivated if you don’t want it. The same holds true for the ‘Feature Slider’ at the top.  You control the look and the feel.
2. Responsive Web Design: This is the latest in web design technology, and a necessity for anyone doing business on the Internet today. When you resize the browser window, or view it in a tablet or smartphone, the design responds to the devise and changes (to look good) accordingly. Try it! Resize your browser window, or pull out your phone and browse to this page.  We believe you will like what you see – and so will your customers. Consider this – 30% of onine searches are now being performed by something other than a PC, and most of them are being performed by some sort of smartphone.  So if your website doesn’t look good to them – they will move on to someone else.
3. E-Commerce WordPress Theme: Built for ease-of-use on one of the most popular and powerful content management systems in the world – Whitelightning is also capable of powering your e-commerce store by adding WooCommerce Plugin. Simply install, activate, configure and begin selling.  It works seemlessly with Whitelightning and the plugin is free.

‘Contour’ – The Shape of Tomorrow’s Business Today!

This customizable business WordPress theme is a powerful asset to any business. As the name implies, Contour will change the shape of your business.  It is time to get online and showoff your products and services in a futuristic way.

With its ‘featured slider’, ‘multi-funtional homepage layout’ and optional ‘portfolio pages’ – Contour will make your business shine.

Advanced Administrative Interface

What makes ‘Contour’ stand out from other WordPress themes is the ease-of-use backend administration allowing you to utilize slider custom post types, customize your typography, and dropping pre-designed custom widgets, you will be able to get your business website running in record time.

Featured Slider

A custom home page featured slider to showcase your work or products with style, all powered by jQuery. Optional slider pagination gives your visitors easy overview.

Custom Homepage

Custom home page layout with mini-features, portfolio and testimonial modules.

Portfolio Page Template

An optional integrated portfolio section driven by custom post types, which utilizies jQuery prettyPhoto script to display your work in a lightbox.

Custom Post Types

The theme takes full advantage of the new custom post types functionality than came with WordPress 3.0, so adding slides, mini-features, testimonials and portfolio posts is dead easy!

Custom Typography

You can customize the typography in the theme to suit, and there is full support for Google Fonts in the font selector.

Custom Widgets

The theme has a widgetized 1 sidebar (that you can even include on the home page) and 4 footer, and as always comes with 8 custom Cis Widgets (Ad Space, Blog Author, CisTabs, Subscribe, Feedback, Search, Flickr and Twitter).

Alternative Styles

The theme includes 9 alternative color styles which you can preview in the demo, and also has styling options for background color/image and setting link and button color.

RemindOklahoma.com is our latest featured business, and I must say – we are very excited about this one. Not only was the design and development fun to create, but the business concept is brilliant.

On the surface – RemindOklahoma.com sells residential air-filters.  Something that every home needs and uses.  However, what makes this so unique is that they have developed a way to ‘remind’ you to purchase your filters while creating a fund-raising project for the local school districts.

As a school package children can sell the air-filters (instead of cookies, or chocolate) to help raise money for more books, band instruments, sports equipment (or anything else they can think of), or when you order your air filters direct – you can choose the school you would like to benefit and that school will receive at least 25% of the cost of the filter.

So, remind yourself to change your filters and stay healthy – at the same time support your local schools and everyone wins!

Take a look for yourself:

Seriously? Who cares? You shouldn’t! Less than 1% of web users still have a computer with IE6 on it.  It is time to upgrade!!!!!

What are you waiting for? Web browsers are FREE and if you are still using IE6 as your internet browser you are missing out on the best of the web.  You are also holding back design technologies.

If you are a business owner and your web designer is still designing for IE6 users – tell him to stop! He is going to make your website klunky, slower than it has to be, he is going to charge you twice as much (and he may not tell you) because he has to be backward compatible to a web browser that had its last rights read back in 2008.

CreationIS – Internet Services is dedicated to a forward thinking Internet. We do not design for IE6. We design for the next generation of Internet users, and we look forward to helping You reach those who embrace the technology of today and relish the developments of tomorrow.

If you want old and outdated – go to my competitors. If you want a website for your business that is on the cutting edge and will take you into the future! Then call us: 405-254-3767

We are Oklahoma’s #1 Web Design Company!