Faq for digital online marketing and wesite development
 

FAQs

Website Design & Development

What is the difference between Static & Dynamic Website?

Web page is referred to as static when it comprises of features for one-way interaction with the users. The data appearing on such pages remains same for every user i.e. its look, feel and design does not get changed as per user’s input. On the contrary, web page is referred to as dynamic when its features allow a two-way communication with the users. In other words, dynamic designs are exclusively made to facilitate interaction, as per user’s input.

Can I choose you to design my site and use my own web hosting?

Yes, you can choose us for the designing of your website and can choose your own hosting services. But, you should have necessary equipment and the apt skill sets to host your own website.

How long will it take my website to be designed?

The time taken for a website, to be designed, depends on the type of website as well as the functionality involved. The time duration would be specified to you after the entire deliverable have been finalized. However, we are always directed towards fulfilling your requirement as per your deadlines.

If I already have a site can you help me improve it?

Of course, Yes. As per the current needs and trends, we can restructure or redesign your existing website. In fact, this would not cost you as much as building a website from scratch would cost.

What kind you process you follow while designing & development of websites?

To know more about our website design process click here.

Is there any way, we can contact you for the quote?

Yes. You can send us your quote request by filling a very simple request a quote form or you can call us on our phone number (877) 932-0888 to discuss your requirement. Once we receive the request from your side, our sales representative will get back to you within 1 business day with quote or questions (if any).

How Dharne can help me in brand identity design?

Dharne & Co. can help you design your brand identity. In Dharne, we design logos, brochures, stationary, website layouts, etc. So please contact us with your requirement to set your unique online & offline identity.

Which are the CMS platforms you work with?

We work with CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, etc. We also develop the Custom CMS using PHP & Code Ignitor framework.

To know more about our services, click here.

Which are the Ecommerce platforms you work with?

We work with Ecommerce platforms like Magento, CS-Cart, Core-Commerce, X-Cart, Volusion store, Flashecom, etc.

To know more about our services, click here

Do you use CSS frameworks while designing the websites?

Yes. We do use the CSS frameworks like Twitter Bootstrap (Latest Version) while designing of websites. Even we have an experience with 960 Grid System.

Do you design the Facebook Pages ?

Yes. We design & develop the facebook pages. Our Graphics team adds their creativity in Photoshop document while designing of facebook pages & our HTML team converts that photoshop document into facebook compatible format using HTML & CSS.

Do you allow clients to review the developed website before making it live?

Yes. After completing development of website, we provide a demo version of website to clients to review it so that they can give us feedback on the developed website &then we work on the edits suggested by client (if any). If client approves website, then we make it live on the client provided hosting or our hosting server.

Do you give demo of CMS after completion of websites?

Yes. We give demo of CMS after completion of website using goto-meeting application. We also provide the documentation of how you can make changes to the website using the CMS.

SEO basics

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which broadly means optimizing your website for search engines and your visitors.

How is SEO useful?

SEO helps make your website findable, helps you build your presence on other websites to get additional referral visits to your website, helps analyze and refine your website content and finally helps you convert visitors to leads or buyers.

How does Google find my website?

Google runs an automated program called a web crawler which goes from link to link and adds any new pages it finds and also any pages that have updated information. If you have a link to your website from a website already found by Google, your website will be found eventually.

My website does not show up in Google. How can we help Google find my website?

SEO helps improve the chances of your website getting found quickly by ensuring your website is easy for the crawler to find and crawl. This includes checking your website architecture for crawl efficiency, broken links or slow loading pages which may thwart the web crawler and taking steps to remedy any such inefficiencies.

What are the key elements to succeed using SEO

While there are many subtle variations and nuances to what is done in each case, below are some of the important elements to succeed using SEO.

  1. A well build website which is easily accessible and loads fast.
  2. Optimized key meta elements of each page on the website using proper keywords helping search engines understand what the page is about without compromising on ensuring the page is user friendly.
  3. Adequate content on each of the pages, properly structured.
  4. Proper interlinking between pages to help visitor navigation and efficient crawling for search engines.
  5. Good quality backlinks from other websites
  6. Good quality co-citations from other websites
  7. Other Trust Signals through Authorship verification, Memberships, etc.
  8. Tracking and measurement of rankings, visits, time on website, conversions
  9. Proper website maintenance
  10. Continuous improvement through a well structured SEO Process.

What are keywords? Why are they important?

For clarity when we say keywords, it also means keyword phrases. Keywords are how searchers express intent to search engines. Search Engine algorithms analyze the keywords for intent and deliver results accordingly.

E.g. A searcher typing in ‘movie theaters in San Diego’ is most likely looking for a list of theaters in San Diego. An even greater likelihood is that the searcher wants to see a movie. So Google returns a mix of results first about movies playing in San Diego as well as lists of movie theaters.

Keywords which represent intent of searcher for something where you are a match are important. Those are the keywords your potential customers use to find businesses like your own.

If you have a website with a page which lists theaters in San Diego, you will want to rank for this term to get more visits to that page on your website.

Focusing on such keywords and ranking for them helps you get targeted visitors from search engines who are more likely to become customers.

What are the different types of keywords?

Broadly speaking keywords in SEO are divided into two groups

Head Term Keywords: In the above example ‘movie theaters in san diego’ can be considered a head term. This is usually a term which is used frequently by searchers but is not specific enough.

Long Tail Keywords: As an example, ‘movie theater in san diego that serves dinner’ can be considered a long tail keyword. Here the term will be used less frequently by searchers but is more specific.

At a more complex level SEOs at Dharne & Company will segment the keywords further based on factors user intent, competition, relevance, etc.

How can we choose the keywords to target?

You need to start with a basic set of seed keywords. These are usually based on

  • What your business is about e.g. Pet grooming
  • Services or products you offer e.g. Dog grooming, Pet spa treatment, flea treatment powder, etc.
  • What your customers call your services or products
  • Problems your services or products solve.
  • Locations are your target customers in

If you have web analytics enabled and have a good amount of visitor data, then it is a great resource to tap into to see what terms your visitors actually used most often.

One more option is to use PPC with the seed keywords above to see which keywords get clicks and visitor volume estimates.

Finally your customer communication e.g. Email, sales staff etc. Will also offer interesting insights into what terms customers are using when talking about your service or product.

Using these seed keywords, Dharne & Company SEO staff will come up with more keywords using experience and keyword research tools.

What important web page elements should I be aware of?

The important elements you should be aware of for SEO are

Title Tag: The text in this tag is displayed in the search results and is visible to visitors at the top of their browsers when they visit the page.

Meta Description Tag: This contains the text displayed after your title in search results. This is not visible to visitors when they visit the page.

Header Tags: This elements provide structure and hierarchy to your web page content. The text contained in header tags is visible to your web page visitors.

Page Content: This is one of the most critical elements of the page. The page needs to have adequate content for all the above elements to work in harmony and for the page to be useful to users and considered valuable by search engines. Page content can include text, image and media elements (like video)

Call to Action: These are elements where you expect the visitor to take some action e.g. Fill a form, Call a number, click to download or view a video.

Alt attribute in Image Tag: This attribute helps give context to images used on a web page. This is useful for the visually impaired as their text readers can read and give context to the image as well as for search engines.

Anchor Text: This is the text used to link either to sections within the page or to other pages on the website and also to web pages on other websites.

Page Speed: This is important to gauge how fast your website is compared to other similar websites.

Page URL: The URL name us useful to give users context of what the page is about, where they are and also for search engines to get keywords related to the page.

How should I optimize these important elements

Title Tag: You should ideally target one primary keyword on one page with one or two related keywords as secondary ones. The title needs to reflect what the page represents and also needs to be optimized to improve clickthroughs. The ideal size which search results show is from 60 to 80 characters.

Meta Description Tag: This should be a summary of the page and should include your primary and secondary keywords if they fit in about140 to 160 characters

Header Tags: These should represent the main topic and sub-topics and reflect the hierarchy correctly. The tags should have your main keyword with some variation from the page Title tag. The sub-topic header tags will usually have some element of your main and secondary keywords.

Page Content: Ensure you have adequate content for the topic the web page represents. While there is no specific limit it is a fine balancing act between

  • Having enough text to read for your visitors without losing context.
  • Ensuring having the target keywords are present in the content without compromising readability
  • Making content interesting with images, video without slowing down the page.

Call to Action: These elements need to stand out without getting too in your face. The visitors flow of vision should naturally move to these action items when the scan the page.

Alt attribute in Image Tag: Ensure the text here represents what the image is about.

Anchor Text: The text in your links should represent the resource the link leads to and yet ensure your keywords are well represented.

Page Speed: This starts right from the design phase of your website. When including any element in your website, page speed should be your main concern. So, images should ideally not exceed 100 kb, there should be minimum requests between the server and visitors computer. Use of heavy flash elements, JavaScript elements should be balanced.

Page URL: This depends on the platform you are using. Old legacy web development systems, ecommerce websites will usually make user friendly URL names difficult to implement. Using a modern CMS like WordPress helps. A clear website structure and hierarchy helps.

What important pages should my website have besides my main pages

Besides your ‘must have’ pages like home, about, contact, services, products it is essential that you take care to have the following pages in your website.

  1. A sitemap page for your visitors to get an overview of the website and also to navigate quickly to another part of your website.
  2. A custom 404 error page so when a visitor does not find a URL he gets served a helpful page that helps them restart or find what they were looking for.
  3. Search Results page for large websites >50 pages since a search option is essential for such websites with an easy to use search results page.
  4. FAQ page to answers frequently asked questions which makes your sales more efficient.
  5. Privacy policy page which helps build your users trust and also the search engines

Most importantly, you should have a Blog or Articles section where you can add content related to your business, your industry and your customers. This content should reflect your expertise and authority on topics important in your niche.

Should I mention my clients or projects on my website?

We recommend our clients to show their clients or projects for the following reasons

  1. Search engines get more content and your brand name gets mentioned with your client brand names which works as a co-citation.
  2. Similar clients know you have worked in their domain and now have a reference which helps in the conversion process
  3. Projects linked with real people testimonials and their social profiles act as proof of being real and trustworthy not only for your visitors but also for search engines.
  4. Any determined enough competitor can easily find your clients anyways.
  5. The project / client page helps enhance your specific service due to the testimonials, case studies that this information generates.

How can SEO help improve conversions?

SEO involves working with keywords and helping match searcher intent with content.

SEO involves looking at the website architecture and internal linking and optimizing it.

SEO involves looking at Call to Actions and most importantly

SEO involves looking at Analytics to identify relationships between sources, keywords, visitors and goal conversions.

All these factors when put together along with testing helps improve conversions.

How can Dharne & Company help with On Page SEO

Dharne & Company helps their clients with various aspects of SEO. These include

  1. Keyword Research
  2. Keyword mapping, Landing page analysis and Landing page suggestions
  3. Title, Meta tags creation and addition
  4. Header tag optimization
  5. Content optimization
  6. Conversion optimization
  7. Internal linking optimization
  8. Page speed improvements
  9. Optimizing website crawling and indexation
  10. Website structure optimization
  11. Implementing Analytics tracking including Goal
  12. Google+ authorship integration

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are links from other websites to your website.

Why do I need Backlinks?

When other websites link to your website, it is an endorsement of your website.

This endorsement can very from extremely positive to extremely negative.

A positive endorsement is when a website that is already having a high value in Google for a topic similar to the topic on your website.

E.g. If your website is about Golf and gets a link from the PGA Tour website, then that is a highly positive endorsement of your website. The PGA site is going to be a highly trusted and authority site on the topic of Golf.

The more such links you get, more the value your website gains. The topic keywords and context mean that you are likely to rank for keyword phrases for that topic.

How do I go get these Backlinks?

Some of the links are obvious and easy and should be collected right away. Some examples are

Links from your business and individual profiles on other websites e.g. Social media profiles, local and business membership profiles, partner business websites, employee profiles and where possible mentions and links from customer websites or blogs.

Others are harder to get and need more research, content effort, networking and luck to get.

A simple research example is from our earlier example from the Keyword Research section of this FAQ.

If you are a movie theater in San Diego, you want to be in the lists from various websites which list movie theaters in San Diego and rank in Google. This is a good way to find websites where you should be present on to get relevant backlinks.

Dharne & Company offers recommendations for content and helps promote content to get additional brand exposure and backlinks. This is based on our experience, research and understanding of your business and goals.

What are Co-Citations?

Co-citations are where your website and brand gets mentioned with closely related websites and brands. As an example the Coca Cola website will often get mentioned with Pepsi related websites, Soft Drinks related sites, Sports Tournament websites (due to their sponsorships). Similar, depending on your business, it is expected that you will be mentioned with a certain group of websites.

How can Dharne & Company help with backlink acquisition and off page SEO?

Dharne & Company will work closely with you for all off page related work. Some important ways we help our clients include

  1. Content Research and Topic suggestions
  2. Content Distribution for Backlink Acquisition
  3. Competitor Analysis and Tracking
  4. Backlink opportunity Research
  5. Direct Link Building (On authoritative sites in your niche e.g. Blogs, Forums, Influencers, etc)
  6. Co-citation Opportunities
  7. Press Release Distribution
  8. Social profiles creation, optimization and integration with website
  9. Local and Business listing creation and optimization
  10. Link acquisition guidance (where your role and relationships are critical i.e. Your direct involvement is a must e.g. Getting a link from your customers blog)

Why is content important?

First of all, Search Engines love content as it allows them to answer their users questions.

To judge which is the best result set, they need to start with finding websites that match the searchers query. More comprehensive your content, greater the chances of search engines finding your site for more searcher queries.

Note that this does not mean stuffing the website with lots of text. The other side of the coin is your visitors. Most important of all content is important for your visitors to get a better understanding of your business and your offerings. If a visitor visits your site from a search engine and returns back unsatisfied, that is a big negative for your website.

So, content is critical for success in SEO. It is the main ingredient of your website and a key component in link acquisition.

What kind of content can a business create to add on the website?

There is a lot happening with a business and the industry they are in. News, technology, influencer opinions, government regulations, market fluctuations, management changes, expansions, recruitment, project completions, product additions, service additions, special offers, industry events and many such things.

There is a huge scope for providing valuable information to your visitors around your business, around your industry, around your services or products. Some examples of content you can create

  1. Case Studies (examples of how your service/product helped solve your client’s problem)
  2. Product reviews (for new versions comparing with older, your opinions, expert views, etc.)
  3. Product help guides (Web pages, PDFs, PPTs, Videos, etc.)
  4. Product or Service FAQs
  5. Project Portfolio (New projects added, photos, videos)
  6. News updates (News mentions, Press Releases)
  7. Industry opinion pieces (latest developments, news roundups, criticism)

Most of this can be implemented as part of a Blog on the website.

What kind of promotional content can a business create

The scope is unlimited and is based on your creativity and seeding your network (friends, relatives, employees, clients, influencers). Some examples are

  1. Product or Service Reviews to post on other blogs in your industry
  2. PDFs & PPTs providing insight into your industry, service or product for distribution to document sharing sites.
  3. Press releases on achievements, project completions, anniversaries, joint releases with partners.
  4. Infographics based on data analysis/insights related to your industry
  5. Newsletters or Emailers to existing contact lists providing tips, insights, updates.
  6. Blog posts (top 5 posts on a ‘topic’ as an ebook PDF)
  7. Whitepapers (as distributable PDFs)

How can Dharne & Company help in Content Creation?

  1. Research for topics in your niche and provide content ideas.
  2. Guidance for various media (PDF, PPTs, Videos)
  3. Competitor Analysis for content ideas.
  4. Your existing content analysis for content ideas.
  5. Find influencers in your niche for content distribution (what topics they usually share with their followers)
  6. Image research and editing
  7. Video editing

Between SEO and PPC what should I choose?

At Dharne & Company, we do not view various channels as an ‘either or’ choice. Each channel has its merits.

At Dharne & Company, we do not view various channels as an ‘either or’ choice. Each channel has its merits.

Even for established websites it makes sense to run a few experimental PPC campaigns to get a better idea of keywords that work, test out ads and landing pages for conversions.

Our observation is that PPC and SEO complement each other really well.

Between SEO and Social Media marketing what should I choose?

As mentioned earlier, each channel has its merits. Social media is new and being experimented with by various businesses.

SEO focuses on being found in searches where intent matches with your offering.

So the focus is strongly on your website and improvements around it as well as acquisition of valuable endorsements through relevant backlinks. The focus is on letting new relevant visitors find your website through search engines.

Social Media is about being social with your customers by increasing touch points between them and your business (customer service, marketing). This has the value of customers returning to do business with you again. Also, it helps increase business exposure to your customer’s networks which is a risk (if they had a bad experience) and great (if they had a first class experience).

So the choice related to Social Media has to be done independently of your choice related to SEO.

How can Dharne & Company help integrate other channels with SEO?

We at Dharne & Company have our SEO and Social Media teams work together to ensure proper integration with your social channels. Some aspects we can help you with include

  1. Linking the website to social media profiles
  2. Integrating Google+ authorship
  3. Integrating Facebook Social Graph
  4. Integrating Twitter feeds
  5. Integrating social sharing across multiple channels

Why should I choose Dharne & Company for SEO

The key reasons why we believe Dharne & Company can provide the right SEO solution for your business are

  1. Dharne & Company has helped a number of businesses succeed in Search Engines since 2004.
  2. We have worked with corporates as well as small and medium business across verticals as divers as IT, Engineering, Automobile, Healthcare, Legal, Pet Care, Finance and many more.
  3. Our SEO team members have a combined SEO experience of over 25 years.
  4. We follow a very transparent tracking process with emphasis on communication.
  5. Highly flexible packages

General Questions

What is a Domain Name?

Domain name is a part of Domain Name System (DNS) with which the identity of a website is separated from the others on the World Wide Web. In order to establish identity on the World Wide Web, you generally choose a Name that represents either your business, or your family name, or anything else, which acts as your Calling Card on the web. Every domain name represents a set of numbers called an IP address. For example, your IP address is 209.165.2.5. So, you could type that number into your web browser’s address bar, or simply type your domain name. Either entry will take you to your website.

What is a URL?

Universal Resource Locator is the Address of a Document or File (resource) on the internet. The first part of the URL describes the protocol to be used and the second part specifies the domain name followed by the name of File/Resource to be referred.

What is Web Hosting?

Web Hosting is a service that allows website owners to make their website accessible on the Internet.

What does website usability mean?

Website usability is directly associated with the user experience. Whenever a visitor lands on your website, he browses through it to serve the purpose of his visit. The ease with which he browses across your website, leading to the destination he had in mind, is termed as user-friendliness.

Why team with Dharne?

We are in the business of helping our customers to launch their business on the Web, that is our stock and trade. Excellent customer service is not a perk but right that our clients have come to expect. We are ready to take on those demanding challenges to make sure your business flourishes on the Web.

Is it possible to sell my products & services online?

Yes. You can sell your products & services online.

We work with different ecommerce platforms which provides lot of features to the customers who would like to sell thier products & services online.

In Dharne & Co., we develop the websites that help you start & improve your online business.

What is a Merchant Account?

Merchant account enables a user to process credit card payments for transactions online. It is required to have a merchant account to setup payment online.