Ballard Web Design is located in the Houston, Texas area. We do in house web design, search engine optimization (SEO), and Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Don't assume that we are out of your price range, the small business website is where we got our start. For more information on having Ballard Web Design build your next successful website please Contact Us.
A Word about what we do...
In Search Engine Optimization we have a saying, 'If you build it they will come.... NOT!'. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a business or individual spend thousands of dollars on a really nice looking website that doesn't show up in search engine results. Having a website that looks great but does not show up in search engine results is like driving an invisible Lamborghini. If no one can see it, what is the point of having it. Flash websites are a good example of this. We have another saying in the business about flash websites. 'The only two people who like a flash website is the person who built it and the person who paid to have it built'. Flash websites are not optimization friendly.
Organic Search Results
This is where most people click when searching online. This is why Search Engine Optimization is so important.
At Ballard Web Design we build websites that people can see. From start to finish we keep SEO in mind. We have a proven track record of success in increasing 'targeted' web traffic. It's actually rather easy to get web traffic but targeted web traffic means getting visitors who are looking for exactly what your site is all about. Many times I'm sure you've done a Google search and clicked on a link that has absolutely nothing to do with what you searched for. The reason for that is those websites who have specifically what you were searching for are not properly coded to bring them targeted web traffic.
It's not like the old days when you could just put up some pictures and a few lines of text and as long as you did your meta tags properly you would get good placement. In fact I find that most websites are being hurt more than helped by their meta tags. Websites who try to keyword stuff their meta tags end up being banned for their most important keywords.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
This is paid advertising (Google Adwords). Ballard Web Design can help your site get the most hits without spending a lot of money.
Search engines such as Google are constantly changing the way they rank websites in their search engine. Search engines try hard to bring you the most relevant websites for the keywords you search for. Unfortunately there are scammers and spammers out there who want you to find their sites that may not have anything to do with what you searched for. They are constantly trying to find ways around the rules created by search engines so that their websites show up before the most relevant sites. It's a constant battle that eventually the search engines will win. This however has made it very difficult for the small business owner to keep up with all the changes and try to get their site a high search engine ranking.
There are many factors that affect your sites search engine ranking. Page content, meta tags, anchor links, link popularity, page rank, and more. The most important of all factors is page content. Most people would probably think that link popularity is most important as it is the most talked about factor, however link popularity only helps if you have the proper page content. Page content means having your most important keywords in your web pages content. Not in pictures! Search engines cannot read text that is in pictures. This is a common mistake that many web designers make.
Pagerank is important as the higher page rank you have the better you will be ranked for all of your keywords across the board. The factor that affects your page rank the most is Link Popularity. Getting other sites to link to your site will affect your page rank. The more sites that link to yours the better your page rank will be and in turn the higher placement you will recieve in search engines for the keywords that are in your page content. Getting links from sites that have high page rank will help your site more than getting links from sites that are low rank. There is no accurate way of knowing what your exact page rank is. Page rank is usually referred to on a scale of one to ten, however that is not accurate as you can have a page rank of 3.3 or 4.7, etc...
Only the search engines know your true page rank and each search engine can rank your site differently. Google has a page rank indicator in their Google Toolbar (pictured above). You might want to download that if you would like an indication of what your sites page rank is. Click here to download the Google Toolbar. I caution you though, Google's Toolbar is only updated once every 3 months so your site could actually have a higher or lower page rank than what is stated in Google's Toolbar. Use this only as an indicator. There are some websites on the internet that can do a page rank estimate on your site but I do not have faith in their ability to estimate an accurate page rank.
Ballard Web Design would love to design your next website or to help optimize your current website. For more information please Contact Us and we will get all the information we need about your site to get you the best search engine placement. Thank you - C. M. Ballard
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