Best Website Design Company In Spokane Washington

Why web design companies need SEO – Case Study

Spokane Washington is not the place most associate with great website design. Typically the best firms are in larger cities like San Francisco, New York and neighboring Seattle. Nonetheless, stars come from all over and location plays only a small role on the influence of design.

Great companies come out of other great companies

Alt29design.com is the new company spun off of InterlinkAdvantage.com a leader in all things web. Although they are different legal entities now they still share the same building location. Interlink is known for its outstanding web hosting service and email systems.

Spokane Web Hosting and Design Thumbnails

Interlink Advantage

Alt29design.com Web Design

Need to follow basic optimization

Alt29design.com does have some things to work on though. From an optimization standpoint the site does not even follow the basics. It is so little optimized that we have to conclude it was done that way on purpose.

Portfolio is better than their site

When you look at their portfolio you see their real talent. They have exceptional graphics and have the art of lighting effects mastered. The sites they have designed earn them the best website design company in Spokane title and not the design of their own site. The weird baby faced freaked me out at first.

InterlinkAdvantage.com has great graphics

We have to assume that the same talent designed InterlinkAdvantage.com which has a visually stunning design. It is amazing how they got certain graphics to look 3d without using any 3d tricks. Very well put together design. Our only complaint again, is that the site  is not optimized and neither are the designs they have done for others. Interlinkadvantage.com is optimized enough to show up on the first page of Google for the keyword phrase “website design company spokane.”

Graphics don’t bring in customers

Optimizing locally will bring business but we have dominated the first page for local search with our eyes closed. I would like to see these types of stunning graphics on sites that bring in clients on a national basis through optimization. Many of the top optimized sites do not have good designs at all like seochat.com and seobook.com, both of which could use a graphics makeover.

What they can do to improve

In any event here are some very quick suggestions that can greatly improve the potential to optimize for alt29design.com.

On all their portfolio pages they have a signature at the bottom that shows they designed it. The problem is the anchor text of the link is their website name. This is optimization 101. You want the links to your site to be the text that you want to rank for.

They have the following at the bottom of their designs:

All Rights Reserved. Website Design by: Alt29

Do you see the problem? It should be like this:

All Rights Reserved. Website Design by: Alt29design.com

Here is the code in slow motion:

All Rights Reserved. Website Design by: <a href=”http://www.alt29.com/” target=”_blank”>Alt29</a>

Do you see the problem? It should be like this:

All Rights Reserved. <a rev=”vote-for” title=”Best Website Design Company in Spokane” href=”http://alt29.com” target=”_blank”>Website Design</a> by: Alt29design.com

Tragic misplacement of Page Rank

The saddest thing about this is the url alt29.com has a gigantic Google Page Rank of 6/10 and alt29design.com does not. All their portfolio links do not even point at their real website. Alt29.com DNS record points to their other site  intelinkadvantage.com. A Page Rank of 6 is worth tens of thousands of dollars. They should do a 301 permanent redirect from alt29.com to alt29design.com to transfer all that good will and SEO juice to their new site. This is a massive tragedy in SEO.

Explanation of link optimization

The rev=”vote-for” is a micro formatting code that is rumored in the SEO community as being something search engines are starting to pay attention to as a way for a site to designate the importance of a link. Currently the code for vote against a link is rel=”nofollow” and this prevents Google from passing SEO points to the site that they are linking to with the nofollow attribute. In the future people may use rev=”vote-against” as a way to designate non endorsement of a link.

Meta title element explained

The next element is title=”Best Website Design Company in Spokane” and this is an example of the most over-looked attribute in linking today. It is the text that shows up when you hover over a link. Like a help bubble that explains the link and why it is there. Many sites waste this opportunity with titles like “Click Here for More Info.” This does the target of the link no favors. Notice that the links to alt29.com don’t even have a  title tag.

Open page in new window or tab

The next element is target=”_blank” to designate that when a user clicks the link it should open in a new window or a new tab instead of taking the visitor away from the page they clicked it from. Not using this tag is considered bad etiquette since it reduces the time on site for visitors of their client’s pages. If a client clicks the link and they leave the site to go to alt29design.com the original site does not get the benefit of a long “time on site” per visitor which does effect optimization.

Anchor text of links is vital

The last part is the text between rel=”external”> and the closing anchor link tag </a>which is the place to put the anchor text of the link. this is the most valuable part of a link because user see this text without having to mouse over or take any action other than scanning with their eyes. What ever phrase you want your site to rank for in the search engines should be in the anchor text of inbound links. Click here for more information on link building strategies.

On page optimization discussed

The text of inbound links is part of “Off Page Optimization.”  Now we are going to discuss some basics of “On Page Optimization” that alt29design.com and interlinkadvantage.com could improve on. The first thing they could improve is the text in their “meta title.” This is the title of the page inside the code the people do not see except in the tab of their browser.

Here is alt29design.com’s title tag:

<title>Alt29 Design Group</title>

Title tag helps ranking

Obviously this could help them rank for “Alt29″ or “Group” or “Design” and any combination thereof. It doesn’t help them optimize for important keywords like “Website Design Company in Spokane” or “Spokane Web Design Company.” Website design or Web design would be the two biggest keywords for them but Spokane makes it easier to rank locally. If the goal is to rank locally at some expense to ranking nationally they should put “Spokane” first in the title. If they are going for national and local they should put “Spokane” somewhere other than at beginning of the  title.

Title tag keywords in the page text

Obviously this same text has to appear on the real page somewhere and we will talk about “heading tags” and page text in a second. The next thing we will discuss is the fact that they do not have a meta description tag. This is vital to control what people see when they looking at the search results. If you do not designate the title and description then the search engine will grab something from the text of the page and it may not look flattering to your potential clients.

Example of a possible good meta description for alt29design.com is:

<meta name=”description” content=”Website Design Company in Spokane Washington With Expert Graphic Designers | Flash, Javascript, Asp.net, PHP. … CLICK TO READ MORE” />

Do not use same wording for title and headers

The keywords in the meta title and meta description tags should appear in the website but do not have to match exactly. The way you word it to get someone to click is different than the way you word it to entice someone to stay on the page and buy. The meta description should compliment the meta title and also contain a call to action. We have found that CLICK TO READ MORE is effective in getting people to click. Design companies could use other phrases for calls to action like “CLICK TO SEE PORTFOLIO.” These elements should be written as sales copy.

Keep your keywords consistent

In any event, your main keywords should be in the meta data of the page but also in the page itself. Both Alt29design.com and InterlinkAdvantage.com are missing these element as well as the H1 and H2 tags on the page. I can see they used bold and other ways to get the text headers to stand out but that is improper design. Your on page title should be your H1 tag and each sub header should be lower like an H2 tag. These elements should contain the same keywords as your meta description. An example of an H1 and H2 tag for alt29design.com is below.

This text was from their home page:

Nearly two decades ago we emerged, slapped ourselves on the backside, and got to work building websites, so to speak.

Today, we’ve evolved to offer more complete branding services to our clients.

Still very much web geeks at heart, we offer everything web. And we also place designers, writers and strategists at the helm of your brand experience, leveraging additional media forms including print, TV and radio to discover new ways to connect with your customers.

We’re also potty trained.

The way it should be:

<h1>Website Design and Graphics</h1>

Nearly two decades ago we emerged, slapped ourselves on the backside, and got to work building websites, so to speak.

Today, we’ve evolved to offer more complete branding services to our clients.

<h2>Passion for Web and Graphic Design</h2>

Still very much web geeks at heart, we offer everything web. And we also place designers, writers and strategists at the helm of your brand experience, leveraging additional media forms including print, TV and radio to discover new ways to connect with your customers.

We’re also potty trained.

Conclusion of Best Website Design Company Review

Alt29design.com is great at graphic design. Their code is not compliant with modern web standards for a custom website design company. Their optimization does not exist and will never unless they make some changes. All in all, they are a great design company that is just getting going. In their learning stages they will see what they are missing and hopefully correct it before they start having disgruntaled clients telling everyone they paid for a website that brought them no money or new business. That is not good for any design company.