Showing posts with label web development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web development. Show all posts

Oct 21, 2008

Now the time is of SEO-Friendly websites

As it is truly experienced, this is an era of Virtual identity. We love to be more virtual than real! Many people (about 90%* of the IT-savvy people) have their virtual identity called “avatar” in one way or the other.

Trade and commerce have also taken an “Online” presence with the name of “e-Commerce”. These new technological advancements have given rise to a high level of competition.

Most of the businesses that go online will start simply with a website. In 2000, the size of the Web was considered to be around 7 million unique websites, a 50 percent increase compared to the year 1999. One study estimated the World Wide Web (www) to contain 11.5 billion pages (not sites) by January 2005. And in 2005, Yahoo! announced that its search engine index contained more than 19.2 billion documents.

"There are now 100 million Web sites with domain names and content on them," said Netcraft's Rich Miller in 2006.s

Websites have become an important rather an aggressive tool for any business now-a-days! But in this tough competition, to use your website-tool for revenue-generation or simply put, to get more business; it is important to rank high in the SERPs, i.e. to rank high in the Search Engines for competitive key words / phrases.

The solution is to go for Search Engine Optimization Services: Optimizing your site, running link-building campaigns for your website, etc.

Also, other activities to rank up your website in search engines are submitting your website URL into more and more search engines, adding your website URL into online directories, building up links with other relevant business sites, submitting rich articles into article sites, submitting your blog pages into various blog sites, submitting Press Releases into various Press Release sites. This will both increase the traffic overall to your site and enhance your search engine rankings, since the search engines pick up on the number of times people link to and from your site and rank your website higher accordingly.

Hence today, most of the people prefer to have their websites Search Engine Friendly or SEO-Friendly as it is said. 90% of our clients at Semaphore-software ask for SEO-Friendly Websites.

We always follow the Web 2.0 standards while designing a website and we also apply the W3C validation. But now along with these web-design standards, more demanding is having a SEO-Friendly Website.

There are many factors to check to have your website SEO-Friendly.
  • Web-page size should be less than 40K
  • Applying proper Title and Meta (Keywords and Description) to all web-pages
  • Applying Alt tag to images and Anchor tag to links
  • Applying Heading (H1- H6)
  • Avoid using Flash
  • Avoid using frames
  • CSS drop down navigation (no Javascript or Flash); CSS stylesheets
  • Checking proper density of researched keywords in document text; don't hide text

There are many such factors to be taken care of. We have designed hundreds of websites at Semaphore for our clients; but now the time is of SEO-friendly websites. We ensure your site is built in a way Google can "read", so all your pages, and new ones you create, are soon in Google search results. This is search engine friendly website design.

Building a SEO Friendly design for a website is not doing Search Engine Optimization of your website but making the website Search-Engine Friendly. Search Engine Optimization is an on-going process of extensive Keyword research with link-building for your website.

At Semaphore, we design SEO-Friendly websites for our clients as per their requirements. Also we have our own independent division for SEO where in we take on separate SEO projects for different websites and have successfully achieved the targets as expected by our clients.

Finally, with looking at the current trend from our international customers, now the time is of SEO-Friendly Websites!

Sep 16, 2008

Choosing Offshore Software Development Company

Technology is a wide arena, like our outer space in the galaxy. IT outsourcing isn’t much different than any other kind of outsourcing. However, if there is danger that you will bite off more than you can chew, it’s about time to take into consideration. Anyone who has experience in outsourcing knows that there are advantages as well as disadvantages in offshore software development. some tips to cut down risks.

It’s not only about saving the bucks:
The most obvious benefit that tends to strengthen the demand of custom software development to an extensive extent is the cost cutting factor. Selecting the least expensive Offshore Software Development Company often backfires and ends up costing the client much more than initially thought. Offshore vendors are all facing cost pressures from wage inflation. Choosing the least expensive vendor just means you have chosen a company with very little leeway in its profit margins. This will affect everything adversely: hiring the right people, retaining the people who are working on your projects and providing the right resources for people to do the work on your development effort. Successful vendors may be better bets even if they're bit more expensive, given the realities in outsourcing and offshoring.

Hear their Story:

The Story of the provider speaks volumes about their professionalism, their business goals, their achievements, and their credibility. This will help you analyze how much you need to rely on them. How active and involved will they be and how much ownership they will take it helping you achieve your goals. If possible try hearing their story from other businesses who have worked with them. It will help you decide and understand how they practically function. Try to choose a provider you can have a long term relationship with. You will save time starting from scratch again.

Put Communication on high priority:

The basic reason is very simple: you know your business requirements best. Software services companies working in another part of the world can only develop a solution based on the input provided by you. But there will be loopholes unless the Communication is crystal clear. Fairly large projects demands for a dedicated project manager who is a single point of contact of the offshore team and acts as a virtual bridge between the business and the software developers. Agile methodologies are more realistic when it comes to making sure communication is facilitated properly and often with real code sent back for verification, reflection and fine-tuning.

Adhere to high standards:

Lookout for standards the provider adheres to, You need to understand that successful custom software development depends upon standards the provider follows in the process, documentation, coding in short the entire development cycle For example, The most dependable companies use the highest industry standards in testing each aspect of the products they create so that you receive a product that is ready to implement.

Check out their past experience:

The work done in past speaks a lot about the experience and expertise the provider has. It also talks about the domain they have been exposed to and the learnings they have picked up along the way which may help your goal. In theory, offshore software development companies should be able to perform custom software development for any type of business. There will be less of a learning curve, though, and greater chances for success, if the company has knowledge of your industry or a related industry.

Technology Expertise:

The most agile software development companies have an extensive network of specialists but they may be not adequate in terms of the technology expertise your project demands. So you will need to compare not only the domain expertise but also the technology expertise of a provider. Essentially, the provider needs to be competent and flexible, and see their role as an information technology partner who solves your software problems, supports your team, and manages your projects from beginning to end.

Study the Methodology the provider adapts:

We should remember that software development methodologies are all milestones in the continuing evolution of software engineering. This evolution is still continuing and there will be more variants in the future. And, depending upon the nature of the software development project, the choice needs to be different. A compatible Process Methodology accelerates the delivery of high quality custom software. An Agile Process Methodology follows a controlled, iterative development and prototyping process.

By: DanePhillip 
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