If you have a Twitter account and don’t know what to do with it, let’s see how you can maximize this social media network website for your business.

First things first, make sure you have your website listed, the bio filled out and a custom designed Twitter background featuring your business phone number, address, and website. Once you have that set make sure you have a link or button to your Twitter account displayed on your company website.

Next, once that’s set what to do next with your account? There is always many ways you can use your Twitter account, let’s look at promotional, informational, educational and engaging the user. Before I give examples of each let’s go over some basics.

• You have available up to 140 characters to update your status.
• Use hashtag (#) – this is a way to categorize your messages. Let’s say, you post “This is the Best Pizza in #Buffalo.” Your message is now part of the search for #Buffalo
• Shorten URLs – With only being allowed 140 characters you might not have enough room to include your URL links. There are a number of services that will take regular links and shrink them down for you. Some even track the clicks for you.

Promotional - If you have a sale or special event going on update your status.

Example: Summer Wine Sale Begins Today! 30% Off over 120 wines! Insert link
Example: Save 37% - Cuisinart 18 Bottle Wine Cooler - Sale $185 Reg $295 Insert link

Informational – Inform your customers or clients on your website by a press release, news article, blog article then post it on Twitter.

Example: Plan your dinner around your fav #wine with these #recipes for perfect pairings Insert link
Example: New Tuscany 16 Bottle Metal Wine Rack Barware Insert Link

Educational – Educate your customers

Example: Calories in Bottle of Merlot - about 100 calories per glass, approximately 5 glasses in a bottle so about 500 calories.

Engage The User – Get your followers to retweet your messages or reply to your messages
Example: What’s your favorite #wine to drink after a long day at work?

These are just some examples on how you can use Twitter to promote your company website. To find out more on how your website can be successful on social media networks contact us today for an Internet Marketing Discovery Engagement.

Even before you can write a meta description you have to understand why your writing it and how it will benefit your website. The meta description is meant to be brief and concise summary of your page’s content. It’s designed to provide a brief description of your site which can be used by search engines or directories. When writing the description you should limit it to 150 characters at most.

Create unique descriptions for each page
Just like your website each page has different content so should your descriptions. If you have Google Webmaster Tools set up on your website, there is a section that tells you if any of your pages have similar meta descriptions. Simple – don’t copy and paste descriptions from page to page.

Create relevant meta descriptions
Write your descriptions to reflect what the content is about on the page. Don’t write about Dog Collars if the page is about Dog Toys. If you don’t have the word dog collars on the page don’t include it. If possible incorporate target keywords within the front part of your description. Don’t over use keywords either this can be seen as keyword spamming. A poorly written or non relevant description will have no value to your website.

Meta Description = Sales Pitch
Search engines and directories can pull this content to display to the user so use this space to be descriptive, informative and promote your web page. Sell the page in 150 characters for the visitor not the search engine. Make sure the description is easy to read and proof read it. Check for grammar and spelling mistakes. Would you want to do business with a company that can’t spell their products correctly? Sometimes the meta description is the first thing visitors see, they scan the search results and read through all the descriptions that are displayed. You want yours to stand out and be what the user is looking for.

Going back to the example of Dog Collars, XYZ.com is a petstore that sells pet products.

A good choice in meta description would be – For the most unique and highest quality dog collars for all breeds we offer a large collection of designer leather dog collars available in sizes from extra small to extra large.

A poor choice in meta description would be – XYZ.com offers the best dog products since 2000 such as collars, beds, leashes, toys and bowls.

The better written your meta descriptions are, the better chance you have in providing the search engines with a relevant description of what the page is about. This all turns into creating more clickthroughs and hopefully a better search engine ranking.

The future of the web is here and you can embrace it, reject it or forget that there is such a thing as upgrading to the latest version of your browser. Either way you look at it the internet is growing whichever way you want to accept it. Soon enough you’re old browser won’t load your favorite website or you won’t be able to see the newest advances in web design.  With that you’ll eventually update your browser. Instead of letting that happen, take the couple of minutes and run a check for updates on your browser, you might be surprised on what you’re missing.
It’s coming and you want to know everything you can before its old news and your competition had already changed the way their web design is being done on their websites. This new design trend on the web is HTML5.

What is HTML5? It’s the next revision being developed for the core markup language of the World Wide Web. It will allow web designers to use new structural elements and attributes, replace some of the common elements and provide functionality to audio and video elements.  The new elements will provide an easy way to semantically structure your page.   HTML5 introduces a number of APIs that help in creating web applications. These can be used together with the new elements introduced for applications.

What are some differences between HTML5 and XHTML1? The code will be shorten down and simplified to allow for easier coding for the web designer, no more self-closing tags and the ability to wrap links around block level elements.

With a new markup language comes an easier and more sophisticated way of displaying the web design for your website.  Currently not all browsers are supporting the new CSS3 changes however it’s coming and better to be ahead of the curve then waiting. Browsers currently supporting the new design changes are Opera 10, Safari 4, and Firefox 3, Chrome 2.

What is CSS3? It’s the style sheet language used to describe how the look and feel of a document is written in a markup language. Included in the language are elements such as layout, colors, and fonts. It allows the web designer to format multiple pages with different styles and methods such as onscreen, print, voice.
What’s new in CSS3? There are some new elements that take the website design to a whole new ball game. Such as the ability to allow a 4th field to define alpha value (rGBA color), create rounded borders, drop shadow behind an element or even allow multiple images to be layered on the background.  Even text is getting a makeover with the ability to define what happens if text overflows its space, use of drop shadows, breaking the flow of text into multiple columns based on the width of their containing element.

CSS3 has been around for awhile but it’s still in the development stage under W3C. Either way it’s the up and coming trend for web design.  Our talented web designers are embracing the change and applying it where necessary in the design for our clients.

Check out our preview page of some of the brand new elements of HTML5 and CSS3 has to offer - www.vertasource.com/html5/html5.html. Test it out also in different browsers, and you’ll be amazed how different the browsers react to the language behind websites today.