Free Guide Get Your Website Listed On Google

Free Report:
Get Your Business Listed In Google

Have you looked for your website in Google, Bing or Yahoo! and couldn't find it ANYWHERE? In my free guide, How to Get Your Business Listed In Google, you'll discover:

  • The 3 Most Important Factors to Ranking Your Website
  • How a single up-tick in rankings can double the traffic to your site
  • Where to find 98% of your customers online
  • And more! 

Fat Pings – the New Hot Thing in SEO

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011 at 8:22 am  
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What are Fat Pings?

Fat pings are something you will hear more about in coming months as SEO gurus try to sell products promoting how much you need them, and how their ‘fat ping product’ will guarantee you higher rankings, blah-blah… Let’s cut to the chase. Fat pings from RSS feeds really are a wonderful thing and something you definitely need to implement on your website for better search engine optimization. The good news — we’re going to show you how to get them completely free.

fat pingsFirst let’s answer what is a regular ping. If you have a WordPress website (highly recommended!), then every time you make an update to your site, it sends out a ping to RSS directories that a new post is on your site. The headline is what gets pinged. A fat ping publishes the entire content to the RSS feed, so you not only get a thin little headline but a big fat piece of content besides. Fat pings are great for SEO. There is a whole nerdy discussion about fat pings here, but we always look at things from a business standpoint. What can a fat ping do for your bottom line?

Fat Pings Verify Authorship

The greatest value of a fat ping, in our view, is that it provides authentication of authorship. There are bot scrapers out there that go out looking for content and then mash it up & post it on websites to imply they are the authors. With the Panda update, Google has done a pretty decent job of stomping on the autoposters and aggregators, but even so, what happens sometimes is a scraper will grab content from a poorly indexed site and publish it. But the scraper site is actually better indexed so that content — the forged content — outranks the original author’s content. This is where fat pings come to the rescue

Fat Pings Save the Day

Fat Pings distribute your entire article the moment you hit the publish button, sending your article out to Google et al. and securing your place as the rightful owner of the content. Google finds your content, your site gets ranked, people like you and not the scraped guy, and everyone lives happily ever after. It’s a nice system this fat pinging…

When you publish something on your WordPress website, it automatically gets published to the RSS feed on the site, and distributed and read by any subscriber of that feed. Depending on how highly optimized your RSS feed is, it may also get published to RSS services and picked up as content linking back to your site. Whenever we think of expanding the reach of our audience, we want to be aware of our engagement and our reach… A complete article would do a much better job of hooking a reader than just having a single headline out there, right?

So how do you implement fat pings in your website? If you have a WordPress self-hosted site, it’s super-easy. Just go and install the plugin for fat pings – found here. If you have installed plugins before, it’s very straightforward. But if you need any help, feel free to contact us.

Good luck with your pinging. Go fat pings and get quality SEO for your business.

Mobile Marketing Guide to Getting Started

Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 7:51 am  
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Emergence of Mobile Marketing

Mobile Marketing is the specific creation of a presence that is optimized for the mobile platform, acknowledging the rapidly evolved mobile culture we live in. Having a good non-mobile website remains essential to your online business, but with half of your web traffic being mobile — yes, half the users hitting your site are doing so on their iPhones, iPads, Droids, Blackberries and other smart phones — you want to make sure they have an outstanding experience on a mobile website.

If you’re not already engaged in mobile marketing of your business, then you may have a website that is hard to navigate on a mobile device. Or worse, you may have a Flash website that can’t even been SEEN on an iPhone or iPad… Mobile marketing is yet another way of reaching your audience and building your brand, promoting your business and gaining more customers and more sales. Mobile marketing is another tool in the toolbox, but it’s on the order of the hammer and saw. It’s not the 96-piece wrench set.  Not sure where to begin with it? Don’t worry; we’ll offer some helpful mobile marketing tips to get you started.

Branding in Mobile Marketing

Don’t forget branding. In your rush to start mobile marketing, you might forget that your mobile marketing efforts need to be integrated into your larger marketing efforts and your brand. Expanding your brand recognition will help bring you more customers, so don’t forget about your brand when communicating with prospective customers via cellphone.

Google recently launched the “GoMo” initiative, speaking to their awareness of mobile in the marketplace. For more information on GoMo, please click here.

Make use of QR codes to allow mobile device users to instantly access your marketing content. QR codes are square, black-and-white boxes that have data encoded in them. When a user takes a picture of the QR code with his mobile device’s camera, a decoding app will take the user to a website or show a message. This means your customers don’t have to write down a URL to visit later.

Be sure to send text messages. People usually have a ringer that will go off whenever they receive a text. They also tend to check it right away. Just make sure to send small files such as photos of a new product that you have available, thus allowing the customer the option of receiving texts or not.

Customers love rewards so reward them just for signing up. Just for signing up give them a coupon for a free item when they come back and purchase something else. Since they are giving you their mobile phone number, reward them with something worthwhile that will keep them coming back.

Mobile Marketing the Customer Experience

The customers who are receiving your mobile marketing do not want to have flashy or unclear messages. They want you to get to the point and let them know why you are messaging them. You only have about seven seconds on average to make your point with a mobile user. Do not make them click an image to see the message; get to the point and tell them what the benefits of your message are immediately.

mobile marketing

Mobile Marketing business owners take note: mobile internet usage by smart phones

Try to set a budget and stick to it if you want to market effectively. Shooting past your budget can quickly cause your campaign to fall apart, if only because you may start to change how you handle things due to a fear of money. Work meticulously to stay within your budget for mobile marketing success.

Make your mobile ads suitable to small screens and slower speeds or they may not be viewed at all! Most mobile devices have tiny screens and data speeds much slower than a regular PC so design your mobile content to be displayed accordingly or else it may never reach its intended target!

Make sure that your messages are targeted to their purpose in mobile marketing. You won’t have any room for meaningless words here. If the customer cannot understand your message in a few words, then it isn’t even worth contacting them in the first place. You need to be very clear here as to your purpose.

Yes, a good website is essential to an online business, but as you have read, it needs to be properly promoted to your customers. The most helpful way to do this is through mobile marketing. So, what are you waiting for? Use the above tips, and start improving your mobile marketing plan!

The ‘Google Placement’ Scam

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 at 4:07 pm  
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You may have received a phone call that went something like this — “Hi! This is Bob with Google Placement. If you are a business owner…” and they go on to tell you they can sell you a website on Google.  They strongly imply they are affiliated with Google!

That is a complete scam, folks. Google is not in the business of selling anything other than the tiny ads you see when you’re in their search engine. The automated dialer that is “Bob” is a private company that will put you into a series of aggressive upsells and cross-promotions that you’ll never get out of. Please don’t fall for it.

If you have become the victim of this scam, we suggest you contact your credit card company and block any future charges; contact the Federal Trade Commission and file and complaint; and issue a ‘cease & desist’ letter to the company directly. We assume you’ve already tried the third step a number of times; we have heard from business owners who are now our clients who were targeted by unscrupulous companies who were perpetrating this…

If you haven’t yet been victimized, congratulations. If you pick up the phone one day and someone says, “Hi! This is X with Google Placement. If you are a business owner — ” …we suggest introducing them to the sound of your dial tone.

We received a phone call, too. The number that called us was from a (262) area code. Buyer beware.

Adobe Abandons Flash for Mobile, Commits to HTML5

Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 1:32 am  
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HTML5 vs. Flash Mobile

In a briefing on Thursday, Adobe announced plans to abandon Flash for the mobile platform and commit fully to HTML5 development. This is significant for a number of reasons which I’ll discuss in a just a moment. It marks a longterm struggle between Adobe and Apple that Steve Jobs predicted would mean the demise of Flash on mobile websites. I have been on an anti-Flash soapbox for years now, and this is (in my view) a clear signal to drop whatever remaining Flash web properties or elements you may have and express yourself in other mobile-friendly ways.

HTML5Mobile is the future; Google has spoken this, Apple has spoken this (by not supporting Flash on their flagship products like iPhone, iPad and iPhone Touch), and now Adobe has (somewhat) reluctantly come to the table. More accurately, Adobe was already at the table, but they agreed to finally eat their peas and not continue to pound the table that Flash would rule. (As Wired magazine noted, this was an abrupt about-face for Adobe.) Flash stopped ruling 5-6 years ago when savvy business owners realized that as pretty as Flash is online, search engines can’t make heads or tails of the content; to a Google bot, a Flash website is a monolithic blog of clay as much as it is a website. Mobile, iPhones and Steve Jobs drove the final stake in the heart of Flash and Adobe mercifully has pulled the plug. I love pretty websites as much as the next guy,

HTML5 the Future for Business

So Flash website owners, HTML5 is the future, and coincidentally, we got into the HTML5 parade some time back so we’re well positioned to help you move into the present. As Adobe itself noted, “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively.  This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” We completely agree; our mobile website designs are almost exclusively HTML5 mobile websites.

In the past several months, we have been hard at work testing and analyzing all the different mobile platforms and dissecting the benefits and ROI for business owners. It’s one thing to know you need to go to mobile, but it’s quite another to know what to do and how to get there. In that time, we have developed mobile websites using a variety of technologies including WordPress, PHP with CSS and HTML5 on our private network. There is a tremendous amount of junk out there with broken code, half-baked platforms and fly-by-night vendors… While WordPress is by far the best solution a business owner can deploy for a website, it is a bit “heavy” on the code for mobile and is really a different mindset than what is appropriate for mobile. I’ll be discussing this in future articles. For now, I want to make clear that I’m not anti-Wordpress; having developed over 500 WordPress websites, I can say with certainty and experience that there is nothing that provides the same level of design flexibility, search engine optimization and end user ease of use than WordPress.

HTML5 mobile superiority

In mobile, however, HTML5 exemplifies a superiority over other options in the same way WordPress is superior on the web. Adobe noted, HTML5 offers “great options for delivering compelling web and application experiences.” I agree with that. While PHP is a good second choice and is reasonably close to HTML5 in current functionality, HTML5 is a newer technology that offers much more of what a business owner needs and will be able to take advantage of as the mobile web continues to evolve. HTML5 has the best Return on Investment of any other mobile technology we have seen, so we are very excited to be committed to HTML5; and excited to see Adobe is too.

If you are a business owner with a Flash website, you may be wondering what people see when they come to your website on an Apple iPhone or similar mobile device. The short answer is, absolutely nothing — oftentimes, just a black nothingness. If you want to test your site yourself, visit Google’s GoMo. Fair warning: it may truly shock you when you realize how many customers you’ve thrown off the boat because they can’t even see your business on their mobile device.

The other unsettling thing to consider about Flash is how people are receiving content on the internet, and where these trends are going. More and more users are moving to mobile, and it’s estimated by 2013 / 2014 that mobile users will outnumber desktop & laptop users online. That will even further limit access to your customer base if your website is Flash. While we applaud Apple’s efforts to move the universe away from Flash — and rather enjoyed Steve Jobs’ rant against Flash – Apple had their own reasons for doing so — drained iPhone batteries, made Apple devices crash, etc. We have our own: it’s not good business, especially when you’re talking about online business. Particularly when you are talking about optimizing your online business, capturing leads and then converting those leads into a customer base. The mechanism for that conflicts with the thought process behind Flash; we have always opined that websites are workhorses, not pretty baubles. They are (or should be) profit mechanisms or income streams, not tax write-offs.

This is an exciting day for business owners online. HTML5 is a stable, robust platform that is only going to continue to get better and better. Join us as experts in HTML5 and explore the possibilities of mobile optimization for your business.

Google Mobile Making Proximity Searching Easier

Sunday, November 13th, 2011 at 12:01 pm  
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Google Mobile integrating with Google Local

With Google Mobile, finding nearby places is as simple as one-tap on your mobile device.

Get local results faster by tapping on shortcuts to commonly searched local categories, like restaurants, coffee shops and bars, in the form of icons on the mobile google.com homepage.

Once you tap on an icon, a map shows locations markers for where you are on a map relative to each place. And as you scroll through results, the map docks to the top of the page and adjusts to each location. Tapping on the business name will quickly show you more about a place including reviews and more useful details.

To use this feature, go to google.com on your mobile browser. This is available in 40 languages worldwide on your Android (2.2+) or iPhone (3.0+) device.

Finding great places nearby has never been easier on your mobile phone, and this just provides another piece of evidence to local business owners for the value in optimizing your websites for mobile.

Mobile Marketing Increases Engagement

Sunday, November 13th, 2011 at 9:48 am  
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Mobile Marketing Tips

Mobile marketing is one of the most effective engagement strategies a business can use. Use mobile marketing to show your customers that you know what they are interested in and you care about catering to them.  Mobile marketing will let you do just that.  One example of showing you care about your customers is to not wear them out with endless promotions and offers; you may instead wish to send useful links and information once in a while. People will get tired of receiving promotional offers constantly and will unsubscribe from your campaign. Keep them interested by sending relevant content.

mobile marketingMobile marketing has factored large in social networks as well; be sure to lay claim to your business in each social network’s location pages. In mobile marketing, it’s all about location, location, location. Smart mobile devices all have location awareness built into their systems, so users can tell what is around them. Make sure they can find you by claiming your page on sites, like Foursquare, Facebook Places, Gowalla and Google Places. As social networks adapt to the proximity marketing standards on the horizon, mobile will be even more important than it is now.

Have your customers engage in your marketing process. Many people love taking videos with their phones and uploading them to the internet. You can ask people to make short videos of all the different ways to use your product and post these on your website. People will feel recognized for you showing their movie and you will be getting more advertisement.

SMS Mobile Marketing

Make your messages concise. This isn’t the time to worry about perfect spelling, as you are limited in the number of characters you can use. If you choose “B” instead of “be”, or “2″ instead of “To” you will save characters, and potentially cost. There are some great texting translators online which can help with this.

With mobile users, text is far more influential than video, so remember that before developing your SMS marketing campaign. Upwards of 88% of all mobile users deal in text messages, but only around 41% of them take the time to watch videos on their mobile devices. This obviously means text should be your bigger area of focus.

Social media is one big and long conversation. Lots of it is meaningless and trivial. Do not link your mobile campaign to this kind of disastrous discourse.  Keep your messages brief and to the point. Social media is a key to any marketing campaign, but you have to use it wisely to get beneficial results.

The fastest growing category with mobile browsers and mobile apps are social networking websites. So business must accept social networking and go where the people are. Mobile marketing success will depend upon your business making a presence on the social networking sites and using it correctly to grow your business.

Build exclusivity and status into your mobile marketing.  Mobile devices themselves have become aspirational.  Phones, tablets and even some mobile apps have become symbols of status.  Follow suit with your mobile marketing by offering exclusive content to your mobile readers or downloads only available to those who have subscribed for mobile messaging.

Personalize your message as much as possible. Use mobile marketing platforms capable of inserting tokens into your message so you can add the customer’s name into your marketing piece. Personalized messages have a higher response rate than impersonalized ones. Be sure to allow enough characters for the name or your marketing text will be cut off.

Competitive Analysis in Mobile Marketing

Pay close attention to what your competitors are doing in their mobile marketing campaigns, this is a great way to gain an edge in “social mobile.” Don’t follow their every move, if you do, you’re going to blend in with them. You have to stand out from your competitors. Blending in means, at best, you’ll be splitting customers; at worst, you’ll lose them all. Choose the right font size is important in mobile marketing. Font size around 16 pixels or higher is an excellent choice, but you can size it to fit your own desires. Using a size relative to the size of the window is great. Remember if your targets can’t read it then it is useless.

When you are marketing on the mobile network, you must keep your messages very short and to the point. People are using their phones because they do not have the time to sit in front of the computer and relax. So many people are in a rush and on the go, and you want to show your customers that you understand that and are not going to be a burden to them. Do not go into a mobile marketing campaign without any clear objectives. In the beginning understand what you are trying to achieve with your mobile marketing. Are you trying to increase sales through your existing sales base, or are you trying just to keep them involved and retain them for the long term.

To summarize, mobile marketing provides way too many positive features to not at least give it a try if you are not already.  Either way, consider the advice given here and use it to modernize or shape up your current marketing procedures.  Hopefully this helps to clear up any questions you may have had about mobile marketing.

How to Choose a Web Designer

Saturday, November 12th, 2011 at 4:58 pm  
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“How do you choose a company to design your first website, or re-design the site you have?”

Seven crucial things your website must do:

  1. Communicates directly with your customers and prospects about your brand. The layout should be simple, easy to navigate and highly professional.
  2. Engages your visitors and lets them know you understand their needs and their pain. Engagement should be your #1 priority, as people in your market strive to cut through the noise and find the true leaders in your niche. Your website is your greatest opportunity to prove your business is relevant to your market’s needs. Context is king, not content. People don’t need more information. They need to know why you as a business matter to them and how you will solve their problems.
  3. Communicates clearly to the search engines what it is about, and notify the search engines every time you add new content. There is special code called metadata that sits behind a website in addition to the content on the site itself. When a site’s content matches the metadata a search engine needs to understand it, we say the website is optimized.
  4. Cause visitors to take action before they click away. We hear a lot of business owners say they want a “simple website.” We agree, but “simple” does not mean “lazy.” Your website should work for you to grow your audience, build your customer list and increase cash flow.
  5. Perhaps you want people to call you, read your free report or engage in a conversation about topics important to them. Your website can do all that.
  6. Use the latest technology so it can be seen on any web browser or mobile device.
  7. Be easy for you to update and maintain so you don’t need to hire a programmer every time you want to change a word or add a picture or video.
  8. Work as part of an overall online branding strategy that incorporates social media, mobile, video and more. Your website is the foundation for your business online.

In summary, your web designer must be able to create a website that

  1. communicates with your customers
  2. engages their needs
  3. synchronizes with search engines
  4. has a strong call to action
  5. be easily read by everyone
  6. easy for you to update
  7. be the key foundation to your online strategy

Few web designers understand the true value or functional requirements of a website. Even fewer have the experience and qualifications to deliver this type of website.

And yet, here at TruBlu we are experts at creating the highly optimized, engaging websites your business needs.

Our designers work closely with our SEO team to insure your website meets your rigorous branding requirements and is highly optimized for search engine placement.

We have designed hundreds of websites for business ownes just like you. We are not a massive call center operation or impersonal corporation. We are very friendly and easy to work with, and we look forward to optimizing your web presence. Let’s grow your bottom line starting with an effective web design.

 

Gary Vaynerchuk 2011 Inc 500 Conference

Friday, November 11th, 2011 at 7:41 pm  
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Gary Vaynerchuck on leveraging culture shifts to explode your brand and your business. He really makes some very excellent points about content (“massively important”) and the more important context. Context is another word for our favorite topic for online marketing — relevance.

Enjoy Gary V. in vintage form – founder and CEO, Wine Library and author of  The Thank You Economy.

He touches on a number of topics including Google investing in Local Search heavily over the next five years.

A fascinating analysis of social media’s influence on online marketing. Warning: graphic language.

Keyword Research Creates Optimum Market Reach

Monday, October 31st, 2011 at 8:12 am  
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Keyword Research Ongoing Process

Keyword research is not a one-time thing when you are optimizing your site. Just because you know which keywords were most popular six months or a year ago does not mean that those same terms are still the most effective. You should be continually researching keywords to stay on top of changes and trends in search terms.

keyword researchBefore you start your search engine optimization project be sure to spend some time doing keyword research. There are free versions of a keyword checker on the internet that you can use if you are on a tight budget. If you are not, you can purchase some really great options on the internet as well.

Develop a well-formed keyword list starting with research and utilizing internet tools. There are various keywords that are very popular related to your site, and these are the ones you want to generate greater traffic to your site. SEO depends on keyword research and the ability to use tools that are offered online to develop high quality keywords.

Do your keyword research before you build your site. You can use Googles Adwords Keyword Tool, which is free, and there are others. When you research your keywords ahead of time, you will be able to build content that is search-engine friendly. You want to use keywords with high volumes of searches and little competition.

Do your keyword research first thing. Find out which keywords you need to focus on when building your website and titles. Keyword research can let you know what people are searching for in your categories. Highlight these items throughout your site to rise in the rankings of the major engines.

Keyword Research Should be Ongoing

Continue to do keyword research on a periodic basis. Selecting the right keywords is the most fundamental part of SEO and by doing initial keyword research, you can save a lot of time and money. If you don’t do any keyword research, you could end up wasting months optimizing for keywords that nobody searches for or keywords that have really tough competition.

Keyword research should NEVER end. New competitors will pop up all the time, so check out what they’re using to drive traffic to their site. New items may be added to your website, so include the new keywords on those pages. A new hashtag might start trending that applies to your site, don’t forget to use those, too!

Use the right keywords. By researching the right keywords to use, you will make sure that search engines rank you for the subject you want to be ranked for. Do keyword research first to make sure you are using keywords that people actually search for; don’t go by your own guesses.

Apply Keyword Research to Be Unique

Make your web site different from your competition. If you are selling a product that many other people are selling, you need your information to be unique. Do keyword research and write your own content. Not only will this help you stand apart from your competition, but you will also get inbound links.

When you do a search on YouTube, the site will suggest related terms that are popular. Use this as a tool for keyword research! Remember that the keywords you type in, while being highly related to the video, aren’t necessarily as popular as the suggestions YouTube is making underneath them.

If you’ve been avoiding it, or you haven’t been seeing the results that you were hoping for from your previous attempts to maximize your search engine results, then hopefully you will now that you’ve read some of these tips. This isn’t an exhaustive reference on keyword research, but it is a starting point that might make all the difference in the world.

Santa Clarita Web Design Experts Help SCV Business

Sunday, October 30th, 2011 at 9:31 am  
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Santa Clarita Web Design for Business

For our portfolio of Santa Clarita Web Design projects, click here

Santa Clarita Web Design firm TruBlu Web Consulting are experts in web design, having created nearly 700 websites since 1999. While we have created on every platform including WordPress, HTML, Magento, Joomla, Drupal and many more, WordPress is our absolute favorite platform. WordPress offers incredible flexibility — gone are the “bloggy” days — where one can create just about anything you envision; it truly is a blank canvas open for the painting. Some Santa Clarita Web Design firms are locked in a particular technology so that’s all they recommend to their clients; we assess each case individually based on the needs of the business and goals you have for your market.

Santa Clarita Web Design WordPress Experts

If you are looking for a Santa Clarita web designer that is a WordPress Expert, we at TruBlu have created over 500 WordPress websites so we know about the idiosyncracies of the platform. Whether your vision calls for a completely custom web design or a modification of an existing theme, we have it covered. We are Santa Clarita Web Designers who can deliver any design you may envision. We also provide perfect clones of websites built on other platforms; if your old HTML site just isn’t performing well in the search engines and you have heard about the many SEO benefits of switching to WordPress but don’t want to disrupt your branding, no problem! We have created perfect clones of sites from PHP, Joomla, HTML and many others. We even have special care for you Flash website owners who have lost part of your customer base due to your website not being visible on mobile devices.

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To be blunt, John is a rockstar. There aren’t that many web design guru rockstars that I know of in the world and if there were John would still be the brightest of them all. John went so far beyond what I would imagine a designer to do and in the process transformed my idea of what is possible, not only in design but also in communication and work ethics. 
Jessica Lehrman
www.JessicaLehrman.com

Santa Clarita Web Design, SEO and Mobile Friendly

Santa Clarita Web DesignWe are a Santa Clarita Web Design team who sees the big picture. Gone are the days when you could just put up a pretty site and people would find it. It must be properly optimized for the search engines. All of our web designs are fully optimized for SEO, mobile friendly and super-easy for you to update and maintain. TruBlu is a Santa Clarita web design firm who guarantees your satisfaction with fast turnaround times, reliable friendly service and a comprehensive solution that takes into account our vast experience. Not all design firms are equal, to be candid. We have received projects started by other designers only to have to re-do large chunks because of incompatibilities with search engines, mobile devices and so on. Do it right the first time when you hire your Santa Clarita Web Design expert.

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