TP Designs Chosen as Top Legal Marketing Firm in Pleasanton, CA
Expertise.com has chosen TP Designs as one of the top legal marketing firms in Pleasanton, CA. TP Designs received an “A” grade for both professionalism and reputation. Visit our Attorney Web Design and Marketing page to find out more about our legal web design and marketing services
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What is a Digital Agency?
Digital agencies design and develop screen-based products and services. They assist their clients in using technology to interact with customers in a way that gives them an edge over their competitors. Product agencies are a type of digital agency that focus on creating digital products for themselves and clients. (more…)
How to Refresh Your Browser Cache During Web Development
Internet browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge all have something called a “cache” that stores pages, images, scripts, styles and other files so they don’t need to download them every time you visit the page. This makes the websites you view load faster. Cached files are stored for a certain amount of…
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SEO Terms: What is Keyword Relevance?
What is Keyword Relevance? The term “keyword relevance” has to do with how important or relevant a specific keyword, keyword phrase or search term is to the content on a particular web page. Keyword relevancy is what the search engines use to figure out what the content is about. And that is how the search…
WordPress Maintenance Services are Not Optional
So often my first contact with a new customer is to fix their existing website. Most of the time this website was built on the WordPress platform, and has not received regular updates for an extended period … or ever! The initial cause of the problem is usually something like this: (more…)
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SEO Terms: What is Link Authority?
What is Link Authority? Link authority is an SEO term that’s important to understand. It’s an SEO metric derived from all the links that are directed to a website from all across the Web. It combines link quantity plus link quality. It’s impossible to overemphasize the importance of link authority as a ranking factor. Imagine…
What is a Creative Agency?
As the name implies, creative agencies help businesses increase brand awareness by developing and implementing creative solutions to the challenges of penetrating and thriving in markets. These solutions are aimed at improving the presentation of products and services, with the ultimate objective of increasing profit. In short, a creative agency uses creative strategies to assist…
Should I Use Adwords Automated Bid Strategies?
If you go by what the Google people say, of course you should use their technologically advanced Automated Bidding Strategies! Why not take advantage of all that machine learning, and focus your time savings on other tasks. But not so fast! There’s also that saying you’ve heard a billion times: “When something seems to good to…
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The Customer Journey : Marketing Basics
What is a Customer Journey? The customer journey is the process of research and decision making that leads up to a sale. It will vary for each type of business, product and service. The customer journey for your customers includes the problems or issues that create the need for your products or services. (more…)
15 Minute Google Ads Audit
It is important to check your Google Ads campaigns on a regular basis to ensure they are running at optimum efficiency. Google Ads is an expensive platform, highly competitive, and definitely not the place to set it and forget it! (more…)
Website Security Basics
Modern websites are constantly under attack. Hackers use “bots” or computers that scan the internet looking for vulnerable sites. Here are some common questions about website security that should be of interest to website owners. (more…)
Technical SEO : What is it and Why is it so Important?
Since SEO became a thing, it has always had two main components: 1) On-page SEO: Optimization of text and other elements on the website itself for keyword/topic relevance and 2) Off-page SEO: Gaining links pointing to your website to exhibit website popularity and authority (more…)
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Using Session Replay to Optimize User Experience
It’s no longer necessary to guess what users are doing on your website, and why they aren’t moving down the funnel and converting. By using session replay you can spy on your website visitors and see exactly what they are doing for the duration of their visit. (more…)
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What Google’s Rank Boost for User Proximity Means To You
For at least a couple of months now Google has been giving a huge boost in map pack ranking for businesses that are geographically closest to the user who is searching. If you are a business that checks its own ranking regularly, you may not have noticed this, because obviously you are very close to yourself.…
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Attorney Web Design and SEO
There is probably no other vertical market where web design and search engine optimization (SEO) adds more value than Legal. The practice areas that are best served by a professionally designed and search engine optimized website are DUI defense, criminal defense, and personal injury. (more…)
DMOZ is Dead
Search Engine Land announced that DMOZ will be shutting down as of March 14, 2017. DMOZ, or Open Directory Project was once a great backlink to have, and fairly straightforward to obtain many years ago, at least in some categories. (more…)
TP Designs Earns Google Partner Search Specialization
TP Designs has earned a Google Partner Search Advertising Specialization: According to Google: “Your new specialization recognizes that TP Designs has demonstrated expertise and sustained client performance in search advertising.” Learn more about Adwords Campaign Management Services
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Troy Philis
Troy has been creating and promoting websites for small businesses since 2001. Google Plus Profile TP Designs on LinkedIn About.me Twitter Yelp Google My Business, Pleasanton Google My Business, Boulder Creek Behance Portfolio
Youtube Analytics
If you publish videos on Youtube, there is some great information about the viewing of your videos that is a little bit buried in the Youtube web interface. Follow these easy steps to check your Youtube Analytics. The information is only 4 clicks away! (more…)
Logo Design Basics
A well designed logo is critical in building your brand identity. Because every brand is different, and your logo needs to be unique. For that reason, the first task for a logo designer is gathering some basic information about the business, services and/or product the logo will represent. (more…)
5 Reasons You Can’t Rank for Your Google Keywords
If you are increasingly frustrated about the decline in your search rankings and search engine traffic, you are not alone. Here are some possible reasons why: 1. You hired the wrong SEO company. If you do any kind of research on SEO you will be familiar with the buzzwords “blogging,” “content marketing,” “social media” and…
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4 Common Yelp Myths Held by Businesses
Many business owners are afraid of the user review site Yelp, and for good reason. I’ve seen businesses with bad Yelp scores struggle, and even go out of business to get away from the bad reviews. Like it or not though, online reviews are here to stay. To survive, business owners need to change their…
Google My Business Factors You May Have Wrong
If you track the rank of your business for Google local searches, you are well aware that the local search landscape has changed greatly over the past few months. The changes manifested in the Google Pigeon update are well known, but there are some adjustments you need to make to your listing that are not as…
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Boulder Creek CA Web Design
TP Designs designs user-friendly Web sites for local companies in Boulder Creek, CA. We also serve Brookdale, Ben Lomond, Felton, Scotts Valley and the surrounding area of Santa Cruz County. Every Boulder Creek, CA business has a unique set of needs. Let us design your Website to meet the needs of your business, and just…
Small Business SEO Tip #8: Get Reviewed
Create listings on review sites like Yelp, and ask clients to review your services. One peek at recent search results should tell you why: (more…)
Small Business SEO Tip #7: Create Listings on Internet Directories
Create listings on third-party internet directories such as Yellow Pages, Superpages and City Search, and ask clients to review your services on those listings. Google scours the web for information about your business, compiles it, and uses it to decide what your business is all about. It doesn’t even need links to your website anymore.…
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Small Business SEO Tip #6: Local Listings on Search Engines
Create local listings on search engines like Google and Bing, and ask clients to review your services on your listing. Google Google business listings have a messy and confusing history. These listings used to be created and managed on a platform called Google Places. They are being transitioned to a Google My Business, however you…
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Small Business SEO Tip #5: Analyze the competition
Using the “compare pages” feature of Moz’s Open Site Explorer (OSE), you’ll get an immediate snapshot of what you need to do in order to outrank the competition. Enter your competitor’s website’s URL into the main URL box, and check the “Inbound Links”tab. Set the dropdown filters to show results for link equity, only external,…
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Small Business SEO Tip #4: Find Out What Google Thinks of You
By signing up for Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll get data on page indexing, crawling, errors, as well as what queries your site is showing up for, along with approximate position, number of impressions and click-through rate. By linking your Google Webmaster Tools account to your Google Analytics account, you can also make this query data…
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Small Business SEO Tip #3: Track Visitors
Set up tools that will allow you to track visitors and measure progress. There are a lot of tools available to record and report on your traffic. Most small businesses choose Google Analytics. It is powerful, free and will immediately let you know where your visitors are coming from, and what they are doing on your…
Small Business SEO Tip #2: Choose Target Search Terms Carefully
It won’t do you any good to be number one in Google for a search term if only 3 people a month are entering it into the Google search box. In your keyword analysis, choose search terms for your SEO targeting that will bring in significant traffic with conversion potiential. (more…)
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Small Business SEO Tip #1: Think Locally
A small business generally won’t have the resources to compete on a national level for generic search terms ( AKA keywords). This means your site should be optimized with geo-targeted terms, like your city, or county. Start your keyword research by identifying the geographic terms that will bring in the most, high quality leads for…
absolute wireless testimonial 2
"The site looks great and we have had compliments on it from our customers. Would recommend this company for proficient and timely website development and design.” – M.Castano, Project Manager, Absolute Wireless Inc.
Logo Design
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CMS Migration for WordPress and Joomla
CMS migrations are necessary when security support for an old version of CMS software is discontinued. Because these websites usually have a number of third party extensions or templates/themes installed each case is unique and requires research to determine the best path to successfully update the software to it’s newest, fully supported version. Here is…
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404 – Sorry: we can’t find that page! You asked for {%sh404SEF_404_URL%}, but despite our computers looking very hard, we could not find it. What happened ? the link you clicked to arrive here has a typo in it or somehow we removed that page, or gave it another name or, quite unlikely for sure,…
Google Penalties and What You Can Do About Them
If you’ve recently lost rank in a Google search that is important to your business, you may suspect that you’ve been hit by a penalty. Google does in fact impose penalties in order to eliminate spam from its search results. To Google, spam is content it determines to be of low quality, and spammers are…
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Small Businesses CAN Maintain an Effective Blog.
Blogs are a key component of any modern web promotion strategy. Blogs are a seamless way to help your website give search engines what they are looking for to rank your site well: Fresh content A rich supply of relevant keywords Link bait Added value to the search results (as opposed to keyword spam) The…
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Using Twitter and Facebook to Promote Your Business
Marketing through social media is primarily a brand awareness, top of the funnel strategy for most businesses. If you are selling certain small price tag consumer products, Instagram may be your best bet to book sales. Otherwise you will probably be using social media to engage potential customers early in the buying cycle. (more…)
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Drewin testimonial 1
"Troy built my web site last year and did a great job. His prices were very reasonable and his work was outstanding. My business has increased dramatically as a result of the web site. Thanks Troy!" – Derek
Adwords Conversion for Dummies
Convert or Fail!Using Google Adwords to drive traffic to your website is expensive. I suspect that Google gets most of it's money from Adwords advertisers who have no idea what they are doing. These advertisers quickly set up a campaign and pump a bunch of money into it, but see few to no leads. They then pour increasing…
Link Building is Not Optional
Because many non-web professionals do not understand how the complex network of computers called the Internet works, they fail to see the importance of link building to the success of their website. The truth is that link building is not optional to the success of a website. (more…)
LFCC Testimonial 1
“TP Designs gave us everything we wanted in a Website and more!” “… Even though we called for many changes in the website, Troy still kept the cost within our budget. Being a non-profit, staying within our budget is crucial.”Rob Melrose, Treasurer, Loaves and Fishes of Contra Costa
Is the Long Tail Dying on Google?
The long tail, in the search engine optimization (SEO) world, refers to an internet marketing strategy that looks to rank for many niche keywords, rather than for a few common, competetive keywords (referred to as the big head). The marketer hopes that the sum of the traffic generated by hundreds, if not thousands of niche…
Blogging Tips From Google
Update 2020: This article has been kept for historical interest. Although many of the basic concepts are still valid, many of the details are obviously outdated Matt Cutts, Google's Ambassador at large recently gave a talk about SEO (search engine optimization) for bloggers: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/Blogging can be a great way to keep your website content fresh,…
Memorable Marathon Testimonial 2
“Troy responded to our questions very promptly and most of all, would offer any suggestions or advice which benefitted the site. We highly recommend anyone interested in a web designer to contact T.P Designs! Thank you for making our vision a reality!” -Chris Dufour , MemorableMarathon.com
Blackhawk Web Design
Blackhawk Web Design TP Designs designs user-friendly Web sites for local companies in Blackhawk and the surrounding area. Every business has a unique set of needs. Let us design your Website to meet the needs of your business, and just as importantly, the needs or your customers and potential customers. View our Web Design Portfolio,…
San Ramon Web Design
San Ramon Web Design TP Designs designs user-friendly Web sites for local companies in San Ramon and the surrounding area. Every business has a unique set of needs. Let us design your Website to meet the needs of your business, and just as importantly, the needs or your customers and potential customers. View our Web…
Walnut Creek Web Design
Walnut Creek Web Design TP Designs designs user-friendly Web sites for local companies in Walnut Creek and the surrounding area. Every business has a unique set of needs. Let us design your Website to meet the needs of your business, and just as importantly, the needs or your customers and potential customers. View our Web…
Dublin California Web Design
Dublin California Web Design TP Designs designs user-friendly Web sites for local companies in Dublin and the surrounding area. Every business has a unique set of needs. Let us design your Website to meet the needs of your business, and just as importantly, the needs or your customers and potential customers. View our Web Design…
Danville Web Site Design
Danville CA Web Site Design TP Designs designs user-friendly Web sites for local companies in Danville and the surrounding area. Every business has a unique set of needs. Let us design your Website to meet the needs of your business, and just as importantly, the needs or your customers and potential customers. View our Web…
Web Design Deliverables
Many documents are created throughout a good web design process. There is certainly a lot for the competent web designer to document throughout the discovery, planning, design, integration and delivery stages of a complex web project. (more…)
Bay Area Web Design
The Bay Area is where it all started, and is still a hotbed of Internet innovation. If your business is located in the Bay Area, and you don’t have a useful, professional and search engine optimized Web site, you are missing out on a lot of business. The Bay Area, and Silicon Valley in particular, is…
5 Reasons Why Your Business Website Needs a Blog
Blogs have revolutionized the Internet. Ten years ago the Web was a different place. If you wanted to find out about a business, you would do a search, find their corporate web site, and find out what they had to say about themselves. (more…)
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Original Idols Cruise Banner
I designed this banner to go on the Carnival Cruise web site. The cruise featured the "Original Idols," teen stars of the 70's and 80's.
More Irrelevant Google Search Results
A little less than a month ago I posted an article describing how the new Google algorithm had filled the results page for a search of my name “Troy Philis” with irrelevant results . Here is a screenshot of what I was talking about: (more…)
Irrelevant Results: Google Algorithm and PageRank Update
Last month I noticed that Google updated the pagerank number that displays in the toolbar for some of my clients' websites. Although I didn't see changes for my own websites, my clients' websites, particularly the newer ones, showed an increase as they claw their way out of the sandbox, and their promotion efforts work to…
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ORO Testimonial
Troy created our website from the ground up and produced an excellent site. He is easy to work with and provided detailed knowledge on web design and optimization.” – Tom O’Connor, OROLawFirm.com
GoAmeBass Testimonial
“..the end product you produced for both websites was absolutely superb and way beyond my expectations.” Ron McPherson – GoAmeBass.com , DekaBassDake.com, Laubass.com
Google Adwords Quick-Start
The first thing you should do before starting your Adwords campaign is to read the Google Adwords Help section. There are a number of concepts that it’s good to understand before throwing money at Google. This can shorten a potentially expensive learning curve. Having said that, here are some quick tips to get you started:…
Business Card for Glass Tile Manufacturer
This business card was designed for a manufacturer of high-end architectural glass tile.
Business Card for Asia’s Influence
This business was designed for Asia's Influence, an importer of sandstone garden murals from the far east. The image in the background is of one of their products.
Product Catalog
This dealer catalog was distributed to showrooms and was used as a product selector for a glass tile manufacturing company.
CD Art for Kat Downs’ Release, Head of Revelations
This cover art was created for Kat Downs' album relase, Head of Revelations.
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Newspaper Ad for Washington Mutual Home Loans
This full-color newspaper ad ran for many weeks in the San Francisco Examiner.
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Event Invitation for Washington Mutual Home Loans
This invitation was sent out for a mixer at an upscale restaurant in San Francisco.The back of the invitation included a map and directions to the event.
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Gentry Magazine Ad Washington Mutual Home Loans
This full page ad was designed for Gentry Magazine, a sophisticated upscale lifestyle magazine for the northern San Francisco Bay Area.
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Gentry Magazine Ad for Washington Mutual Home Loans
This full page ad was designed for Gentry Magazine, a sophisticated upscale lifestyle magazine for the northern San Francisco Bay Area.
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Search Engine Marketing – SEO vs PPC
In a recent request for a quote to design and produce an Ecommerce Website, I was asked if I offered a refund if no visitors showed up. I think this question highlights the confusion that a lot of small business people and entrepreneurs have with exactly how the Internet works. Granted, it can be confusing,…
Web Page Layout
The one subject that I have found missing from all the Web design classes I’ve taken has been Page Layout. How do you arrange the elements of a Web page so that it is not only usable, put also visually pleasing? Not until I started taking courses in graphic design did the answers start coming.…
User-Centered Website Design
From the standpoint of a web designer there are two perspectives you can take on how the website will be used: The Sales and Marketing Perspective The User-Centered Perspective (more…)