If you are serious about improving search engine rankings, you need to check the keyword density of your web site. In order to do this you must integrate proper keyword phrases within your meta tags and web copy.
What is keyword density?
This is the ratio of a keyword or keyphrase to the total words (depth) on a page. It is one of the most critical aspects of search engine optimization. To improve search engine ranking, your keyword density must not be too high or too low.
Try to aim for a keyword density of 1% to 7%. To achieve 1% you would need to insert your keyword or keyword phrase once for every hundred words. If you only used your keyword once in one thousand words, this would result in diluting your keyword density.
Don’t try to stuff all your keywords together, separated by commas. Search engines may see this as spam, penalizing your rankings.
How to improve your search engine ranking
The best way to achieve good rankings, is to research the appropriate keywords or keyword phrases related to your web copy before you even begin building your site.
If your site is already built and it’s on the Internet, you may want to consider reviewing the keywords and make the necessary changes to your meta tags and web copy. It makes no sense to have a site that is not targeted to the right audience and expect high search engine rankings.
If your site has a lot of graphics or flash and is short on content, you should consider redesigning it. Search engines love content rich pages, so use images and flash sparingly.
1. Use the Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) or the overture suggestion tool(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion), to research your keywords. These tools will show you how many times a particular keyword was searched for each month. It’s no point including keywords in your web pages that nobody searches on.
2. The best keywords you SHOULD include on your site, are those that are very popular (high number of searches when using the tools above), but have a low number of competing web sites.
3. Select two or three of your most important keywords related to your business and try to use them 3-7 times for every 100 words in your web copy.
4. Incorporate these keywords or keyword phrases in your title, description meta tag, keyword meta tag, alt tags (words that describe your images) comment tags, heading tags and main text of your web copy.
Search engines will spider the heading tags in your web copy first (H1, H2, H3) because these stand out from your main text.
5. Write your web copy so that it not only satisfies the search engines but also is compelling enough for your web site visitors to read (don’t make it sound weird to read or obvious you are just writing for the search engines). Repeat your keyword phrase or combinations of them every few sentences.
6. Write at least 250 words (or longer) for each of your web pages. Search engines will spider the text near the top of the page, rather than at the bottom. Therefore include your keywords in the first 250 words on your page.
7. To avoid making your text hard to read, split your paragraphs into 2 or 3 sentences or make use of bullets.
8. Avoid using words that may be popular, but are not related to your site. This will not improve your search engine ranking and will only frustrate your visitors who are searching for relevant content.
9. Keyword density analysis – use a keyword density analyzer to check the keyword density of your web pages. This will tell you if you have used too many or too few words in your web copy.
http://www.keyworddensity.com
10. Realize that not all search engines treat keyword density the same. Some will only place significance on keywords in your title, meta tags and web copy. Google (the most important search engine), places the most significance on keywords in your web page text.
Conclusion:
Achieving optimal keyword density throughout your web pages, will dramatically improve search engine rankings, therefore boosting your web site traffic. Try it..you will be pleasantly surprised!
—————————————————————–
About the author:
Herman Drost is the author of the NEW ebook “101 Highly Effective Strategies to Promote Your Web Site” a powerful guide for attracting 1000s of visitors to your web site. http://www.isitebuild.com/web-site-promotion
Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original articles. mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com. You can read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles
Monday, August 31, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Are Your Search Engine Rankings At Risk?
By Scott Buresh
Ever since there have been search engines, there have been techniques that unscrupulous webmasters and shady search engine optimization firms have used to artificially boost rankings. As search engines caught on to these techniques, they devised ways to detect them without having someone physically look at each site (a practical impossibility, considering that several individual engines now index well over a billion pages). While most engines are becoming more adept at detecting “spam” pages and penalizing or removing them, there is an unfortunate side effect to this efficiency- some companies that are innocent of intentional wrongdoing unknowingly have sites that fall into the “spam” category. What follows is a list of some of the issues that can hurt such sites, followed by suggestions of how to prevent penalization or removal.
==> Issue #1: Bad Links
Much of the internet is founded on sites linking to one another (a search engine itself is really just a very large collection of links). However, with the relatively recent emphasis placed upon a site’s links as part of the ranking formula (commonly called “link popularity”), it has become crucial to carefully select and closely monitor the sites with which you exchange links. Google, the pioneer of this ranking methodology, often penalizes sites that provide links to what they call “bad neighborhoods”- sites that Google determines serve no purpose save for artificially boosting link popularity. It is important to note that sites are only penalized when they actively link to another site, not when a site links to them (which is only fair, as webmasters have no real control over what sites choose to link to theirs). If any page of your site contains links to outside sites, it is important to make certain that these outside sites are not being penalized. The easiest way to do this on Google is to download the Google toolbar (available at http://toolbar.google.com/). Most pages that you find on the internet have been assigned a “Pagerank”, which is represented by a sliding green scale on the toolbar (visit the link to see an example). To be safe, avoid linking to any site that does not show any green on this scale (most importantly when this scale is grayed out). Such sites may be penalized, and linking to them may get your site penalized in turn (do not, however, refrain from exchanging links with sites simply because they show just a sliver of green- these sites are not being penalized and links from them may become more valuable over time). It is also very important to monitor the sites that you link to periodically to make certain that they have not been penalized since you originally added their link to your site.
==> Issue #2: Hidden Text
Almost all search engines use the words on the pages of web sites as one factor in their ranking equation. This means that if the text on your pages includes your keyphrases, you have a better chance of ranking highly for those phrases than a competing page that does not include them. Some webmasters, aware of this but not wanting their visitors to actually see the text (usually for “aesthetic” reasons), began taking keyphrase-rich text and making it the same color as the page background. For example, if a page had a white background, they would add text to the page, loaded with keyphrases, in the same shade of white. A human visitor would not be able to see the text, but the search engine “spider” (the programs that search engines use to go out and index web pages) would, and it would get a ranking boost accordingly. However, engines soon caught on and began penalizing pages that used this tactic. Unfortunately, some innocent sites are still penalized for this, even though the text on their pages is visible. Say, for example, that the background of a page is white. On this white background is a large blue box that has white text within it. Even though the text is clearly visible to the visitor, the search engine is not smart enough to realize that the white text appears in a blue box- it just assumes that the white text has been placed on a white background. To avoid any potential problems, it is important that you let your webmaster know that the text on your pages should never be the same color as the assigned background color.
==> Issue #3: Keyword Stuffing
As mentioned above, the words on your pages can be an important factor in the ranking of your web pages. However, it is entirely possible to have too much of a good thing. “Keyphrase Density”, as it is commonly called, is the ratio of keyphrases on your page to the overall number of words on the page. While different engines prefer different keyphrase density, almost all have an upper limit, after which pages can be penalized. In most cases, this threshold would be hard to break without the text sounding inane. However, particularly when a keyphrase is part of a company name, density can accidentally become unnaturally high. For example, if your company name was “Atlanta Plumbing Pros” and you styled your text so that this company name was used in almost every sentence, you would have a dangerously high density for the phrase “Atlanta Plumbing” and would be at risk of penalization. To correct any potential problems, go over the text on each of your pages and make certain that it reads naturally and that no phrases are repeated too frequently (for example in more than half of the sentences).
==> Issue #4: Cloaking
Cloaking, loosely defined, is the practice of showing a search engine spider a different page than what an actual human visitor sees. This means that the server of a cloaked page makes a note of the unique address assigned to each visitor, and when that visitor is a spider, it feeds it specialized content that is designed to rank highly for certain search terms. Virtually every major engine now imposes harsh penalties on sites that use cloaking (although a few of them will allow you to pay them for the privilege, but that’s a topic for a future article). Unfortunately, the intent of cloaking isn’t always necessarily to trick search engines. Some high-ranking pages are cloaked simply to prevent others from stealing the underlying code (such theft is commonly called “pagejacking”). This concern, however, is somewhat unfounded today. With the increased emphasis of “off the page” elements, such as link popularity, an unscrupulous webmaster could steal the code from a high-ranking page and replicate it exactly without achieving the same high rankings. In any case, the practice of cloaking, for whatever reason, puts your site at risk of being penalized or removed from major engines, so make sure that your webmaster does not employ the technique.
==> Conclusion:
Search engines are becoming increasingly cognizant of the techniques used to try to fool them, and they are also becoming better at detecting and removing pages that violate their terms of service. It’s important to remember that search engines make decisions on how to rank pages based upon extensive studies of their users and their preferences, and any webmaster or optimization firm that claims to know better (and subsequently uses underhanded techniques) is doing a disservice to their client. Unfortunately, however, sometimes the spam detection methods that the engines use target good sites that inadvertently meet the criteria for removal or penalization. By paying attention to the four issues above, you can help ensure that your site isn’t one of them.
Ever since there have been search engines, there have been techniques that unscrupulous webmasters and shady search engine optimization firms have used to artificially boost rankings. As search engines caught on to these techniques, they devised ways to detect them without having someone physically look at each site (a practical impossibility, considering that several individual engines now index well over a billion pages). While most engines are becoming more adept at detecting “spam” pages and penalizing or removing them, there is an unfortunate side effect to this efficiency- some companies that are innocent of intentional wrongdoing unknowingly have sites that fall into the “spam” category. What follows is a list of some of the issues that can hurt such sites, followed by suggestions of how to prevent penalization or removal.
==> Issue #1: Bad Links
Much of the internet is founded on sites linking to one another (a search engine itself is really just a very large collection of links). However, with the relatively recent emphasis placed upon a site’s links as part of the ranking formula (commonly called “link popularity”), it has become crucial to carefully select and closely monitor the sites with which you exchange links. Google, the pioneer of this ranking methodology, often penalizes sites that provide links to what they call “bad neighborhoods”- sites that Google determines serve no purpose save for artificially boosting link popularity. It is important to note that sites are only penalized when they actively link to another site, not when a site links to them (which is only fair, as webmasters have no real control over what sites choose to link to theirs). If any page of your site contains links to outside sites, it is important to make certain that these outside sites are not being penalized. The easiest way to do this on Google is to download the Google toolbar (available at http://toolbar.google.com/). Most pages that you find on the internet have been assigned a “Pagerank”, which is represented by a sliding green scale on the toolbar (visit the link to see an example). To be safe, avoid linking to any site that does not show any green on this scale (most importantly when this scale is grayed out). Such sites may be penalized, and linking to them may get your site penalized in turn (do not, however, refrain from exchanging links with sites simply because they show just a sliver of green- these sites are not being penalized and links from them may become more valuable over time). It is also very important to monitor the sites that you link to periodically to make certain that they have not been penalized since you originally added their link to your site.
==> Issue #2: Hidden Text
Almost all search engines use the words on the pages of web sites as one factor in their ranking equation. This means that if the text on your pages includes your keyphrases, you have a better chance of ranking highly for those phrases than a competing page that does not include them. Some webmasters, aware of this but not wanting their visitors to actually see the text (usually for “aesthetic” reasons), began taking keyphrase-rich text and making it the same color as the page background. For example, if a page had a white background, they would add text to the page, loaded with keyphrases, in the same shade of white. A human visitor would not be able to see the text, but the search engine “spider” (the programs that search engines use to go out and index web pages) would, and it would get a ranking boost accordingly. However, engines soon caught on and began penalizing pages that used this tactic. Unfortunately, some innocent sites are still penalized for this, even though the text on their pages is visible. Say, for example, that the background of a page is white. On this white background is a large blue box that has white text within it. Even though the text is clearly visible to the visitor, the search engine is not smart enough to realize that the white text appears in a blue box- it just assumes that the white text has been placed on a white background. To avoid any potential problems, it is important that you let your webmaster know that the text on your pages should never be the same color as the assigned background color.
==> Issue #3: Keyword Stuffing
As mentioned above, the words on your pages can be an important factor in the ranking of your web pages. However, it is entirely possible to have too much of a good thing. “Keyphrase Density”, as it is commonly called, is the ratio of keyphrases on your page to the overall number of words on the page. While different engines prefer different keyphrase density, almost all have an upper limit, after which pages can be penalized. In most cases, this threshold would be hard to break without the text sounding inane. However, particularly when a keyphrase is part of a company name, density can accidentally become unnaturally high. For example, if your company name was “Atlanta Plumbing Pros” and you styled your text so that this company name was used in almost every sentence, you would have a dangerously high density for the phrase “Atlanta Plumbing” and would be at risk of penalization. To correct any potential problems, go over the text on each of your pages and make certain that it reads naturally and that no phrases are repeated too frequently (for example in more than half of the sentences).
==> Issue #4: Cloaking
Cloaking, loosely defined, is the practice of showing a search engine spider a different page than what an actual human visitor sees. This means that the server of a cloaked page makes a note of the unique address assigned to each visitor, and when that visitor is a spider, it feeds it specialized content that is designed to rank highly for certain search terms. Virtually every major engine now imposes harsh penalties on sites that use cloaking (although a few of them will allow you to pay them for the privilege, but that’s a topic for a future article). Unfortunately, the intent of cloaking isn’t always necessarily to trick search engines. Some high-ranking pages are cloaked simply to prevent others from stealing the underlying code (such theft is commonly called “pagejacking”). This concern, however, is somewhat unfounded today. With the increased emphasis of “off the page” elements, such as link popularity, an unscrupulous webmaster could steal the code from a high-ranking page and replicate it exactly without achieving the same high rankings. In any case, the practice of cloaking, for whatever reason, puts your site at risk of being penalized or removed from major engines, so make sure that your webmaster does not employ the technique.
==> Conclusion:
Search engines are becoming increasingly cognizant of the techniques used to try to fool them, and they are also becoming better at detecting and removing pages that violate their terms of service. It’s important to remember that search engines make decisions on how to rank pages based upon extensive studies of their users and their preferences, and any webmaster or optimization firm that claims to know better (and subsequently uses underhanded techniques) is doing a disservice to their client. Unfortunately, however, sometimes the spam detection methods that the engines use target good sites that inadvertently meet the criteria for removal or penalization. By paying attention to the four issues above, you can help ensure that your site isn’t one of them.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Why Isn’t Your Blog In The Search Engine?
If your site isn’t found in the search engines, it is probably because the robots couldn’t deal with it. It could be something as simple as not being able to find the site, or it may be more complicated issues involving the robot’s not being able to crawl the site or figure out what your pages are all about.
Submitting your site to the major search engines: that will help with the “can’t find it” problem. Even having links pointing back to your site can be enough to attract the search engine robots. Google, for example, suggests that you may not have to submit your pages; they will find your site if you have a link pointing back to it from at least one other site on the web.
If the robots can find your site but can’t make sense of it, then you may need to look at the content and technology used on your pages. Frames, Flash, dynamically generated pages, and invalid HTML source code can cause problems when the search engine robot tries to access your web pages. While some search engines are beginning to be able to index dynamically generated pages and Flash (e.g. Google and AllTheWeb), use of some of these technologies can hinder your ability to be indexed by the search engine robots.
Text in images cannot be read by the search engine robots. Using ALT image text is an important way to help the robots “read” your images. Websites with extensive images rely heavily on ALT text to present their content.
How Do I Get The Most Out Of Indexing?
If you know what to “feed” the spidering robots you will help yourself with search engine ranking.
Having a website full of good content is the major factor. Search engines exist to serve their visitors, not to rank your website. You need to be sure to present yourself in your site in the way that will be most useful to the search engine visitor. Each search engine has its own idea of what is important in a page, but they all value text highly. Making sure that the text on your pages includes your most important keyword phrases will help the search engine evaluate the content of those pages.
Making sure that you have good title and meta tags will further assist the search engines in understanding what your page is about. If the text on the page is about widgets, the title is about widgets, and the meta tags are about widgets, the search engine will have a pretty good idea that you are all about widgets. When their visitors search for widgets, the search engines know to list your site in the results.
A sitemap page is a very good way of giving the search engine robot every opportunity to reach your website pages. Since robots click through the links of your web pages, make sure that at least your most important pages are included in the sitemap; you may even want to include all your pages there, depending on the size of your site. Be sure to add a link to the sitemap page from each page on your site.
Another important consideration is that of keeping all of your pages within a small number of “clicks” from your top page. Many robots will not follow links more than two or three levels deep, so if your “widgets” page can only be reached from your home page by following multiple links (e.g. home page >> about us page >> products page >> widgets page), the robot may not crawl deep enough to get to the widgets page.
Testing Your Website For Search Engine Robot Accessibility
To get an idea just what the search engine robot “sees” on your page, you can look at the Sim Spider tool. You may be surprised at how different your site looks to the robot. You can find this tool at http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi
You will see text and ALT image text show up in the results. If your entire website is built in Flash, you will see nothing at all because robots don’t understand Flash movies.
The Bottom Line
When it comes to search engine robots, think simply. Lots of good content and text, hyperlinks the robots can follow, optimization of your pages, topical links pointing back to your site and a sitemap will help insure the best results when the robots come visiting.
Resources
SpiderSpotting – Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/spiders.html
Robotstxt.org
List of robots and protocols for setting up a robots.txt file.
http://www.robotstxt.org/
Spider-Food
Tutorials, forums and articles about Search Engine spiders and Search Engine Marketing.
http://spider-food.net/
Spiderhunter.com
Articles and resources about tracking Search Engine spiders.
http://www.spiderhunter.com/
Sim Spider Search Engine Robot Simulator
Search Engine World has a spider that simulates what the Search Engine robots read from your website.
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi
——————————————————————————–
About the Author:
Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com), a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses. She has specialized in search engine optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly & Associates, a technical book publishing company.
Source: Entireweb Newsletter
Submitting your site to the major search engines: that will help with the “can’t find it” problem. Even having links pointing back to your site can be enough to attract the search engine robots. Google, for example, suggests that you may not have to submit your pages; they will find your site if you have a link pointing back to it from at least one other site on the web.
If the robots can find your site but can’t make sense of it, then you may need to look at the content and technology used on your pages. Frames, Flash, dynamically generated pages, and invalid HTML source code can cause problems when the search engine robot tries to access your web pages. While some search engines are beginning to be able to index dynamically generated pages and Flash (e.g. Google and AllTheWeb), use of some of these technologies can hinder your ability to be indexed by the search engine robots.
Text in images cannot be read by the search engine robots. Using ALT image text is an important way to help the robots “read” your images. Websites with extensive images rely heavily on ALT text to present their content.
How Do I Get The Most Out Of Indexing?
If you know what to “feed” the spidering robots you will help yourself with search engine ranking.
Having a website full of good content is the major factor. Search engines exist to serve their visitors, not to rank your website. You need to be sure to present yourself in your site in the way that will be most useful to the search engine visitor. Each search engine has its own idea of what is important in a page, but they all value text highly. Making sure that the text on your pages includes your most important keyword phrases will help the search engine evaluate the content of those pages.
Making sure that you have good title and meta tags will further assist the search engines in understanding what your page is about. If the text on the page is about widgets, the title is about widgets, and the meta tags are about widgets, the search engine will have a pretty good idea that you are all about widgets. When their visitors search for widgets, the search engines know to list your site in the results.
A sitemap page is a very good way of giving the search engine robot every opportunity to reach your website pages. Since robots click through the links of your web pages, make sure that at least your most important pages are included in the sitemap; you may even want to include all your pages there, depending on the size of your site. Be sure to add a link to the sitemap page from each page on your site.
Another important consideration is that of keeping all of your pages within a small number of “clicks” from your top page. Many robots will not follow links more than two or three levels deep, so if your “widgets” page can only be reached from your home page by following multiple links (e.g. home page >> about us page >> products page >> widgets page), the robot may not crawl deep enough to get to the widgets page.
Testing Your Website For Search Engine Robot Accessibility
To get an idea just what the search engine robot “sees” on your page, you can look at the Sim Spider tool. You may be surprised at how different your site looks to the robot. You can find this tool at http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi
You will see text and ALT image text show up in the results. If your entire website is built in Flash, you will see nothing at all because robots don’t understand Flash movies.
The Bottom Line
When it comes to search engine robots, think simply. Lots of good content and text, hyperlinks the robots can follow, optimization of your pages, topical links pointing back to your site and a sitemap will help insure the best results when the robots come visiting.
Resources
SpiderSpotting – Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/spiders.html
Robotstxt.org
List of robots and protocols for setting up a robots.txt file.
http://www.robotstxt.org/
Spider-Food
Tutorials, forums and articles about Search Engine spiders and Search Engine Marketing.
http://spider-food.net/
Spiderhunter.com
Articles and resources about tracking Search Engine spiders.
http://www.spiderhunter.com/
Sim Spider Search Engine Robot Simulator
Search Engine World has a spider that simulates what the Search Engine robots read from your website.
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi
——————————————————————————–
About the Author:
Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing (http://www.searchinnovation.com), a Search Engine Promotion company serving small businesses. She has specialized in search engine optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly & Associates, a technical book publishing company.
Source: Entireweb Newsletter
Friday, August 28, 2009
Optimal Your Blog
The idea of good website design is to offer your viewer a logical flow while making it interesting and easy to understand. Lead your viewers to the starting point and then direct them through your site without confusing them.
Here are some excellent tips that can help you develop a user friendly site and please your visitors senses. Give yourself a chance before they get away.
1. Use lots of white space.
Don’t feel that because you have a whole screen that you need to fill it up with stuff. Your page should follow a clean outline. Include your site name at the very top. Below that list the subject of your page and below that expand on your topic. Leave adequate space between each section. Don’t cram a lot of pictures and ads. If you have an ad keep it off to the side or subtly intersperse it between your text. The idea is not to overwhelm your reader.
2. Don’t use animation and flashing objects.
As advertisers we feel the need to get our viewers attention. This is important but we need to do it gracefully. Flashing objects and scrolling images distract your visitor and take away from the content. If your product is better demonstrated with animation or some other multi-media, allow your viewer to select the option. Don’t force it on them.
3. Every page of your site should contain an ‘about’ link.
The internet can be a rather cold and quiet environment. If someone can come to your site and find out about who you are and what you are about, they can feel a little better about doing business with you or taking advice from you. Always include your business address and phone number and email address as well. This lets viewers know that you are serious about your business and that you welcome contact.
4. Include a ‘Privacy’ Link
Viewers like the reassurance that you have a policy that follows privacy guidelines. They want to know that you will not sell or give away their information. In these days of rampant spam, your privacy policy needs to be prominently displayed. Many viewers and business partners won’t do business with you unless you have it.
5. Always keep your links in blue.
Why does that matter you might say? It’s an expectation that viewers have along with the links being underlined. There’s certainly no law that says they need to be as such but people spend a lot of time on the internet and it’s good practice to keep your navigation consistent and recognizable. If it’s not you may lose out on clicks.
6. Keep navigation consistent
Keep your site’s navigation consistent. What you do on your index page should be done the same way on the rest of your site’s pages. Keep the colors consistent as well. Don’t force your viewers to relearn each page of your site. Keep your navigation bars and links the same for each page.
7. Understandable buttons and links.
Title your links appropriately. Don’t use cute or misleading names. For example, if you have a link to sports equipment don’t label the link ‘Great Outdoors’, call it ’sports equipment’. If you have a link to ‘cameras’ don’t label the link ‘hotshots’, label it ‘cameras’. Your viewers don’t want to waste time figuring out what things are. Be clear with your labeling.
8. Focus on the ‘YOU’, not the ‘ME’.
Make it obviously clear to your readers that you are there for them. What can you do for your reader? What benefits are there for your viewer? How can you make their life or business better or more profitable? Request feedback on their success. Find out what they want to know or how you can offer them what they need.
9. Make sure your page loads fast.
If viewers have to wait for a page to load they will click elsewhere. Here’s a site that will help you determine how well your page loads. If a page doesn’t load in 8 seconds you lose 1/3 of your visitors. Here’s a great free tool to help you check your website’s load time:
http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.loading-time-checker.htm
10. Use a site map.
A site map will give visitors a “guide” on viewing your site and also eliminate confusion, especially with larger sites. It’s a road map for your visitors to follow while they are on your site. Sitemaps will also increase rankings and placement within the Search Engines.
——————————————————————————–
About the Author:
Elizabeth McGee has spent 20 years in the service and support industry. She has moved her expertise to the world wide web helping businesses find trusted tools, enhance customer service, build confidence and increase sales. You can contact Elizabeth at: mail@pro-marketing-online.com or visit her website at: http://www.pro-marketing-online.com
Source: entireweb.com
Here are some excellent tips that can help you develop a user friendly site and please your visitors senses. Give yourself a chance before they get away.
1. Use lots of white space.
Don’t feel that because you have a whole screen that you need to fill it up with stuff. Your page should follow a clean outline. Include your site name at the very top. Below that list the subject of your page and below that expand on your topic. Leave adequate space between each section. Don’t cram a lot of pictures and ads. If you have an ad keep it off to the side or subtly intersperse it between your text. The idea is not to overwhelm your reader.
2. Don’t use animation and flashing objects.
As advertisers we feel the need to get our viewers attention. This is important but we need to do it gracefully. Flashing objects and scrolling images distract your visitor and take away from the content. If your product is better demonstrated with animation or some other multi-media, allow your viewer to select the option. Don’t force it on them.
3. Every page of your site should contain an ‘about’ link.
The internet can be a rather cold and quiet environment. If someone can come to your site and find out about who you are and what you are about, they can feel a little better about doing business with you or taking advice from you. Always include your business address and phone number and email address as well. This lets viewers know that you are serious about your business and that you welcome contact.
4. Include a ‘Privacy’ Link
Viewers like the reassurance that you have a policy that follows privacy guidelines. They want to know that you will not sell or give away their information. In these days of rampant spam, your privacy policy needs to be prominently displayed. Many viewers and business partners won’t do business with you unless you have it.
5. Always keep your links in blue.
Why does that matter you might say? It’s an expectation that viewers have along with the links being underlined. There’s certainly no law that says they need to be as such but people spend a lot of time on the internet and it’s good practice to keep your navigation consistent and recognizable. If it’s not you may lose out on clicks.
6. Keep navigation consistent
Keep your site’s navigation consistent. What you do on your index page should be done the same way on the rest of your site’s pages. Keep the colors consistent as well. Don’t force your viewers to relearn each page of your site. Keep your navigation bars and links the same for each page.
7. Understandable buttons and links.
Title your links appropriately. Don’t use cute or misleading names. For example, if you have a link to sports equipment don’t label the link ‘Great Outdoors’, call it ’sports equipment’. If you have a link to ‘cameras’ don’t label the link ‘hotshots’, label it ‘cameras’. Your viewers don’t want to waste time figuring out what things are. Be clear with your labeling.
8. Focus on the ‘YOU’, not the ‘ME’.
Make it obviously clear to your readers that you are there for them. What can you do for your reader? What benefits are there for your viewer? How can you make their life or business better or more profitable? Request feedback on their success. Find out what they want to know or how you can offer them what they need.
9. Make sure your page loads fast.
If viewers have to wait for a page to load they will click elsewhere. Here’s a site that will help you determine how well your page loads. If a page doesn’t load in 8 seconds you lose 1/3 of your visitors. Here’s a great free tool to help you check your website’s load time:
http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.loading-time-checker.htm
10. Use a site map.
A site map will give visitors a “guide” on viewing your site and also eliminate confusion, especially with larger sites. It’s a road map for your visitors to follow while they are on your site. Sitemaps will also increase rankings and placement within the Search Engines.
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About the Author:
Elizabeth McGee has spent 20 years in the service and support industry. She has moved her expertise to the world wide web helping businesses find trusted tools, enhance customer service, build confidence and increase sales. You can contact Elizabeth at: mail@pro-marketing-online.com or visit her website at: http://www.pro-marketing-online.com
Source: entireweb.com
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Making Money Online With Streaming Media
Streaming media are multimedia that are constantly received by, and normally presented to, an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider (the term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback).
Here are some websites that streaming video that can be viewed instantly without waiting to download an enormous file.
tvunetworks.com, channelsurfing.net, freemediatv.com, justin.tv, onetruemedia.com, ustream.tv, camstreams.com, livefooty.com, freeviewfootball.com, ahashare.com, avistaz.com, yahoo.com, um.com.my
Here are some websites that streaming video that can be viewed instantly without waiting to download an enormous file.
tvunetworks.com, channelsurfing.net, freemediatv.com, justin.tv, onetruemedia.com, ustream.tv, camstreams.com, livefooty.com, freeviewfootball.com, ahashare.com, avistaz.com, yahoo.com, um.com.my
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