Archive for March, 2007

Best Tips to Improve Your Web Site

Content information rules

The most significant thing to remember about well-liked web sites is that they should always be rich in content.

First impressions matters

You first need to think about the communication you are sending to your own customer. The first page of your web site needs to be of brief description of your website. You page should not be too busy - attract visitors to dig deeper into your web site through the use of appealing text and attractive graphics. If you are serious about your business through website then purchase your own domain name and don’t use any “free” hosting service.

Design your sites and not the pages

Your first concern needs to be the site’s complete design. When you are starting to design a new site from scratch, you can try to make a design, which would make sense to users, has a reliable look and feel, and is not too difficult to expand in the near future. The uniformity of design of a site is one of the factors, which differentiate amateur sites from qualified ones.

Get around easy

Your viewer should be able to easily navigate to any required page in your web site from one page to another page. It’s again significant to link in a reliable, well thought out manner so that the users could learn to navigate. Have clear links on your pages and, if you are selling a product, make it trouble-free for people to purchase it! Show your business name; address, phone number and other E-mail address on every required page. Invite customers to get in touch with you with their questions and comments or feedbacks. Add links to other sites only when it is actually required, or on a particular links page at the end of your site. You desire visitors to go through your site before moving off to another!

Be a stranger

Once you are done with your web site outline, view it in other browsers. Does it look like you required it to look?

Keep it current

Come up with new reason for people to surf through and revisit your pages and suggest them to their friends. This could be in series of articles, tips, a daily cartoon, or other interest catching event. The words most probable to draw visitors are: Free and Special. Be sure you really offer something of worth if you use these words!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tamil_Selvi

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7 Tips for Improving Your Website Design

It doesn’t matter whether your website is of a personal nature with just a few pages or a larger e-commerce website, having a well-designed site is very important. Believe it or not, website design is something that matters to your visitors. It can make all the difference in whether they leave your site or bookmark it. The following are 7 tips for improving your website design. 1. Pages that load quickly. If your site does not load at least within ten or 15 seconds, chances are that most people will simply leave. You may have speedy Internet connection, but keep in mind that not all folks do. Remember, 56k modems do still exist. 2. Text on your pages should be easy to read. You will want the size of the text to be big enough, and a background color that does not obscure the text. To be on the safe side, it is recommended to use black text on a white background. If you would like to use a little more color, choose carefully, making sure that the page is still easy to read.. 3. You will want your website to be easy to navigate. All text links and graphic elements such as buttons and tabs should be easy to read and use. Links found within your article should flow appropriately. You don%u2019t want your visitors leaving because they were not able to figure out how to get your Flash menu to work. 4. Both your website design and layout should be consistent with one another. If you were to switch from one style to another to often, you may confuse your visitors. It only makes sense that if the website design is suddenly too different people are bound to think that they are at another website altogether. 5. Stay away from music and sounds. Not many people like to suddenly be forced to listen to a certain type of music when they click on your site. They may already be listening to their own music. If you think that your site really does need music, turn it off by default and provide a button for visitors to click on if they want to listen. 6. Focus your web design on browser compatibility. For example, not all people use Internet Explorer. Be sure that your site can be viewed using Mozilla, Safari, Opera and Firefox. If at all possible, you may want to test your website on both a Mac and PC. Sites targeting markets such as technology should be careful, because these readers are more likely to use some of the newer browsers and gadgets. 7. Consider your website design for all screen resolutions. Chances are, you like to surf in 1240×1080 with your screen, but remember, some folks still use 800×600, or even 640×768! A website that looks great in high resolution may not be so easy to view correctly in 800×600. If you have any doubts, consider these tips for improving your website design and test, test and test! You could ask for advice from friends or family if you want. They are not as familiar with your website design, and will likely be able to point out things that you overlooked.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Connie_McKenzie

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Baby Steps To Web Design

Baby Steps to Web Design, this is a simple pattern or template to crawl before you walk. As you get more experienced you add more things and grow with your web site. Happy Web design to you.

5 Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine. 5 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!Generating Revenue With Good Planning

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accomodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kevin_Woods

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How Do You Apply Keyword Optimization?

You have to optimize your site with keywords relevant to your business You have to apply keyword optimization to your website in order for your customers to come and find you. Most internet marketers do not rely on this strategy very much because they find that it does not do much for their business. What they do not reallise is how wrong they have been applying it over the years. There are various ways to apply keyword optimization and they are described in this article.

1. SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization. You have to apply the SEO technique in order for search engines to come and find you. You have to edit some of the Hypertext MarkUp Language or HTML tags of your website so that search engine ‘robots’ such as Google’s Googlebot can find you. Implementing the SEO technique can be very tasking, but it is beneficial. You can hire a very experienced web programmer to do this, or you can take your chances on some SEO templates available on the Internet.

In addition, you can exchange links with websites that have similar websites optimized with the keywords that you are using. If, for example they do not have the product that a customer is looking for, they can follow your link and head on down to your website and look for the product.

2. Keyword Focus on every page

You have to focus the main keyword or keyword phrase of your website on every page. If you have ‘coffee machines’ as your keyword phrase, make sure you focus on it and not on other items such as ‘coffee grinders’. And not only that, the content of that webpage must have that keyword phrase as well in order for it to perform exponentially.

3. Articles

Articles bring you traffic to your website. But first, you have to make sure that the article is being read before it can do its job. The article marketing strategy is loved by almost all internet marketers. It has been proven that websites that use the article marketing strategy get more traffic than the sites that do not use this strategy.

Let’s say you’d like to write an article on cooking, and you’ve did some research and you found out that the keyword optimization phrase ‘basics of cooking’ are the keywords that beginners in cooking type into the search engine box in order to learn more about cooking. So, create an article with a headline that has the keyword phrase in it, and in the body copy, you can use that keyword phrase about three to four times more.

4. Pay-per-click advertising

The purpose of pay-per-click advertising is to bring targeted traffic to your website. Using the same keyword phrase as above, you can also use the strategy of using the keyword phrase in your headline as well as the body copy like this:

The Secret To Basics of Cooking Learn The Basics of Cooking As Fast As Three Weeks! –www.yoursite.com–

Do remember that generating traffic through keyword optimization to your website does not happen overnight, except for the pay-per-click advertisement. Be patient in the beginning stage of the growth of your newly-launched website and wait for about one or two months for the search engines to get used to the presence of your website.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rasheed_Ali

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SEO: Radically Remade

I heard a radio advertisement the other day for a website that featured unique hand crafted items that interested me. I wanted for the website address, but when the website address took ten minutes and several backslashes, dashes and dots I gave up and figured why bother.

If you are looking to boost your efforts in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies you may take a look first at your website address.

The advertisement I heard was most likely due to either a free or coopable web host that provides a place for the store to exist, but includes their website information followed by the sub domain for the business.

It could be that your website needs a makeover or you may even want to abandon your current design and start over using SEO strategies.

Spend some time at your favorite domain registry and look at website names that match your business. If you can’t find a domain that’s an exact match for your business then you can always focus on some of the primary product or services you carry.

There was a time when purchasing a domain was expensive, but the price in many cases is now less than ten dollars per year. There is no reason to have a long website address.

Even if you have a free website that will allow you to place your site on the web without a domain name you should purchase a domain that matches your business and use ‘redirect’ to allow customers, and search engines, to find you under the new and simplified address.

This step makes sense for start-ups as well as those seeking to redesign existing sites.

Because your site can be promoted in off line applications such as business cards as well as print, audio and video advertising it is important to keep things as simple as possible. Search engines seem to favor short, meaningful web addresses when they make an assessment on site rankings.

If you were a brick and mortar store you wouldn’t name your company http://knickknacks.onlinemart.net/ornaments - would you? So, why make it hard for your customers and search engines to find you online?

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Scott_Lindsay

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A Quick Look At Web Site Statistics

If you’re going to be an internet marketer, you better get a handle on web site statistics. While there are hundreds of different tools for measuring web site activity, here is a quick guide to some of the more common statistics prepared by most tools.

Hits. “Hit’s are the number of times someone made a request for information on your site. It’s important to note some statistics tools count a hit as any information not necessarily a single visitor. For example, with some tools, if you’re home page has 3 pictures on it, a visitor to your home page might register as 4 hits – 1 for the page and 1 to download each picture.

Unique Visitors. Unlike hits, unique visitors are just that – how many unique people visited your site irrespective of the number of pages they viewed. If you’re trying to build traffic, this is the data to watch.

Pages. Page counts tell you how many pages on your site have been viewed. Theoretically, the smallest number of pages viewed would be equal to the number of unique visitors (if every visitor views just the home page before going elsewhere). A page count higher than the number of visitors is a good thing – this means visitors came in and went deeper into your site than just the home page. Some tools offer “by page” counts that will show you exactly how many times each page has been viewed.

Entry Pages/Exit Pages. Entry pages are the pages that a visitor first entered your site with. Exit pages are those that they left the site after viewing. This data is important to tell you what’s happening with your visitors. How they arrived will often tell you what offer they are responding to (if you use separate “landing pages” for email promotions, for example) and the exit pages will tell where (and hopefully why) they left. For example, if a high percentage of the exits are from the home page, it means a high percentage of people haven’t gone deep into your site. If, on the other hand, a high percentage have exited from the contact page, that may correspond to increased sales activity coming your way!

So, by all means, get familiar with these and other web statistics — in the final analysis, internet marketing is all about web statistics.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Raymond_Nesa

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Web Development Must Haves

The second thing you must have on your web site is an opt-in form. No visitor to your site should be allowed to leave without the option of leaving their email address. You rarely get two chances with a visitor, so make your opt-in form prominent and offer some freebie to induce them to sign up. This can be a newsletter, a free ebook or perhaps even 5 or 7 part course. Courses are good since you can prove yourself to be an expert in your field.

However, once you have at least a first name and email address, you can keep in touch and send special offers of products that can provide you with an income. You will notice that all of the successful internet marketers have an opt-in form, either directly on their web site, or as a pop-up that appears while you are visiting their site.

Thirdly, it is of great advantage to you have a page saying something about you. Every web site should have an “About Me” page, so that visitors can read about whom your are, where you live and what you have achieved in the past. You can include a photograph of you, and even of your family. People feel a bit more secure doing business with someone who appears to have nothing to hide.

Fourth is contact information. These things that you must have on your web site are presented in order of importance, since what might be the most important to one person could be the least to another. Contact information is essential. You should provide at least a contact email programmed to an autoresponder that informs the sender of the email that their mail has been received and will responded to within at least 24 hours.

A telephone number and postal address, while not essential, lets your visitors know that you are accessible, and don’t mind others knowing your phone number and address.

The fifth essential design item is a simple navigation system. Your main navigation should be on your home page, but this should not provide links to every page in your site. Your home page navigation should take visitors to your main theme pages, which themselves should have further links to lesser pages.

For example, your home page on a writing site could link to calligraphy, which itself could then lead to various calligraphy-related pages, then each sub-page to articles. Additionally to this you could sign up for Google Adsense and place an ‘Adsense for Search’ box on your home page. This provides a Google web search box that can also be used for a site search on up to three of your websites. Alternatively, you can use site search software available on the internet.

If you include these five web design basics, your site will be more successful than without them.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_Ray

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3 Steps to Building an Effective Web Site for Your Business

Does your website deliver?

Many businesses, both large and small, are disappointed with the results they get from their web site. Although they get site visitors and even generate sales or leads, they haven’t managed to extract their site’s real potential. The reason is often a failure to:

  • understand the wide variety of prospects that may visit their site;
  • understand how to meet the varying needs of these prospects; and
  • invest the time and the effort needed to make the site successful.

Make your site doesn’t have to be complicated. And, there is no need for magic. All that’s needed is the:

  • willingness to understand your user population;
  • the ability apply some common business sense; and
  • a small dose of creativity.

In this article, we will identify some of the key things you can do to create and manage your web site to help you grow your business.3 Steps to Building an Effective Web Site for Your Business

STEP 1. Before You Start : Know Where You Are Heading

You need to decide why you want a web site and what you really want to achieve. I would suggest that a good reason is NOT - ‘because my competitors have them’ or ’so we can put it on our business cards’. This makes for very expensive business cards. Some good reasons may include:

  • To attract sales leads from new customers;
  • To sell directly to new and/or existing customers;
  • To enhance the customer experience and service for your clients;
  • To provide new and relevant information about you and your products to potential customers and business partners;
  • To improve your products and services by obtaining feedback from customers;
  • To help recruit employees;
  • To reduce the cost of sales;
  • To improve your businesses efficiency;
  • To lower your marketing costs;
  • To expand your marketing reach; and
  • To increase your profitability.

STEP 2. You Know Your Target : Plan Your ExecutionThe Internet and your web site is just another channel to your target audience. You may already be doing taking similar steps in your current sales and marketing process. Now, you just need to translate this to the new medium. Planning your website is a critical component of your overall marketing strategy. Now more than ever, consumers are researching purchases and shopping online. While key business decision makers are sourcing product and services using the Internet. To develop your Internet marketing strategy, you need to carefully define answers to the following questions:

  • Who is your target? How can you segment your online audience to better understand their needs?
  • What is your primary message? Not ‘what are you selling?’. What value do offer?
  • How can you begin to form a trusted relationship with your customer?
  • What are you willing to promise? Will you deliver?
  • What marketing channels match your sales mission?

The answers to each of these questions will depend on your product or service and your company’s “personality”. These are critical to your site’s development and how effective you will be about converting visitors in to interested customers. Develop your strategy together with your web design company so you can better understand user behavior and the technical requirements of search engine optimization. And working closely with your designer means your designer can better understand your customer and his or her needs.All this may seem like a lot. But, if you know your customers and work closely with a professional web design company, you will develop an you can develop a marketing presence that will pay dividends to your business and enhance your customer relationships. Experienced web development and Internet marketing specialists can help you develop a coherent plan and execute on that vision. Moreover, you will increase your chances of early success and, also reduce your costs - mistakes and wasted efforts are time consuming and unnecessarily eat in to your marketing budget.

STEP 3. Creating Your Website : How do I Pick the Right Web Designer?

For the do-it-yourself small business owners, the good news is that there are a lot of tools that will help you build your own site. But, keep in mind building a site that delivers requires significant time and experience.

Larger businesses may consider hiring a full time developer to design, build and manage their site. However, except for the smallest of companies (measured in revenue potential and not necessarily employees), outsourcing your online marketing makes sense. There are far too many skill sets, including technical, design and marketing, to trust any one person. Use a company that has a good balance of web design, technical know-how and Internet marketing skill to ensure your site looks good and performs.

TIP: Think of your web site as an extension of your business. Just like your business, your web site should not remain static. Your products and services change, as does your industry. Use your website to continually update the world. Not only is it good business practice, regularly adding fresh content to your site will — over time — improve your rankings in the search engines that generate your site visitors. A content management system or an integrated blogging tool makes it easy for you to update your content easily and without the aid of a web designer.

Your Site is Complete. Now What?

So, your site is live and you are pleased with the results. Great! Now all you need to do is find and attract pre-qualified prospects. But how?

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Taus

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Web Site Promotion – Steps to Web Site Visibility

There are many ways to get visibility to your web site. Promotion of the web site is the most important task to generate any form of traffic. There are several ways you can do this but I will focus this article on the 5 steps to web site visibility that I find to be the easiest and most helpful for beginners.

1. Google Adwords. When you go to the Google search engine and perform your search you will generate a page that has the results on it. The right hand side of your screen has what is known as Google Adwords, basic short ads that provides links to web sites that are affiliated with the search that was performed.

2. SEO- Search Engine Optimization increases your web site visibility by using pageranking and keywords to make your site visible to searches seeking results that your website offers.

3. Blogs have become the latest form of reaching out from readers and searches on the web. This form of advertising can increase your web site visibility by prompting on the blogs that are targeted to the audience of your choice.

4. Banners: the simple innovative way to get people to click on and be redirected to your site. These ads can be placed all over the web and you can access customers in places you might not have thought of.

5. Off the internet advertising: This form of promotion for a web site is sometimes forgotten about. People aren’t clued to the Internet 24/7 (even though we feel that we are). Life outside does still exists so promote your site in the “real” world.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_Ray

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Web Site Promotion – Ways to Get More Web Traffic

1. Social networking provides a great way to increase traffic. Using social networks allows you ways of reaching clients and users that you may not have accessed to originally or even think of advertising to.

2. SEO- Search Engine Optimization allows for increase traffic by providing searches with keyword tags that aide the searcher to condense their results simpler. SEO, if used advantage by you, will pull in traffic from searches seeking topics in related fields to your site.

3. Banners: banners provide simply advertising on various websites that can provide quick links to your site.

4. Bulk Emails: Bulk Emails, if done correctly can generate ample traffic to your site. Make sure you do your research on bulk emails and perform them legally. You do not want to produce “spam” mail and be ignored or either targeted for spamming. Bulk Emails to those addresses that have contacted sites requesting information about products or services that relate to your web site can produce you positive web site traffic

5. Key words are the guide to obtaining the most, the best, the best fitting traffickers to your site. For starters, if you need to search for anything on the web what is the very first thing you do? Use key words to narrow down the sites! Yes, key words are the best way to get the traffic that sticks! But what do key words mean? Using the perfect, most descriptive adequate terminology to describe what you have. Making sure that your site is seen and searched will ensure that more traffic visits your perfected site. And when using keywords, don’t just use the main word, use synomoms for the words, words that are grouped with the particular word also works.

6. Article Marketing can be a great form to get more traffic to your web site. Use this tool as a guaranteed way to promote your website with little effort in doing so. Key words those hyperlinked puts readers a “click” away from your website.

7. Forum marketing and blogs. This gives readers guidance to your website without actually promotional or advertising. Friendly blogs and forums assist searchers with kind information that you have to offer. This truly is a great way to market your page and get lots of traffic!

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sean_Ray

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