Many web designers fall into the trap of designing a fancy website that looks great but includes elements that will cripple its search engine rankings. It is a huge waste of time, effort, and sometimes money to create a beautiful looking site that does not attract any visitors. What good is all that beauty if no one can find it? Here are some common design elements that should be avoided whenever possible.
Image Links
Using images instead of text links for your site’s navigation menu can confuse search engine bots and may make your site difficult for them to spider completely. If you must use graphic elements for links, be sure to also include a set of text links for the spiders to follow. Many sites do this in their footer, either above or below the copyright information.
Frames
If you use frames to display your site, you run the risk that the search engine’s spider will not pick up all of your content. Most bots will only spider the first HTML file they encounter, ignoring your other frames. If you use frames and notice that only a fraction of your pages make it into the search engine’s index, the frames could be the problem. Also, many users are turned off by the sight of multiple frames and will not stick around your site long enough to purchase your product or click an advertisement.
Splash Intro Pages
Splash introduction or entry pages, often using flash animation, are another SEO pitfall for many new webmasters. While the graphics and animation may look impressive to human visitors, they lack any useful content for the search engine spiders. Usually, the only text on the page will be a “skip intro” link, which won’t do much for your site’s ranking. Making this even worse is the fact that the splash page comes before your index page, which is the most important page to a search engine bot. Many times, splash pages also include an automatic redirect if the introduction is not skipped. Search engines usually do not index redirects and there is always the possibility that a new algorithm will penalize sites for this.
In order to get high rankings in the search engines, first they have to find your site, then they have to be able to read enough of your content to rank the site. Eliminating style elements that confuse or restrict the spiders will help make your website more accessible and easier to index. If you must use things like image links, make sure to also have an alternate set of text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow. More dramatic elements like frames and splash pages should be avoided altogether if you want to get the best possible search engine ranking for your site.
Posted on 8 May '10 by admin, under Online Business. No Comments.
If you are suffering from a low amount of sales from your online business and looking for more ways to multiply your sales here are 10 Killer Ways To Make Extra Money Online.
1. When you make your first sale, follow-up with the customer. You could follow-up with a “thank you” email and include an advertisement for other products you sell. You could follow-up every few months.
Make sure you don’t overflow them with ads too… you want to keep them hyper-responsive to your promotions.
2. You could upsell to your customers. When they’re at your order page, tell them about a few extra related products you have for sale. They could just add it to their original order.
One-time offers are a quick powerful way to increase your online profits. Don’t miss out!
3. Tell your customers if they refer four customers to your web site, they will receive a full rebate of their purchase price. This will turn one sale into three sales.
This is a powerful form of viral marketing and once it takes it’s effect you can just sit back and watch your profits just roll in by the truckloads.
4. When you sell a product, give your customers the option of joining an affiliate program so they can make commissions selling your product. This will multiply the sale you just made.
You would usually put this information on the thank-you or delivery page to see best results.
5. Sell the reprint/reproduction rights to your products.
You could include an ad on or with the product for other products you sell. You could make sales for the reproduction rights and sales on the back end product.
This is also another great form of viral marketing and branding as well… you don’t have to do any of the work they will do it all for you.
6. You could cross promote your product with other businesses’ products in a package deal. You can include an ad or flyer for other products you sell and have other businesses selling for you.
They will be more than happy to offer more great value to their subscribers.
7. When you ship out or deliver your product, include a coupon for other related products you sell in the package. This will attract them to buy more products from you.
8. Send your customers a catalog of add-on products for the original product they purchased. This could be upgrades, special services, attachments, etc. If they enjoy your product they will buy the extra add-ons.
9. Sell gift certificates for your products. You’ll make sales from the purchase of the gift certificate, when the recipient cashes it in. They could also buy other items from your web site.
10. Send your customers free products with their product package. The freebies should have your ad printed on them. It could be bumper stickers, ball caps, t-shirts etc. This will allow other people to see your ad and order.
You can apply any of these 10 killer tips and see an increase online sales.
Posted on 8 May '10 by admin, under Online Business. No Comments.
Promoting your website can be a daunting task: it feels like there are thousands of ways to do it, but all of them take a lot of time or money for no guaranteed return. To help solve this problem, I’ve compiled a list of ten easy ways to promote your website.
1. Advertise in the Media. Now, you might have already ruled out advertising in newspapers and the like as too expensive, especially since the chances are your audience doesn’t live in any specific local area. That mostly rules out radio, too, and TV is even more likely to be out of your reach. What you might not have realised, though, is that you should stop looking at the general media and start looking at the specialist media for your area. For example, if you run a house-buying website, you could advertise it in specialist property magazines, and even on ‘lifestyle’ cable channels that show programmes about moving home.
2. Write Your Web Address on Things. If your business has any physical objects, whether it’s a product, a carrier bag or just the front of your office, make sure to write your web address on there. Even if people don’t keep or remember the exact address, it at least lets them know that your website exists.
3. Give Out Leaflets. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of old-fashioned paper promotion: leaflet as many areas as you can. The chances are that your website is targeted to a specific demographic rather than an area, but the post office will be surprisingly helpful when it comes to getting your leaflets where they need to go, if you ask them.
4. Go to Specialist Events. If there’s some kind of trade fair for the industry your website is in, turn up to it and promote your website. While there might not be all that many people there, the ones who are there will be influential, and can get your site talked about.
5. Put it on Business Cards. It should go without saying, but once you’ve gone to all that trouble to set up a website, don’t forget to put it on your business cards. After all, if you’re relying on them to get people to phone you, why not give them the option of reading more about you on your website?
6. Astroturf on Forums. An often overlooked way of getting traffic to your website is to participate on forums related to the subject and put your web address in your signature. This gets you more traffic than you’d think, especially at very popular forums.
7. Create Controversy. A great trick to promote your website is to use it to say controversial things: as the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity. This works best if you say something that you know will be provocative to a certain kind of person, getting it linked from all over the place. Bear in mind, though, that this strategy is better for advertising-driven websites than it is if you’re trying to build a reputation and make sales directly.
8. Keep a Good Blog. While more and more businesses are starting blogs, few of them are doing it right. If you’re using your blog to publish product announcements in corporate-speak, it’s useless. You need to remember a simple mantra, ‘views not news’ Make sure your blog has something interesting to say.
9. Buy Search Engine Ads. Many people seem to think it’s some kind of admission of defeat, but search engine advertising can work very well, especially with keywords that aren’t already cluttered with ads. If you do it right, you can get very targeted ads very cheap. Indeed, ironically, the more targeted the ads, the cheaper they tend to be.
10. Start an Affiliate Program. Finally, if you’re selling something, don’t forget that old standby of web marketing: the affiliate program. Offer visitors a cut of the profits if they can sell your products for you, and all of a sudden you’ve got a crack sales team raring to go. The only trouble with this plan is that everyone is doing it, so you’ll need to offer a high percentage of your profits to your affiliates to make the offer attractive to them.
Posted on 8 May '10 by admin, under Online Business. No Comments.
SEO – is the latest in techniques used by web masters for making the overall layout, structure, and keyword patterning of your website relevant to search engines and web directories where the site has been submitted. This technique, readily available by professionals in any quality SEO company or firm, allows search engines and directories, both human indexed, and spider indexed, to properly categorize and rank your site to be found when a user makes a search.
SEO teaches the different search engines and web directories which keywords are most relevant to your website, so that they will obtain high ranking when someone makes a search for that exact keyword. Search engine ranking is very important because the majority of internet users will only look at the first sites listed whenever they do a search. Therefore, even if your page is listed 12th with Google for a given keyword, it may never be seen by web users, because they simply don’t scroll that far down the list.
For this reason, it’s very important that you incorporate proper SEO strategies into your website. This may involve hiring an SEO firm or an SEO company for their different services.
Among the most common SEO services are articles. These are articles written with interesting or informative content, but which have been structured specifically around a specific keyword. Therefore, if your company sells widgets, you might want to include an article on your website that uses the word “widgets company” throughout its paragraphs.
To come up with your keywords, try to think about the different ways that you’d search for your own website. Think about your services, your products, the information that you provide, and the type of customer you’ll want to attract. You can either make your own list, or use a computer program that is designed for coming up with the different words that will work the best for you. If you hire an SEO company, they will likely have that sort of program available. It allows you to simply give an idea, such as “widgets”, and it will come up with all of the relevant search words that people use, and will tell you how many other sites already come up in search engines when that word or group of words is used.
There is a trick to writing a proper SEO based article. Although it may seem as though you can simply write a regular article and plug in your keyword, there are actually some other things that you need to consider. For example, if you use the keyword too frequently, many search engines will not recognize it as SEO, but will instead see it as SPAM. Similarly, if you use the word too infrequently, the search engine will not recognize the keyword as being relevant at all.
This is where experts seem to disagree. While some believe that the keyword should be used once within the title of the article, and up to ten times throughout the rest of the text, others believe that it should only be used three more times, and a subheading is required.
In fact, there are many different techniques that work very well for proper SEO, but it is a matter of knowing what you’re doing, and being consistent about it. For this reason, it’s not a bad idea to hire either a freelance SEO writer, an SEO company, or a firm. This will ensure that you have the best odds at achieving those coveted top search engine ranks.
Whatever you choose to do, make sure that SEO is a part of your website…unless, that is, you don’t want to encourage any visitors at all!
Posted on 5 May '10 by admin, under Online Business. No Comments.
If you are a new business owner, you likely have spent a good deal of time trying to determine what domain name will be best for your operations. To this end, you may have taken the steps necessary to determine the availability of a particular name. In fact, finding that it is available may have made you very pleased. Not registering the name upon your first visit, you return a couple of days later to find that someone else has registered the name you wanted in the interim.
Of course, this all could have been a coincidence. Nonetheless, in this day and age, a more likely possibility may be that another entity actually tracked your search for a particular domain name and intentionally registered that name itself. Those entities that are now engaging in this insidious practice are said to be domain name spying. In fact, there now appear to be operations that solely engage in this practice.
The reality is that there is nothing new about operators interfering with a bona fide business’s attempts to register a domain name. Cybersquatting involves registering a name confusingly similar to a trademark and then offering to sell that name to the trademark’s actual owner for a greatly inflated price. There are other practices that interfere with legitimate attempts to register domain names, including tasting and kiting.
Domain name tasting is a process that takes advantage of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) policy that allows a five day grace period in which a domain name can be returned. A taster registers numerous names in order to generate advertising income from short term ownership to determine which names might be most profitable over the long haul. If the registrant finds that certain names don’t meet his or her goals, it is simply returned.
Domain kiting actually takes the tasting concept a step further. Through kiting the ICANN grace period is abused. As with tasting, the registrant will return a name at the end of the ICANN five day grace period. The difference between kiting and tasting is that when the registrant returns the domain name, the registrant will then quickly reacquire the same name all over again. Essentially, a registrant engaging in kiting will retain ownership of the name in question over an extended period of time and will never pay for that ownership.
By understanding tasting and kiting, a reader can appreciate how domain name spying is an outgrowth of these practices. The difference rests in the fact that spying is intended to target those names that someone else or another business enterprise has a specific interest in owning. At this juncture, it is not specifically known how a domain name spy gathers information relating to another business checking on the availability of a name.
Some victims of domain name spies may have at least some recourse through trademark and cybersquatting laws. However, if a domain name spy does not violate these laws, a business actually may have no remedy at this juncture.
If you find that you have been victimized while checking the availability of a name, you probably will end up with two choices:
1. select another domain name
2. pay the spy a premium for the name you actually want
The best way to avoid becoming a victim of domain name spying is to purchase immediately any name that you may have an interest in. Remember, if you elect not to use a certain name, you have five days to return that domain name with no charge to you.
Posted on 5 May '10 by admin, under Online Business. No Comments.