Entries Tagged as 'Web Design'

Google Adwords

How frustrating are you finding Google Adwords?

Is it taking all your money and giving you nothing in return?

Are your clicks getting more expensive and falling further down the page?

Once you get those clicks, are you actually getting any customers?

Are you mad with Google Adwords and ready to throw in the towel?

Well don’t.

Don’t get mad. GET EVEN!

Here’s how.

It’s really easy to set up a Google Adwords campaign. It’s because it’s so easy to get one running that so few people actually go much further than setting up a basic campaign and then watch as their clicks get more expensive and their conversions disappear.

Have you ever wondered how the Google Adwords professionals make a living? They must know some black art that allows them to make a success of their campaigns.

The truth is that they are using techniques that few people are using but they are hardly magically tricks. I’m going to share with you some of these tricks. Once you know and start to use these tricks then you’ll have better than an even chance that your campaigns will start to become very profitable. That’s what I mean when I say now it’s time to get even.

Step One: Understand Google’s Quality Score

Have you ever wondered why some of your keywords have a higher minimum cost more than others? You probably think it’s because there is greater competition for that keyword. That might be true, but the real reason the minimum cost varies is because of the quality score that Google sets against each of your keywords.

So what is the Quality Score? Well it’s a measure of the relevance and relationship between your keyword, your ad and the page you are sending your visitors to when they click on your ad (this page is referred to as the landing page). If your keyword appears in your ad and also prominently on your landing page then it will have a very good quality score. If it doesn’t, it will have a poor quality score. The better your quality score, the less money you will need to bid for your clicks.

So, it is good practice to arrange your keywords into AdGroups where the keywords are all similar and feature well in the Ad and the Landing Page. Obviously you can’t get every keyword into the Ad but you should be able to spread them a lot of them into the landing page.

You can check the quality score of your keywords by clicking on the customise columns link in your adgroups. You will see the option to Show Quality Score. Select it and you will see the Quality Score for each of your keywords. Avoid any keywords that are reported with a Poor Quality Score. You should either delete them or improve their score by moving them into their own Adgroup with their own specific ads and landing page.

Step Two: Look for the best match

Are you using Phrase and Exact matching? A phrased match is one where the keywords will only match if they are used in the exact sequence of your keyword and an Exact match is one where the keywords will match only if that exact phrase is entered and no other words are used for the search.

To make a keyword a phrase match you put quotation marks around it and to make it an exact match you put square brackets around it.

As default Google sets up keywords as broad matches. This means that you keywords would match to a search query if your keyword were included anywhere in the search query. It would also accept synonyms as well.

Broad matching is best explained with an example. Let’s say I am selling red paint and my keyword is red paint then it would match with the following searches. Red paint, red painted cars, painter sees red over forgery, paint your garden fence red and so on. As you can see few of these searches would be from people looking to buy red paint and so my ad selling red paint is unlikely to get many clicks from these searches.

By using phrase and exact match keywords you can target more closely the searches that you want your ads to appear for.

Step Three: Try to be negative!

Are you using negative keywords for your ads? Negative keywords are another form of matching. If you set a word as a negative keyword then any searches that contain that word will not be able cause your ad to be displayed. A common keyword used by people trying to sell something is free. Any searches containing the word free will not display their ads. To add a negative keyword you type it with the minus sign in front of the word like this -free.

Step Four: Schedule your ads.

Do you run your ads 24 hours every day? Is that sensible? Think about your target audience and when you think they are most likely to be looking for your goods or services. Set your ads to only appear during those times. You can make changes to the schedule through your campaign settings.

If you sell business to business, should you really run any ads over the weekend? Is your target audience likely to be surfing in the evening at home or at work during the day? If you are not sure you can actually get reports out of Google that will tell you the times of the day and what days people are clicking on your ads. Work out when your popular click times are and schedule accordingly.

Step Five: Remember its customers not clicks.

In everything you do, keep in mind that it is customers you want and not just clicks. Implement Conversion Tracking and measure the success of your ads by how many conversions you get and not by how many clicks. Shops don’t normally count customers through the door. They count money in the till and stock sold. So should you.

These five simple steps should help to get your Adwords campaigns back on track. There are many, many more techniques you can apply that will further enhance your success but if you aren’t doing the five listed here then you have little chance of success.

Mike Seddon is the founder of KKSmarts. Their website contains many free guides on http://www.kksmarts.com/

Link Building Tip

Link Building Tip.

Here’s one of the strategies I use to build links from other sites. It uses a combination of article writing and Google Alerts.

Step One: Write some articles.

Start writing articles and ideally make sure they are related in some way to your business.

I suggest you prepare at least a couple of articles. Don’t write them in Microsoft Word. Try to use something like Notepad. I’ll explain why in a minute.

When you have a couple of articles of about 400 to 700 words each, you should then submit them to the article submission sites.

Here are a couple of sites I use.

www.articlemarketer.com

www.ezinearticles.com

Article submission sites are great for getting your articles distributed around the web. Not only do they send articles onto other article distribution networks, but lots of website owners come to these sites for content to put onto their own websites.

When you submit your article to one of these submission sites, you are allowed to add an “About the Author” paragraph to go with your article. It is here that you put a link back to your website using whatever keyword phrase you are trying to optimise on.
To submit your article it is simply a case of copy and paste from your prewritten articles. I tend to have an “About the Author” paragraph already prepared to copy & paste as well.

Now the reason I suggested using Notepad for your articles is because when you copy from Word it tends to bring with it certain formatting issues and these can cause you article to be rejected by the submission sites. Notepad doesn’t have this problem.

Step Two: Find out who’s using your article.

By using Google Alerts you can set up alerts for each of your articles. You basically tell Google to alert you if it finds your phrase being used on the web. I tend to use the article name as the alert phrase if it is fairly unique. Otherwise try using a distinctive line from your article.

Whenever Google finds your alert phrase, it sends you an email with the web address of the site where it found it.

You can now check out this site. If you think it will give you good traffic or pass on good page rank, you can contact the website owner. As they already have one of your articles then they probably like your material so you can either offer more articles (with links of course!) or even point them to pages on your site that they should link to because the content would be of interest to their visitors.

So there you have it. One of my tips for building links back to your site.

By the way, you might just like to put your website name into Google Alerts as you’ll be surprised how many alerts that can generate and you can find many places mentioning your website.

More top tips for you soon.

Regards,

Mike Seddon

More Website Promotion Guides

available at KKSmarts.com

Top-performing sites of 2007 named

Top-performing sites of 2007 named
February 14, 2008
Web User

Google's privacy policies have been under scrutiny recently Google’s search engine was the most visited website in the UK in 2007 with an average of 27.1 million hits each month, according to statistics.

Though this news will hardly surprise most surfers, the fastest-growing website in the UK last year was BeatThatQuote.com with an increase in traffic of 1,165 per cent over the year.

It’s growth was far in excess of Facebook, which was the second fastest-growing site, with a traffic increase of 781 per cent, statistics from web monitor Nielsen Online showed.

"Many will be surprised to see that Facebook wasn’t the fastest growing site of the year, this honour went to price comparison site Beat That Quote – a reminder that the internet provides valuable services other than virtually poking friends and acquaintances," said Alex Burmaster of Nielsen Online.

However, in terms of websites that encourage surfers to come back again and again, Yahoo Widgets won out, with the average visitor coming back to the site 23 times in a month.

"In terms of ’stickiness’, however, services from the large portals tend to perform strongest. Yahoo’s widget service has people coming back on an almost daily basis and AOL’s email service and MSN/Windows Live Messenger visitors tend to go there two in every three days," said Burmaster.

Google’s new position 6 penalty

A discussion in an online webmaster forum indicates that Google might have invented a new ranking penalty for websites that rank well for popular search terms.

What has happened?

During the last few weeks, some webmasters noticed that some of their long term position 1 or position 2 rankings in Google suddenly ranked at position 6.

The problem affected well established websites with a long history. The dropped web pages had long time rankings for popular search terms, usually on position 1.

Why has Google done this?

It is not exactly clear yet which factors cause that ranking drop in Google’s results. There are two theories:

1. Google now considers usage data when calculating the rankings.

2. Google now has a better understanding of word and phrase relationships.

If different usage data is the reason for the change then web pages with a higher click-through rate would get higher positions. However, some webmasters reported that even web pages with high click through rates have been downranked.

The penalty also seems to affect web pages that are listed with an appealing title and a description that is very relevant to the search term so it might be that the click-rate is not taken into account.

Google penaltyWe think that it’s more likely that the word and phrase relationships are the reason for the ranking drops. It seems that web pages with too many inbound links using exactly the searched keyword as the anchor text were affected by the filter.

If the link to a special web page always uses exactly the same anchor text then the word variety is probably extremely low compared to the competing websites in the top results. That indicates a manipulation of the anchor texts and Google applies the filter.

What can you do to avoid that filter?

When you build links to your website, make sure that you use different but related keywords for the links to your site. If you overuse the same link text, Google might discover a manipulation.

Optimizing Your Site for Both Google and Yahoo!

Search engine optimization techniques for Google and Yahoo are quite different. Many websites rank well in one search engine but not the other. This is the direct result of each search engine having its own unique ranking algorithm. For example, the Google algorithm predominantly values the anchor text of in-bound links. Yahoo places more emphasis on keyword density and meta tags.

The primary reason for the difference in ranking algorithms is that Google owns the patent on Page Rank (PR), named after Google’s founder Larry Page. As a result of owning this patent, other search engines need to place more emphasis on different optimization factors including website URL, keyword density and so on.

What are the greatest differences in search engine algorithms?

Google places a significant amount of emphasis on inbound links to your website. The value of these inbound links are measured based on their Google PR. The more links you receive from high Google PR web pages, the better your search result placements will be for a given keyword or search term.

Yahoo places emphasis on website URLs, meta tags, and keyword density. These factors can be analyzed on any website with a limited amount of effort, allowing Yahoo to quickly and easily rank websites properly.

How you can optimize your website for both Google and Yahoo!

The challenge all website owners face is making the most of their optimization efforts. When thinking about search engine optimization, you need to cover all the bases. To do so, pay particular attention to the following guidelines.

Keyword Targeted URL. If your website URL doesn’t contain your keywords, consider purchasing a new one or creating a new page off of your root directory (ex: marketingscoop.com/internetmarketing.htm). Having your keywords in the URL helps improve both your Yahoo and Google search results. Yahoo weighs the website address as an important ranking factor. Google values a keyword rich URL when third party websites place a link to your site using nothing but a web address.

Meta Tags. Although not as important as they once were, Yahoo still uses meta tags to help align search engine rankings and appropriate website pages. Make sure that your meta tags are complete and include your keyword phrases in the title, description, and keyword tags.

Keyword Density Between 6 - 8%. Although much has been written about the importance of keyword density remaining between 2 - 3%, Yahoo looks for sites with keyword densities as high as 8%. Don’t be afraid to include your keywords throughout your webpage content. Make sure however, that your keyword density is not more than 8%.

Link Building. This is the most important factor for increasing Google search result placements. Develop a link building campaign and give other sites a reason to link to your site. This may include free downloads, tools, or other valuable resources.

Site Map. Publish a sitemap. This makes it easy for search engines to spider your website and access all of your most important web pages. Site maps should be accessible from your home page and kept up-to-date.

Optimizing for both Google and Yahoo can be challenging. Following basic seo principles and working to develop incoming links can help you reach the top of the largest search engines. Apply these techniques regularly to see the greatest results.

Michael Fleischner is a marketing expert with more than 12 years of Internet marketing experience. Learn how to improve search engine rankings with his latest ebook, The Webmasters Book of Secrets at http://www.webmastersbookofsecrets.com.

How to Choose Colours for Your Web Site

Colour can have a profound impact on your prospective buyers. The wrong colours can negatively impact your sales, while the right colours can trigger positive emotions motivating your visitors to buy from you.

Colour can affect how we feel and influence what we think. In general, bright bold colours tend to stir us up, while the softer pastel colours calm and relax us. Responses to colours can vary by age, gender and cultural background.

Colours will affect how a potential buyer reacts to your web site. Carefully select your colour scheme for your web site, web header, and ebook cover. Here are some guidelines to help you make good colour choices. Bear in mind that these are guidelines, and that there are no hard and fast rules. Just use common sense.

Consider your audience. For example, if your web site primarily targets men, then you will want to use strong, bold colours. If your target audience is women, then choose soft, pastel colours. If your focus is on children, choose bright, vibrant colours.

Choose colours that are appropriate for your web site’s topic. For example, green may work well for web sites about starting a home business, making money, and reducing debt.

Keep the number of colours down to two or three, and no more. This does not include photographs which can have a whole range of colours.

Make sure that all of the colours you use work well together and do not clash.

Communicate your message with easy-to-read text. Use colours for your text that contrast with the background colour so your text is readable. For example, a dark font on a light background is easy to read.

Consider the mood you want to create. Remember that emotions trigger sales. People buy what they want - not what they need. The list below will show you how colours can affect us in different ways.

Red - Action, energy, strength, passion, fire, heat, power, attention-getting. Can also mean love and romance. A strong masculine colour. Red is a good colour for a call-to-action. Red is cheerfulness, excitement, and warmth. Pink is a soft version of red. It is most associated with romance, calming affect; a feminine colour.

Blue - Confidence, travel, freedom, truth, professionalism, wealth and power. Also tranquillity, dependable, acceptance, patience, understanding, cooperation, comfort, loyalty and security. It is one of the most calming colours and is associated with the sky and the sea, intelligence, reassurance, and trust. Blue has also been known to be an appetite suppressant, so it would not be good for cookbooks or recipes but you can consider it for diet books.

Green - Money, wealth, prosperity, calm, health, food, nature, hope, growth, freshness, soothing, sharing, and responsiveness. Green symbolizes spring, renewal, and fertility.

Orange - Health and vitality, autumn, youthfulness, fire, steadfastness, courage, confidence, friendliness, cheerfulness, warmth, excitement and energy. Has been known to stimulate the appetite. Vibrant and warm, orange is associated with autumn and the earth.

Yellow - Light, purity, understanding, caution, brightness, intelligence, joy, organization, Spring. Yellow often represents sunshine, warmth, light, energy and happiness.

Purple - Dignity, sophistication, creativity, spirituality and mystery. Deep purple is associated with royalty and richness, while lavender is associated with romance and nostalgia.

Brown - Credibility, stability, the hearth, home, the earth, wood, comfort and strength. Brown can be used as a neutral or a warm colour.

Black - Space, night, authority, dramatic, classy, committed, serious, power, elegance, and sophistication.

White - Purity, peace, perfection, fresh, easy, cleanliness, goodness, and spirituality. Worth noting here, white represents life and marriage in Western cultures, but it represents death and sorrow in Eastern cultures.

Grey - A conservative colour, symbolizing security, maturity and reliability.

Take advantage of the impact colour can have on your online sales and choose colours that will create positive responses.

Web Design and SEO

Web design focuses on appearance and aesthetics. SEO focuses on text quality and quantity. Web designers don’t really like to clutter their designs with text. They prefer to see the images stand out on their own. SEOs on the other hand don’t like images that much. Sure, an image can be optimized for the search engines by adding relevant alt attributes and titles, but this is not enough for a site to be properly optimized. Page copy still plays the most important role in website optimization for SEO.

As a business owner you are caught in the middle of this conflict. For your website to convert you need both design and optimization. There is no middle way. You cannot have a little bit of this and a little bit of that and still be competitive. You cannot have just one of the two either. Without optimization your site is invisible to the search engines, hence to your potential customers. On the other hand, without a good design your site, although not invisible, will get nothing but hits. Web users are picky and if they find nothing of interest on your site they will just surf to the next site.

Having a beautiful website no one can find is like having a store and keeping the doors locked. You know it is there, you’ve done a great job decorating it, the products are waiting for the customers, yet no one comes in.

When you pay for web design don’t automatically assume that by paying thousands of pounds on a layout you’ll be a hit on the Web. The Web is a highly competitive place. There are already thousands entrepreneurs who, just like you, invest in design and hope to become the new “it.” Without online marketing (SEO being an important part of the discipline) all these entrepreneurs will remain in the shadow, with their beautiful websites closed to the world.

SEO is the key to that virtual door you need to open for your customers. It is important that you consider this tool when you first conceive your site. Web design and SEO don’t need to be enemies. There are enough professional agencies that employ both web designers and SEOs who work together to develop a good business website, a site that is SEO ready, accessible and readable with any browser. You just need to take your time, research and send a few inquiries. Then choose the company that answers your questions in a timely manner, basically choose the company that proves a clear ability of designing with W3C standards and a clear understanding of the online trends and realities.

Then balancing content with visual appearance shouldn’t be such a difficult task. Aside graphics and artwork you have to choose proper font types, in a readable size, with colors that harmonize with the layout of the site and so on. If your site is not SEO ready from the first stage of the project you’ll face additional costs after you launch. SEO ready means a site that is properly coded (errors in the HTML code might stop some search bots from crawling and indexing your site correctly), with good navigability and good internal linking structure.

On the other hand, SEO and appearance are not the only traits of a good site. Brand conscious companies should look at the broader picture: instead of debating what is better online entrepreneurs should ask themselves what works best to convert visitors into clients.

Studies show that an over optimized page might hurt the user-experience of people with disabilities. For example, many SEOs stuff the image alt attributes and their alternative titles with keywords. Blind and other visually impaired people who use screen readers to access the Web and read the pages cannot see the images and, instead of listening to a relevant image description, they’ll hear… nonsense.

Usability and accessibility are equally important as design and optimization. Strangely enough images are better for usability. They give focus to the design and when properly optimized they provide for less cluttered website content. The problems appear when the images slow down the loading times, but with the use of CSS loading times should not be a big concern.

As search engines prefer fast loading sites it is easy top understand why good coding and optimization are so important. Poor coding raises many other problems aside loading times and might increase costs when you need website updates, especially when your website administrator is not the one who created your site.

Mihaela Lica used to be a military journalist, worked six years as a freelance reporter for the Romanian National Radio Station (ROR) and four years in the Public Relations Direcorate of the Romanian Ministry of Defense. Since 2002 she is a PR consultant in Germany. For more SEO articles visit ewritings.

Seven Often-Missed SEO Opportunities

Article printed from SEO-News: http://www.seo-news.com
HTML version available at: http://www.seo-news.com/archives.html

Seven Often-Missed SEO Opportunities
By Donald Nelson (c) 2007

If you have good content and present it in a reasonable way,
then you have an excellent chance of achieving good positions in
search engine queries for your main keywords and keyword
phrases. You don’t have to resort to any trickery to get your
site noticed. However, many web designers and web masters fail
to take advantage of opportunities to get high search engine
rankings by mishandling a few crucial components of their web
pages.  Here is a list of the seven most frequently missed
search engine optimization opportunities:

1. You’ve Got to Display Your Text as Text!

This sounds elementary, but it is not. Many designers want their
site to look good and replace headlines with gif images. The
headlines (or headers) are one of the most important elements on
any printed page. If you want to know what a magazine article is
all about, then you just have to glance at the headline and the
sub-headings to get a good idea. Similarly, search engines place
great importance on headers, which are usually marked with the
html codes <H1> <H2> or <H3>. If you are selling blue widgets
and want to be found in the search engines by people who make
the query “blue widgets” then you should put these words in a
text headline, properly marked, at the top of your page.

Some website building programs often render entire paragraphs of
text as images. A person viewing such a page will be able to
read it, but a search engine’s robot will not see the text. So,
check your web pages, and if vital text is being replaced by
graphic images, then it is better to substitute the images with
text.

2. Put a Good Amount of Text on Your Pages

It’s not just headlines that count, body text is also needed.
It’s true that a picture is often worth 1000 words, but
following this strategy is not good when it comes to search
engine optimization.  If your page is about blue widgets, then
an opening headline saying “Get the Best Blue Widgets from the
ACME Widget Company” is a good start, and a picture of a blue
widget would be OK, but why stop there?

People come to the web looking for information. They come to
find a solution to their problem or to find something that will
benefit them in some way. If it takes you a few paragraphs or
even a whole page to explain all the benefits that your widgets
offer, then by all means add that text to your page. It will
help your users, and in the process you will be repeating your
keywords and phrases again which in turn will tell the search
engines that this page is truly about blue widgets. So, more
text is good for search engine recognition and for the end users
alike.

3.  Don’t Use the Same Title Tags on All the Pages

Title tags are even more important than headlines in letting the
search engines understand what your web page is all about. The
title tag is displayed as the first line of text in the blue row
at the top of the browsing window. The code for the tag is in
the <head> section of the html document and is labeled
<title></title>.

Normally you will want your site to rank well for a variety of
phrases and keywords. You can’t stuff all of these keywords and
search phrases in one headline or in one title tag. It will
cause “indigestion” for both your viewers and for the search
engines. A better strategy is to organize your website into
different pages, with each page emphasizing a certain aspect of
your activity.

In fact, most websites are built this way. But the problem is
that instead of emphasizing the unique aspect of each particular
page with a properly crafted title tag, many websites repeat the
same tag on all the inner pages. This is truly a missed
opportunity to get ranking for a large number of different
keyword phrases. So, don’t miss this one: make a separate title
tag for each of your pages

4. Don’t Try to Do Your Branding in the Title Tag

Unless you are already well known it makes no sense to overly
emphasize your company name in the title tag. People are not
searching for the XYWZ MP3 Player Company. They are searching
for MP3 players. The first words in a title tag are the most
important. If you are Coca-Cola, then maybe it makes sense to
have these as the first words, but if you are yet-to-be-famous
then it makes more sense to put your most important keywords and
keyword phrases in the forefront of your title tags. Your
company’s logo at the top of the pages can do the branding for
you, but leave the title tag for the more important task of
being found in search engine queries. You can consult my
previous article “How to Write Title Tags”,
http://www.a1-optimization.com/how-to-write-title-tags.htm , for
more suggestions.

5. Your Link Structure Should Be Easy for Search Engines to
Follow

Even if you have great text and well-written headlines and a
unique title tag on each of your pages, it will not do you that
much good if all of your pages are not indexed by the search
engines. Normally a search engine robot will visit one of your
pages and then look for more links and if it finds those links
it will visit those pages and add them to the search engine’s
data base or index. If your links are easy to follow then all
of your inner pages will end up in the search engine index and
will be displayed when they match queries made by searchers.

Some site navigation structures are not search-engine friendly.
Links found in java-script, which is used in many drop-down
menus, may not be followed by the robots. Similarly, links on
image maps (particular segments of graphic images) may also be
missed by the robots.

The best way to make sure that your links are followed by the
robots is to make a simple text navigation menu at the bottom of
your pages. This kind of navigation bar can supplement your drop
down menu or other navigation system and it has multiple
benefits. It helps the search engines follow the links, and it
reminds your users, as they reach the bottom of the page, where
they can go next. On top of that, it helps you with opportunity
number 6.

6. Use Your Site’s “Anchor” Text to Your Advantage

Just as the title tags and headlines give a good indication
about the content of your pages, so do the descriptive words in
the internal links on your website. The clickable portion of a
site’s text links are known as “anchor text.”  Instead of having
all of your anchor text read “Click Here,” find a way to put the
words “mp3 Player,” “Blue Widgets,” “Illinois Real Estate” or
whatever your keywords are in the text links of your site.

Once again this works to the advantage of your readers as well
as giving the search engines better information about the
content of your pages. The more descriptive your text links
are, the better they are for your users. In fact, one of the
best methods of site navigation is to refer to the relevant
pages of your site from within the text on your page, linking to
the pages using descriptive keywords.

7. Use Keywords in Your File Names

Instead of naming your files as if they didn’t matter, such as
page1.html, page2.html, put your keywords and keyword phrases in
your file names. If you do a search on Google for any particular
item, you will see that wherever your search keyword appears it
is listed in the Google results in bold text. Usually you will
see this bold text in the title that is displayed, and in the
descriptive text that Google displays underneath the title. You
will also see it in the URL. If  you already have some of your
keywords in your domain name, then that is helpful. But even if
you don’t, you can still make file names such as
www.xyzwcompany/blue-widgets.html .

Do the keywords have to be separated by hyphens? Once again if
you look at Google results you will see keywords in file names
are displayed as bold text even if they are part of a longer
stream of text. This is a process known as stemming, where the
search engine can recognize keywords within longer text blocks.
Still, I personally like to use hyphens just to make sure!

So, check your web pages and do whatever you can to help both
search engines and your end users enjoy and benefit from their
contact with your web pages. Take advantage of these seven SEO
opportunities to improve your site’s performance.
================================================================
Donald Nelson is a search engine optimization specialist. His
SEO company A1-Optimization provides affordable search engine
optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com), website
copywriting, article marketing and other web promotion services.
================================================================


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How to gain a good page ranking on the major search engines

What is the secret for gaining a high page ranking in the major search engines? In essence, it’s nothing more complicated than doing what the search engines want you to do. In other words, it’s making things easy for the robots when they come crawling around your site.

Let’s talk first principles.

One.
The search engines don’t operate for the benefit of webmasters. Their main function is to provide good information to the public at large. This means that any website you submit to them must reach their ‘good content’ criteria. Therefore, to achieve a high ranking, it is imperative that your website has better, more illuminating content than your competitors.

Two.
Search engine robots are pretty rigid in their approach to sites. The robot crawls your HTML from top to bottom. Given this, it is important that the first stick of body copy it comes across (the stuff your readers also see) contains copy which is relevant to, and reflects: (a) the Title of your web page and, (b) the meta keywords and meta description phrases contained in the "Head-tag" of your HTML.

To put it simply, the first few lines of copy will often be grabbed by the bots and used as a description of your site in their listing. So, if this copy says nothing in particular about your products or services, then you’ll be banished to page 97.

Three.
Some webmasters are obsessed by keywords. They drive themselves nuts attempting to coin exactly the right set of words with which to describe their site. This approach is essentially flawed. It’s not keywords you want, but key phrases.

Allow me to explain. Let’s say that you are in the market for a good book on copywriting. You open Google search and you type in….what? Copywriting? Not really, because that will result in approximately one-and-a-half million entries from copywriters looking for work. Thus, the obvious thing is to type the phrase Books on Copywriting, which will cut the list to about half. But this list will largely be relevant to what you are looking for.

Research shows that people generally use phrases in their search requests - they rarely employ a single word. It makes sense, then, to populate your meta keywords with phrases you feel people will employ in their search for products or services.

And the easiest way to figure out what key phrases are optimal for your products, is to ask yourself what phrases people would use to find you, then try them out on the search engines.

One other point worth mentioning about keywords and phrases is that some search engines - Google, for instance - no longer take them into account at all! On the other hand, many others do. So it is generally better to incorporate them.

Four.
The "title tag" in your website HTML is the phrase you choose to name your site. The general rule in framing your title is: ‘what’s right for people is generally wrong for search engines’. Essentially, you should try to incorporate your major key phrases into the "title tag". Just make a list of them and try to incorporate them in the title.

The fact is it really doesn’t matter whether your site title is a million miles away from your own name, or the actual name of your business. It’s simply a device for gaining the attention of the bots.

A title tag can contain up to twenty words; but more doesn’t mean better. Eight to twelve well chosen words is more than sufficient. For best results, the first (short) phrase of the title tag should be geared towards the human reader, while the remainder can be key words aimed at the bot. Bear in mind that the search engine will display only the first few words of the title tag anyway (whatever suits their house-style).

Five.
It’s a terrible old cliche, but with robots, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. As mentioned above, the crawler will grab the first thing it comes across and then use it to describe your site. Good enough reason to make the very first paragraph on your site as key-phrase rich as you can. Indeed, the first para should recap and enlarge upon all the material in your title and meta tags.

All right, this first paragraph also has to be read by your visitors, so it has to make sense. Writing this para so that it is acceptable to both robot and human is an art in itself. But perseverance can pay large dividends insofar as search engine placement is concerned.

In addition, your opening para should be designated by an H1 paragraph tag so that its importance is obvious to the bot. If you hand-flog your HTML, just drop in "H1-tag" and "H1 end-tag" at front and back of the paragraph.

Six.
Now a word or two about how often you should post your site to search engines. Some authorities believe that if you post too often, your efforts may be seen as spam by the engines and you’ll be banned. On the other hand, it seems to be the consensus that you should post every time you make changes to pages or add pages.

Generally speaking, whenever you tweak your site - particularly the index page, you should post straight away. The search engines seem to like changes and they react accordingly by shoving you farther to the front of the listings. The more you do, the better they like it.

If all of this leaves you somewhat cold, not to mention baffled, you may be wiser to employ a professional Search Engine Optimizer. Somebody who knows what they are doing. The modest cost could save you a lot of heartache.

And that’s that. If this has been useful, maybe you’ll let me know. But if it seems that I’ve been teaching you to suck eggs, perhaps you’ll let me know that also.

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Web Content Is Vital To Having an Effective Web Site

An appealing design will pull people into your web site, but it’s the content that will make them stick and become buyers. In other words: Pictures tell, but words sell. That’s why your content is one of the most important elements of your web site.

Outlining a clear strategy for your content is the initial step to creating effective content for your web site. First, identify what you want to accomplish, what information it will include and how the content will be organized.

Your site should provide information your prospects need to know to buy from you plus information you want them to know that will convince them to buy from you. Need-to-know-type content for potential customers might include information about your company, products/services, customers and testimonials.

Information that you want them to know might include work samples, frequently asked questions, press releases, reports, articles and other material that can educate them about your business. And don’t forget to include a clear and effective marketing message that will convert visitors into buyers. After all, isn’t that the primary reason for having a web site?

While your content must cater to site visitors, it should also be strategically developed for the best performance with search engines. So be sure to include the right keywords in your regular text, meta tags, headings, etc. The goal is to make your content appealing to site visitors and search engines. If you optimize your content effectively, you can keep a steady stream of free traffic flowing to your web site.

Web Content Writing Tips

One of the most important things to remember when writing content is this: Keep it simple and clear. Most people find it 30 times harder to read text on a computer screen than on paper. Also, site visitors tend to skim over web content, focusing on headlines, bold text and links. So be sure to format your web content so the information is easy for people to find, read and understand.

Here are seven smart ways to create effective Web content:

1. Be concise.
Cut out extra words in sentences, get to the point and express what you need to say quickly.

2. Be conversational.
Don’t use complicated words or business language no one outside your industry will understand. Just write the way you talk, so your copy will convey a friendly, comfortable and confident tone.

3. Write in small chunks.
Group ideas by topics and present them in small, manageable chunks of information. Keep your sentences as short as possible and vary the lengths so you hold readers’ interest. Then add descriptive, bold headings that will make the content easier to scan.

4. Give good information.
Most people go online to find information about their hobbies, products or other interests. Don’t waste their time by placing useless, self-serving content on your site. Make sure you provide information that’s not only interesting, but also educational and enriching. (In fact, many search engines won’t consider listing sites into their databases if they lack useful information.)

5. Use descriptive links.
Go beyond the typical "click here" link on your Web pages. Try something like: "Take our demo," "Get a sample," or "Order now!" Not only is this more engaging, but it can enhance your performance with search engines.

6. Link to complementary Web sites.
Include links to Web sites that offer supplementary (not competing) information. This will not only benefit your site visitors, but it also can boost your search engine ranking.

7. Keep your content fresh.
Keep the information on your site interesting and updated so visitors will have a reason to come back.

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