From the category archives:
Google PageRank
How do you Improve your Google Ranking?
Now that we have (haven’t we?) finally buried the myth behind custom web design vs template customization by showing you how every web designer custom or not uses some form of template regardless and that the only real difference is in the tremendous amount of money you’ll pay to have a site custom made, may be we can now move on to search engine optimization and show you how to generate some real traffic over to them pages; after all aesthetics have no real relevance in search.
In this post Dyfed Lloyd Evan gives you some real insight on tuning-up your site’s PR and explains in layman’s terms how all that works and shows you lots of other helpful hints on how to publicize your site.
For the moment, at least, it seems that Google has won the ’search engine wars’. The search behemoth now has over 78% of the search engine market cornered. This means that 78% of all searches performed on the internet are done via Google.
At the heart of Google’s strategy to delivering search results is an algorithm called ‘Page Rank‘. This is named after Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and is an attempt at measuring the popularity of a web page based, primarily, on the number and quality of links coming into a site. It is this algorithm that, ultimately, determines your site’s rankings within Google’s search results.
How Does Google Work? Over the years many website owners have tried to claim (some even doing so in court) that Google’s algorithm was somehow ‘unfairly’ keeping them from the top of the search engine results. The truth is that Google, as a private company, is not beholden to the millions of website owners who all want their sites to rank well in the search engines. Rather, Google is beholden to its stock-holders and needs to be seen as delivering value to them.
Google needs to earn profits and the company does this by selling advertising. The company has determined that the best way to deliver value for its advertisers is to have the best and most relevant websites be the ones that are easiest to find on the web. Thus Google’s revenues from advertising are tied to Google’s website ranking systems.
What’s Google’s Real relevance in Search? The question of Google’s real relevance in terms of how much search and other traffic comes to a webstie has been a vexed one. I asked this question of a number of my colleagues. We all have large websites in different domains and we pooled our information for the first 6 months of 2008 to arrive at the following figures…
Total search traffic 54.8% of which:
53.7% Google Search Traffic
40.2% Other main search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Windows Live etc)
6.1% Other search engines (the tiny ones)
The remaining 45.2% of our traffic all came from link sources: articles, blogs, recommendations, forum posts and links from people referring our websites.
So, only just over half the web traffic comes from the search engines and almost half comes from other links! However, the good news is that the way to garner more search engine traffic and more general ‘link referral’ traffic is one and the same!
How to Rank Well As was mentioned above, Google’s ranking system works with both the number and quality of in-bound links. One of the best ways of getting these links is to write and submit articles. Many article directories have excellent page rank and lots of site visitors. This means that submitting articles and including your URLs in them are a great way of gaining more links to your site. But they’re also a wonderful, direct, way of getting traffic to your site (remember the traffic figures above).
There are, however, a few key SEO considerations to take into account when writing your articles.
Article Links and SEO One big advantage of writing articles is that you can define your own ‘anchor text‘. This is the text in the link that defines what the person looking at the link sees. It also gives the search engine spider following the link an indication of what the page it’s navigating to is all about. This is why you should never, ever, put something like ‘click here’ in your links!
You link text should be related to the subject of the page you’re linking to, as this makes it more relevant to the search engines. Now, if at all possible the text of your links should also match the key words you are targeting on your web pages as these give the keywords more relevance and will improve your rankings for them.
Also, the more competitive the keyword you are targeting the more work you will have to put into ranking for that term. Indeed, if you are just starting and a keyword is very competitive (’computer’, for example) then you may never, realistically, be able to rank for it. But if you target a keyword like ‘extreme computer construction’ you are far more likely to be ranked for that term. Be clever and don’t try and bite off more than you can chew.
Indeed, the more competitive the keyword you are targeting the more work you will have to put into ranking for that keyword. In this case it may well take you many weeks before you will notice any effects from your article writing efforts.
But for less competitive keywords you may notice a jump of several tens of positions in your rankings with as few as 3 articles. In this case, you get out what you are willing to put in.
One thing to note is that Google takes not of all the link text that comes through to your page. If you have more than 60% of the links with exactly the same text this marks-up a red flag an your rankings may well drop. As a result you should vary the link text and you also need to alter the text surrounding the links.
Given enough time and commitment you can use article marketing to elevate any single web page on your website into multiple top spots in Google’s SERP rankings. However, this does mean that you need to write and publish articles on a daily basis. Few people have that level of commitment to their websites.
About the Author
Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Articles Directory where you can freely submit high quality articles. If you really want high quality back-links to your sight then you need to check out his free eCourse on How to Maximize your Web Traffic.
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A Closer Look at Flash: When Use It?
In a previous post, Top 10 Things Flash Developers Don’t Want You to Hear“, I discussed a number of reasons why I thought it might be wise to reconsider the whole idea of having an all Flash website. One of my biggest concerns had to do with Flash inhibiting Google’s ability to crawl the content. While I have never argued the possibility of making Flash content search engine friendly I do appose the notion that this is some how not even a problem nor that meeting all of these extra hurtles is worth the amount of time and extra money you’ll spend on optimizing Flash sites the right way vs plain old HTML. Notwithstanding in this article we will discuss a number of cases where it is actually practical to utilize this technology.
Article: When Use Flash? The following question is the sorest and the most disputable as for the usage of Flash. So, let us discuss how this technology is applicable for creating Flash sites. At first we have to define the purposes of a site, because they are to determine the choice of technology for creating the site. If your site is intended for selling some product or service, especially, if competition is intense, creating a Flash site is not cost-effective.
This is due to that reason that Flash is not indexed in full by search engines, that is why it will be just impossible or it will cost big money to make these sites occupy the first positions by specific keywords. In such a case an html site is much better suited. Therefore, a Flash Internet shop selling lots of various products is nonsense and rival non-Flash sites with correct search engine optimization will easily overcome regarding the traffic and hence regarding the volume of sales.
Of course, there are Flash Internet shops which function effectively, but most often these are the shops selling specialized products and belonging to large and well-known companies, which do not need heavy advertising. For instance, there is the site adobe.com, which has the like narrow specialization of its products, and those who use their products, as a matter of fact, already know where to buy them.
There is one more type of sites, which offer users a specific product; these are promo-sites (sites designed to present some concrete product or service). There both Flash and html can be used. Again everything depends on the purposes. Let us assume that we want to advertise a new brand of a cellular telephone and we want to do it extremely elegantly. In such a case we need a Flash site, but only on condition that our Flash promo-site will have visitors, but they are evidently not going to come to us from search engines. That is why users are often stimulated to visit a promo-site from producers’ websites or by means of advertising.
This type of sites has a small life-cycle, because they are most often created to demonstrate new features of a definite product. Since new models are continually being created, the old promo websites lose their significance, that is why a website must get its visitors as much as possible interested. This can be achieved most impressively by creating a Flash promo website.
The following type of sites is a forum. The situation with forums is very similar to the situation with internet shops. If a forum does not belong to the company producing a specific product (such forums are very scarce) or it is not created for a very limited number of individuals, but created to attract as many people as possible, there is no need to create a Flash forum. This also concerns blogs.
I am not going to divide websites into groups, I will just do their very brief survey and say from my personal point of view where else it is appropriate to use Flash:
* Chats, because chats are often tied to definite resources and they do not need any additional promotion, and if it is an avatar chat, using Flash is the most suitable choice.
* Galleries, if this gallery belongs to one definite artist, has a small amount of text information and directed at a select circle of users.
* Business card site usually has minimum information content, most often there are the address of the company, contact information (telephone number) and some general information about the activities of the company, that is why original decoration made using Flash will be quite to the point.
* Online portfolio, because this will give an opportunity to make its appearance very bright and make it more dynamic and interesting.
* Guestbooks can also be made with the help of Flash.
I have listed the main things, but there are many more hybrid websites, which combine in themselves various features. The major point to be taken into consideration here is the following: if you want to attract a lot visitors to your resources (especially if your website is developed for selling some products or services) sparing the expenses or completely avoiding them, it is better to make such websites without using Flash or using Flash partially (use html for all text information and Flash for some elements).
Anyway, whatever your website’s purpose is - portfolio, gallery, business website, ecommerce shop, etc. - it is not necessary to order custom web design and hire a flash programmer. There are much simpler and modern solutions nowadays. I am talking about Flash Templates and Flash CMS templates. They are pre-made Flash web pages that require making additional changes to suit your needs and preferences. As a rule, flash web templates are easy-to-use, suitable both for newbies and professionals, and allow launching a website in no time. I recommend a large gallery of Flash web templates at FlashMint.
About the Author
Trenty Fox - Marketing Assistant at FlashMint.com. FlashMint is a leader in an industry which offers Flash Web Templates with high-grade graphics, thought-out structure, remarkable flash and sound effects.
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Has Your Website Been Google Slapped?
Getting to the top of the search engines has never been easy and the bad news is that it has gotten even harder, especially if you are trying to peak Mt. Google
Recently, with respect to information quality, Google raised the bar even higher with another algorithm tweak that effectively reshuffled (and in some cases evaporated) page rank across thousands of web pages.
Thus if your website’s PR (or that of its inner pages) recently stole quietly away in the middle of the night with nary a goodbye take consolation in the knowledge that you are not alone; this calamity has befallen countless others.
The latest Google algorithm tweak/update has been pretty widespread and non-discriminatory in nature, targeting both new sites and well established veteran sites too.
In the good ole days it used to be that a gray page-rank bar was indicative of a website/web page that had been banned from the Google index but that seems to no longer be the case. Lately it would appear that being grayed-out merely reflects a webpage/website that is under probation (of course in certain cases a gray PR band could actually reflect a banned website/web page).
So what does this all really mean?
Google Web Paradise
Understanding Google’s goals and objectives is fundamental to search-engine optimizing your website effectively and correctly within their guidelines. The first thing you need to appreciate is that online search is a business. Google is Top Dog in the search engine business for two very simple reasons:
1. Google returns the most accurate results for any given search query.
2. Of all the search engines, Google has the fastest retrieval rate for almost all queries.
Being number one for both the above listed parameters obviously has major advantages; it ensures that more people flock to use your search engine and, as has been proven time and time again, where the crowds gather the advertisers hover not far behind.
Advertisers want to get the best bang for their buck so they will naturally tend to spend their dollars where they can get the greatest percentage of targeted and relevant eyeballs; which means advertising on the major search engines (of which surprise, surprise) Google is the leader!
Google’s domination of online search is a tangential derivation of the saying “The Richer Get Richer,” because as Google gets better and leaves the other search engines floundering in their dust, more and more people (and advertisers) will naturally tend to gravitate to them!
The New SEO Horizon
The first thing that should be understood is that the debate about the existence of the Google Sandbox has been laid to rest once and for all. It exists and has become even more expansive as well as having gotten more rigid!
As of January 2005, Google had over 100,000 servers with which to store data in its cache index. The cache index is where Google stores a copy of every page that the googlebot crawls on the internet.
Those web pages that eventually make it into the Google Primary Index (the index that displays the resulting listings in response to a query) are the pages that have been evaluated as most relevant and qualified for that particular query.
Web pages or websites that Google evaluates to be comprised of largely duplicate material that is already in its index are relegated to the supplemental index (the backburner). The supplemental index contains web pages and/or websites that Google considers, for all intents and purposes, to be irrelevant.
In other words you do not want your website to end up in the supplemental index because nobody will ever get to see it!
In 2006 Google suffered a very major server-overload crisis. Since then they have acquired several more servers, but this new algorithm tweak/update tends to suggest that they are leaning much more towards the principle of efficiency-and-quality versus volume-and-quantity.
In essence it appears that Google is adopting an approach geared towards maximizing efficiency of storage and organization of data. This by its very nature means restricting the amount of content that gets crawled, cached and eventually indexed (i.e., saves server space) as opposed to trying to accommodate every single piece of data that is drifting across the internet.
This certainly may go some distance explaining the zeal and passion with which they executed operation “gray band” that affected thousands of websites and web pages.
Recovering From Being G-Slapped
If your website/web pages have recently been demoted (loss of page rank) or now shamefully display a grayed-out PR bar where once a shimmering green existed, then your website has indeed been Google slapped!
So where do you go from there?
There’s a saying that states “understanding the nature of the beast is the first step in divining its true intent” (which is just a fancy way of saying: if you know what makes something tick then you’ll be better able to predict its future actions.”
Keeping that in mind, it is possible to deduce the following aspects from the May 2007 Google update:
1. A gray PR band will be the norm for all new websites and web pages; in other words think “probation period.” The length of time the PR bar remains grayed-out for any particular website/web page is dependent upon a number of factors which include:
a) How unique the content on a web page is. Pages that boast highly original and unique content will tend to be released from the gray zone quicker.
b) A web page that has a lot of unique traffic will have a shorter probation period (note that the origin of that traffic is something the search engines factor in to rule out sneaky play by individuals attempting to game the search engines).
c) Links! Links! Links! Yes, when it comes to SEO it is impossible to ignore the link factor. A page that “naturally” acquires a good number of topically related links will experience a shorter probation period.
d) Greater link activity will increase the importance of the destination page whereby such a web page will tend to attain higher PR quicker. This makes sense because a hyperactive links denotes popularity (websites that are popular are so because people find them useful).
e) The amount of time people spend on your site is also an important parameter that the search engines take into account. People tend to spend more time on websites that they find useful and the search engines can determine that fact through the use of sophisticated tracking scripts.
Bottom line: It is becoming increasingly difficult to game the search engines (the use of blackhat techniques) as their algorithms get smarter and more sophisticated.
The May 2007 Google update amply illustrates that Google is aggressively gunning for its vision of Web Paradise which by necessity means smacking down hard on websites that offer little useful function to that vision!
Simply put, if you wish your website to advance up the SERPs you need to make it user oriented. Visitor use and appreciation of a website appears to be the single strongest factor in determining that website’s eventual position on the SERPs in Google’s brave new Web Paradise!
Internet Marketing Online
About the Author
Ba Kiwanuka is the webmaster of http://www.internetbusinessmart.com
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How To Be A Successful Web 2.0 Puppetmaster
One of the key characteristics of Web 2.0 is participation, collaboration and moderation through the use of web applications. Web 2.0 sites derive their power from the human connections and network effects from this characteristic that is made possible, and grow in effectiveness the more people use them.
The idea of “participation, collaboration and moderation” can take many forms. If you look back history, bulletin boards are one form, online forums are another, online multiplayer games, content management systems (e.g. Wikis, Joomla), dating sites and classifieds as well. If not for features that enable multiple users to create their own space within a website via registering accounts or at least leave a message (like a comment in a blog), the communication culture would have been one-way (from the webmaster to the visitors) and remain stuck in 1.0.
Why would a webmaster want to go Web 2.0? We learned that social networkers want to expand their personal network of online friends. On the other hand, the webmaster desires to build up a core group of active participants who unconsciously help to sustain the ‘liveliness’ and therefore the longevity of the website and its agenda or interests while the overall database of users expand. In this manner, a lot of the effort that goes into building the database (or list) becomes very much hands-off for the webmaster. There’s leverage. This is also where moderation comes in.
The role of the webmaster naturally becomes that of the moderator, whose job is to maintain some semblance of order (but not to the point of creating a restrictive environment) and general site maintenance. It gets better when the webmaster can promote participants into moderators themselves, and more and more s/he becomes the “silent puppetmaster” behind the scene without doing much. It may not be easy, but the whole mindset of being a moderator is to gain confidence in just “letting it be” and letting his/her site runs by itself.
Now that the webmaster’s motivation is addressed, s/he must find ways to avoid competition by finding new twists to contribute to the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Much as new sites keep popping up in recent months, somehow no 2 sites are made the same and they certainly enjoy a good amount of traffic anyway. It would be better when you can boil down social networking to the context of a specific niche, like a site to exchange Mexican recipes or talk about Ferrari car accessories or business opportunities in Central Asia. You can better target the type of people you are looking for and it also gives them a sharper sense of purpose to engage with and within your site.
At the end of the day, social networking is all about sharing valuable content and making friends. The successful Web 2.0 webmaster is one who knows how to tap on this human desire to the fullest and consistently encourages such a desire to grow within the culture of the social network he has created by offering further privileges for more prominent members. Really, there’s no better way for them to build up credibility and make their personalities known than to be consistently ‘alive’ and ‘happening’ on the Net. From the SEO standpoint of view, you can also accumulate more backlinks and subsequently more traffic to your social networking site.
About the Author
Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at Internet Mastery Center.
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Post Regularly Because…
Keeping people interested in your blog, whether it is a business or personal blog, is key to attracting a lot of regular visitors. Many blogs have died because people have just lost interest. The main reason for the lack of interest is simply a lack of posts by the blogger. Regular, frequent posting, which will boost your blog’s ranking in search engines, is essential to the survival of any blog.
You might be asking yourself, what is frequent posting? How many blog entries should I make on a given week? How do I make frequent consistently good posts? What are the reasons for me to post frequently? In this newsletter, we will go over all of the above.
What is frequent posting?
Frequent blog posting is posting enough to keep your readers interested. Obviously, people will not want to come back to a blog that hasn’t been updated in months. They want to see consistent posting so that they know coming back to check the blog next week to see if there are more posts won’t be a waste of time.
How many blog entries should I make each week?
This is one of the tougher questions to answer. It really depends on the purpose of your blog. If it’s a personal blog, a weekly or twice weekly update is an excellent idea. A political/sports/music/religion blog should have 3-4 posts per week. Business blogs should have at least 2 posts, but preferably 4 each week.
The thing to remember is that quality counts. Posting frequently just for the sake of posting frequently tends to result in subpar posts which people won’t care about. It is important to find a balance?”frequent, quality posts that won’t result in burnout on your part. Why create 4 poor quality posts each week when you could post 2 quality posts per week?
How do I create quality postings on a consistent basis?
It’s all about following a consistent pattern of writing. Maybe you’re not a natural writer and this is difficult. That’s why we’ll give you an outline to help you.
1. Pick a topic that is interesting to you and to your readers. Maybe if your blog is a personal blog, you could write about the latest happenings in Hollywood. 2. Carefully think about what you’ll write about the topic. It makes it easy to make quality blog postings if you know exactly what you’ll write. Plot out everything about the post before even beginning to write it. 3. Before writing your content, pick out some keywords that are relevant to your blog. If you naturally use keywords throughout your post, you will please search engine spiders which will get your blog ranked higher on search engines. Your visitors won’t mind the use of keywords if they are used in a tasteful way. 4. Begin writing your post. Don’t limit yourself to a particular amount of words. Just do what’s natural. And if any blog post is hard for you, just take a timeout and relax. You should be able to finish the post a bit later on, after you’ve had some time to think things through, you should be able to finish the post with no problems.
Why is frequent posting important?
Blogs are meant to be outlets for individuals or businesses. They are used to get an opinion out on something and to engage readers. Readers need to have something that makes them want to keep coming back to a blog. That something is usually quality, frequent posts.
Gaining and maintaining visitors isn’t the only reason to post often in your blog. Catching the eye of a search engine?”and achieving a high ranking?”is another valid reason for posting frequently. Most likely, each posting in your blog features some keywords or keyword phrases scattered throughout it. Logic says that the more natural keywords you have on a blog, the better. Thus, the more posts you make on your blog, the more keywords you have on there. And the more keywords you have, the more likely a search engine bot is to crawl your site. The more your site is crawled by bots, the more likely it is that you will have a high ranking on a search engine.
Frequent blog posting can be easy as long as the person who is posting takes the time to plot out what they’ll write about. So take a few minutes to think about your post and then just do it!
About the Author
Len Hutton is a information publisher specialising in helping people start their own home based business. Get a no cost video showing you step by step how to set up a niche ebook empire at www.nicheresidualincomes.com Keep your eye on residual income business opportunity regularly to learn and earn. http://residualincomebusinessopportunity.blogspot.com/
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How Can Interactivity Increase Conversions & Make You Money?
In the last article (See Resources for details) we discussed several ways to enhance your users experience and how having a site that is user friendly is so conducive to having pages that are also easy to crawl and index. This time we’ll discuss the central elements of the ideal Web 2.0 ready site and they are collaboration and interactivity. I want you to really focus on these two key concepts in particular because they really are an essential must have in the Web. 2.0 era
The phenomenal popularity of sites such as these has had more and more organizations that are doing business online reexamining the status quo. Consumers now simply expect more than just a one-way conversation or a static mandate. Think about it, why should anyone follow what your have to say if you are not willing to listen to what they have to say to you in return. Consumers prefer to interact; they want to know what other customers have to say about your product or service. That means you have to facilitate a place for your customers to express their point of view, start a conversation, comment on a particular topic or simply ask a question. With that in mind, you need to start thinking about your online presence as an outlet or podium that regularly encourages and endorses an entrenched sense of community among its users.
But how can interactivity increase conversions and make you money? If you read the last article you already know about the importance of having good content. Search engines love content. They want the foremost authority on any given subject. In other words, they want a site that knows the most and is the most reputable on a topic. Now we need to look instead at what we don’t know. We need to gain a better understanding of what our customer’s wants and needs are. That is where interaction and collaboration come in.
Tools like web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) which help you see what’s happening on your site by determining which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, what pages they looked at, visit durations, where they left from and who referred them, only tell you half the story. Web analytics tools are great for answering questions like when, where and how. But what they don’t tell you is the who and the why. Only by feeding and growing the interactivity of your online presence can you gain a better understanding of your customer’s wants and needs. Moreover, giving your customers a voice will you help you better tailor your product to suit them.
If for instance you are looking at launching a new promotional campaign you can use the feedback on your site from your prospects so as to test the idea before you launch. You can even find out how people currently perceive your small business. This type of research is invaluable in helping you improve and make the right decisions concerning your online business. As they say: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Having an interactive site does not have to cost you and arm and a leg either, there are plenty of low-cost solutions out there, one of which I will be telling you about in the upcoming weeks. However, the key here is you have to facilitate the means to carry that conversation. You need to open that dialogue to get insight into what’s really working or isn’t working on your site
In the upcoming weeks we’ll talk more about these new Web 2.0 trends and also show you the easiest way to launch your own ready-built web 2.0 site. As always please feel free to share your thoughts, comments, feedback and keep checking back for more updates.
Resources:
Is Your Site Search Engine and Users Friendly?
How to Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshotize the Ideal Web 2.0 Site in a Nutshell.
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Is Your Site Search Engine and Users Friendly?
In the last article of this series (see Resources for links), I explained the importance of having regularly updated content on your site. In that same vain, we looked at how that content must be clear, authoritative and more importantly, relevant to your niche. Additionally, I talk about how crucial making your content available through RSS is become with the advance and development of the decentralized information movement. In this article, I’ll discuss two more fundamental characteristic of the ideal Web 2.0 site, and that is that your site must be search engine and user friendly.
As I’m sure you may have already heard, at the center of all this there’s a lot of technology: JavaScript, HTML and XHTML, a bit of dynamic HTML, Ajax, and even some XML (Extensible Markup Language). Don’t worry if you don’t understand all of this (or any of this for that matter) you don’t have to. What I’m about to teach you through this series of articles does not require any knowledge in programming. Anyone can do this and I don’t care if you are selling garbage bags, bartending, teaching disco dancing or working retail. These are all very easy and inexpensive techniques anyone can use to launch their very own Web 2.0 ready site and it can be done in a matter of just minutes.
Building a site with SEO in mind goes Hand-in-Hand with having a site that is user friendly too, in fact you can’t work towards the one without the other. Search engines love feeding web users lots of relevant content, so the more authoritative and relevant your content is, the more likely it will eventually be served. Consequently the better the users experience the better your Ranking. In other words, make pages for users, not for search engines. Hence, you need to figure out your niche and be carefully defined within that niche. In addition you must updated your content regularly and that content must be authoritative.
Now that we understand the significance of having the right content lets talk about the sites structure. First, you must take common-sense steps to ensure that your site helps users find their content easily. For example, is your content organized in an easy-to-read hierarchical layout? Are you using HTML links on every page, and does each page provide internal links in the text to help the search engine crawler find its way around? Does your site offer a site map and do you include a link to the site map somewhere on each page? And last but certainly not least. Do your pages contain relevant information that clearly and accurately describe your content and is that text clear, crisp and legible?
Remember, optimizing your site structure has to be an integral part of the design process and must enhance the overall user experience. Furthermore, pages that are simple to navigate and don’t require much thinking on the end users part, will also be pages that are easy to crawl and index. In reality, SEO is pretty simple, avoid using overzealous SEO practices and think about what’s best for the user. The ideal search engines and user friendly site is all about providing the user with content–rich relevant information and getting them to that information as soon and as easily as possible.
And there you have it. Two more fundamental ingredients of the ideal Web 2.0 ready site; is your site search engine and users friendly? In the upcoming weeks we will be continuing this discussion, as promised, and show you how you can launch your very own ready-built Web 2.0 site. If there’s anything you wish to add on the subject of search engine and users friendly websites please feel free to share your thoughts and comments and keep checking back for more updates.
Resources:
How Can Interactivity Increase Conversions & Make You Money?
How to Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshotize the Ideal Web 2.0 Site in a Nutshell.
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How to Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshotize the Ideal Web 2.0 Site in a Nutshell.
Recently I have been talking a lot about Web 2.0 and the far reaching effects it is had through the whole social media phenomenon. Hugely popular sites and services like (Digg, Blogger and YouTube) attract enormous amounts of audiences by delivering the once impossible, now inevitable opportunity to rant to anyone clear across the world or, discuss your special expertise in a particular niche with those who share a similar interests.
In this series of articles (See Resources for links) I will explain how to apply these new trends and new technologies using very inexpensive techniques and services that do not involve tinkering with the HTML code of your pages themselves so you too can be well informed and able to make every effort to take full advantage of the social media era.
First and foremost, stay fresh! Having just a simple digital brochure (e.g. an online bulletin board of your services, contact page etc) simply doesn’t work anymore. Your site has to have regularly updated content. Nobody likes stale news; similarly, your sites content needs to stay fresh in order to continually hook and delight your primary audience. Moreover as a publisher of information people will want to do business with you if they trust you and one of the best ways to build that trust is to provide the users with relevant clear authoritative content.This involves coming up with a strategy to keep people coming back for the latest and greatest. For example, you could plan to keep up with the latest trends in the home load industry, such as mortgage rate trends, refinancing etcetera. Or you could feature relevant news articles, special promos, tips or tutorials that draw attention to your particular niche. In addition, your plan should provide a checklist with specifics “to do” items essentially saying that you are going to do this many blogs this week, this many podcasts this month, this many videos and keep a regular publishing schedule (remember we’re talking long-term strategy here) so your subscribers will become used to hearing from you and, you’ll be able to gain their trust. So again, your site has to have regularly updated content.
Secondly your content should be made available through RSS (formally “RDF Site Summary”, commonly known as “Really Simple Syndication”) or RSS feed. You don’t need to understand the ins and outs of the RSS protocol (I promised you no tinkering, didn’t I? Though if you want to know more, here is a good place to start), all you need to know is why RSS is becoming so popular and how important it is to make your content available through RSS. Basically, what’s so attractive about RSS (versus bookmarks or even email) is it allows the subscriber to control the delivery of information. In other words, unlike with email, subscribers can limit what they receive to exactly what they want.
If you’ve ever opened your inbox and seen something that looked like spam, walked like spam or quacked like spam I think you can certainly appreciate this. Since users can be counted on to be a little lazy (or would most likely prefer avoiding going all over the place for new information), they’ll just use sites and services like myYahoo or Google Reader that can constantly checks their favorite news sites and blogs for new content. Consequently, as the web becomes more and more decentralized placing media control in users’ hands and allowing them to experience what they want, when they want, your site needs to adjust to this decentralize nature and be present wherever your target market is looking. So, whether you are posting up article regularly, video blogging or podcasting, whatever the case maybe, you need to be positioned to allow syndication on your site and that means making your content available through an RSS feed.
In the upcoming weeks I will be talking more about these new Web 2.0 trends and also show you the easiest way to launch your own ready-built web 2.0 site. Likewise, please feel free to share your thoughts and comments and make sure to check back for more updates.
Resources:
Is Your Site Search Engine & User Friendly?
How Can Interactivity Increase Conversions & Make You Money?
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The often missed, but essential practices of SEM and SEO
Search Engine Marketing and Optimization. If you are reading this article you most likely know the basics of what the two mean, but for those who do not or need a refresher…here it goes:
Search Engine Marketing - Typical involves advertising on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and various other search engines. Programs like Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Search Marketing, and more are typically used in conjunction with start up websites and even established ones :) .
Search Engine Optimization -Optimization is completely different from Search Marketing in that Optimization is all about your website as a whole. Some things to keep in mind are: Does your website utilize xhtml and css standards? Does your website use Alternate text (e.g. 
) ? Are your links relevant to information on your page? These are just a few things to take into consideration when building or maintaining SERP’s (Search Engine Ranking Pages).
To start off, I will discuss the often common missed practices for Search Engine Marketing:
* Time of year - People seem to think that time of year does not matter. By far the worst time to spend most of your money on SEM is towards the end of the year (Christmas, Hanukkah, etc). Some people need to face reality, people are not at their computer’s during this time especially or better yet looking online for your services. Instead, they are spending time with their families, which is a given .
* Too much money spent on advertising - Companies go around spending hundreds of dollars a month on advertising when all their advertising efforts are useless, their marketing steps should begin with their initial design.
* Ads being displayed annoying - How many times have you been to a website and boom an annoying sound starts playing in the background with no on/off switch? How often are you reading a article on a website and the ads get in the way of the text you are reading? How would you feel if your reading was interrupt by someone’s stupid ad being displayed? These are just a few complaints that make a potential reader leave and go somewhere else.
Some common missed practices of Search Engine Optimization include:
* Text is not readable by Search Engines- Numerous businesses today still design their site primarily in Photoshop. While, this might look great from an aesthetic standpoint, from an optimization standpoint its terrible. Search engines cannot understand and/or read text within images or in flash.
* Link farming and invalid links - Newbies to website optimization often look toward link farm agencies to get them inbound and outbound links to their websites to increase their SERP (Search Engine Ranking pages), or the pages that link to a particular website. If search engine optimization were so easy, people would not be getting paid over $100/hour for search engine optimization. However, you do get one thing out of link farming and do you know what that is? Being banned from search engines, that in theory will make you money for free. * Out of date technologies - What is the use of making a website if your not using up to date technologies? You wouldn’t want to create a business and not be able to represent it correctly online? So what’s the point? If your website is a 1990 website built in old-standards of html without anything else why should your potential client trust you or better yet trust your services. They won’t and they shouldn’t, creating a successful isn’t just about creating a website and your done; it’s doing it the right way that counts.
Conclusion - So you’ve seen the benefits of not only building a website from a design standpoint (SEO) correctly, but also how not to burn your business on too much paid advertising like Google Adsense where the ROI isn’t worth what some people spend. If you get anything out of this article, understand that especially for start up businesses spending hundreds of dollars per month just for a handful of clicks is not worth it in the long run, the ROI is not worth it. Remember this before you go to spend hundreds per month on a little three line text ad.
About the Author
Joseph Dickinson, a New Jersey based Web Developer who created JDFreelance.com and the JDFreelance Blog. Currently, I’m a college student studying Computer Information Systems at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania. I work for the U.S. Navy in Philadelphia, PA as a database adminstrator full-time during the summers working with PHP, mySQL backend databases, XHtml, and Css. I love blogging, enjoy your post my blog!
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SEO Technology? Web 2.0? Seo Web Design? What’s Next?
What constitutes the birth of one industry is oftentimes the death of another. With all of the internet buzz words flying around these days like Seo Web Design, Web 2.0, Internet Marketing, Seo Technolgy and a host of other mutant forms of traditional advertising and marketing, understanding the underlying premise is important to gauge where all of this is coming from and where it is going.
I’m not going so far as which came first the chicken or the egg, but the last I knew, communication, content and conversation essentially encased all of the above definitions and was part of any aspect of traditional marketing.
These are the three C’s that take precedence at the forefront of any offshoot. Fundamentally, with exposure being the basis of search engine optimization, blogging, or online marketing, positioning tactics have had to evolve in order to keep in tune with the times. Definitions exist for the sake of categorization, but first critical mass needs to occur for acceptance to result from the masses.
Much in the same what when the acronym for SEO was born. (search engine optimization), now it is as common as the yellow pages (a tried and true advertising from the past) in the minds of consumers. But things continually are getting shaken up and evolving to keep us on our toes in regard to what’s hot and what’s not.
From this vantage point, it appears that good old SEO has taken a backseat to social book marking and blogging. Sure, you could spend hours tweaking pages, getting your meta tags just right, going to 3000 search engines to add your url, but you would be wasting your time. Now all you need is a blog, some creativity and hit the publish button to link bait and reel in some traffic.
In addition, contextual advertising and link baiting have become the new form of generating backlinks and traffic to websites as opposed to reciprocal linking, or strong on page factors. At this rate, press releases may be the next dinosaur to fall prey to the new face of marketing, as it is obviously loaded with conjecture and promotion language, which is a big turn off for most users online.
The modern consumer and online citizen are far more savvy than the blue collar industrial generations that proceeded us. Try getting bombarded on a daily basis from billboards, radio, tv and now online and see if natural evolution doesn’t intercede and dampen the impact. So many choices are appearing at break neck speed faster than we can get a grip. So, quite naturally our BS filters are increasing at an alarming rate as well. People like to be sold, but you can’t make it appear as a sale, this is the new form of advertising. Call it tactful third party referral, the art of the passive close or what have you.
In any case, web etiquette is definitely taking on a new protocol. For example, link building is facing a major face lift, personalized search may be the end of SEO as we know it, at least for those savvy enough to sign up and enable it as well as paid links have now taken the hit with the recent removal from Google’s index for over 60 well known directories . In addition to that the pagerank that we all used to cherish adimately has been reduced to a toolbar ornament as trust rank, website authority and personal pagerank are determining who dominates the SERPs.
It will most definitely be interesting the see the next big thing, whatever it is, and how it affects our communication and interaction as a whole.
In the meantime, go with the flow, enjoy all of the conveniences as they arise, you never know when the things you have just become accustomed to as a result of conditioning, will be condemned obsolete. All I can say at this point is, good luck to newspaper and radio advertising, as well as TV as video, pod casts and other forms of social interaction are becoming commonplace as the internet is booming as the new frontier of business, social interaction and entertainment combined.
About the Author
Jeffrey L. Smith is an seasoned search engine optimization strategist and founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Web Design Company in Chicago.
Jeffrey has been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings fresh optimization
methods and solutions for businesses seeking long-tail organic search engine
placement.
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