7 Things NOT to Waste Your Time On When Doing SEO
Time is precious. They say “time is money,” but I think it’s even more than that. In this post, I would like to talk about the SEO practices that are a complete waste of time.
Before writing the post, I simply sat down and penned my SEO experiences. As a beginner, I used to waste a lot of time on different SEO methods that later on turned out quite useless. So, I made a list of those. I’ve also “interviewed” some of my SEO buddies and included their piece of advice in this post, too. So, what I would like to present to you is our distilled wisdom. Enjoy!
It is NO use:
1. Hanging Out at SEO Blogs/Forums
Ironically, this is what you are doing now, aren’t you? Well, it’s not the same, and let me explain why. There is a difference between CHOOSING to read a blog post or a forum thread that looks really helpful (this is what experienced SEO’s do) and simply reading everything in sight to stay informed about everything at all times.
I remember the days when I used to read every reply in a forum thread that I started, even when I already knew the answer to the question I had asked in the thread. I was just curious! So, guess what, I don’t have the time for curiosity anymore.
Also, one of my SEO buddies had volunteered to moderate an SEO forum. He thought it was gonna be fun, but it turned out to be extremely time-consuming. Well, if you have nothing better to do, you might as well do that.
2. Commenting on SEO Blogs/Forums
First, let me make myself clear and say that I do NOT mean using blog/forum commenting for SEO purposes, I mean using it for commenting purposes. Like, sometimes you’d get caught up in a heated discussion, especially when the “wow, I didn’t know that” stage is over, and you can give your opinion on different SEO matters, and you don’t hesitate to do it. So, this just eats up your valuable time and doesn’t really do anything for you.
3. Thinking That Manual is Better
To all of you perfectionists, double-checkers and sure-makers out there, I’d like to say that manual is seldom better. At least not when it comes to SEO. Many of my SEO friends, including me, say that, as SEO newbies, they had tried to do everything by hand. Partially, that was striving for better quality, and, partially, it was not trusting the SEO tools.
Anyhow, once they did try SEO software, they haven’t ever got back to the olden do-it-yourself ways, ever. The general principle here is, if there IS a tool that can do it FOR you (like, a rank checker), go for it. Will save you loads of time.
4. Submitting to Crappy Article Directoríes
One of the SEO managers I know admitted that she used to spend a lot of time submitting to crappy article directoríes. Later on, she discovered that article marketing was all about quality, not quantity; that it was better to find fewer better-targeted, perhaps even paid directories and submit there.
5. Spinning Content
Another fríend of mine did a lot of article submission, too. But those were not unique articles, but spun articles that were being submitted to hundreds of directoríes on the Web. At some point, he realized that writing and promoting one unique and useful article had a much bigger impact on site rankings, than spamming the Web with hundreds of “clones.”
6. Doing Manual Link Exchange
When I was still a beginner, the way I used to do link building was one link at a time. I would find a site, suggest to exchange links, write “best regards” at the end of each email – Hah, now, when I think about it, it seems just so ridiculous.
I don’t do that any longer, of course. I now use SEO tools like LinkAssistant and SEO SpyGlass to build links. I now sometimes build 100 backlinks a day, with very little effort on my part.
7. Keyword Stuffing
One of the SEO’s, who I have great respect for said that he used to engage in keyword stuffing at the beginning of his career. He just wanted to rank faster for his major keywords, you see.
Well, of course, that affected content quality. His bounce rates went up, and the rankings went down. So, my acquaintance decided to work on interlinking instead! He provided useful links between different pages of his site. This worked both ways: to help SEO and to improve user experience. Users began following those links and, as the result, were staying longer on the site.
So, this is it. Are you practicing any of the above-mentioned techniques? If you are, take our word, they are not worth it! There is a saying that goes like ‘a smart man learns from his mistakes; a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.’ So, be wise and save your precious time!
By Alesya Krush
The Explosion of the Mobile Web…..Is Your Website Ready?
Just a few short years ago, it was a good bet that you would read articles like this one on your PC or laptop. Today, it’s just as likely that you are reading this article on a smartphone or tablet computer. So what’s changed, what happened? The mobile web happened, that’s what – and the Internet will never be the same. So, what’s the mobile web?
Loosely defined, the mobile web is a way of accessing the Internet via a wireless network, using a handheld mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer.
The Explosion Of The Mobile Web
The mobile web is growing at a phenomenal pace, and is forecast to overtake the desktop web in 2014. In other words, more users will access the Internet using a mobile phone rather than a PC for the first time.
Approximately 900 million people currently access the web with mobile phones, compared to 1.4 billion desktop Internet users. In 2014, mobile web users will outpace desktop users (approximately 1.7 billion mobile users to approximately 1.65 billion desktop users). By 2015, the number of mobile web users is expected to increase to 2 billion.
Assuming an annual growth rate of about 2 percent annually between 2010 and 2015 in cell phone subscriptions (77 percent of the world’s population will have cell phone subscriptions in 2010 and 87 percent will have subscriptions in 2015), about 6.35 billion people worldwide will have a mobile phone subscription and approximately 1 out of 3 subscribers (or 2 billion out of 6.35 billion) will be accessing the Internet on mobile phones. (Source: Wikimedia)
And according to the August, 2011 edition of eMarketer, 33 percent of mobile users are looking to access local content relevant to their GPS positioned location.
Is Your Website Ready?
So, what does all of this mean to you? It means more people than ever will be viewing your website through a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer, via a wireless network. It also means that if you want to survive and thrive, you have to adjust and adapt, and make your website mobile web friendly. The good news is, it’s easier than you think.
“Within the Alexa top 1,000 sites, 40.1 percent of all sites are mobile-friendly. These sites represent the world’s most popular web properties, like Google, Facebook and Yahoo!
Beyond the top 1,000, mobile friendliness still holds strong but is not yet as widespread. Of the top 10,000 Alexa sites, 29.7 percent perform well on mobiles. Once the input data is broadened to include the top 500,000 sites, the total number of mobile-friendly sites drops to 19.3 percent.” (Source: mobiThinking.com)
If you haven’t already done so, the very first thing you need to do is bring your website up to speed visually. In other words, you want to make sure that users of mobile devices can view your site optimally.
The quickest and easiest way to do this is to run your site through the MobiReady online testing site. This is a free service that evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards.
The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well your site performs on a mobile device. There are also other tools that will allow you to test your site for mobile readiness. In fact, here are 10 Excellent Tools for Testing Your Site on Mobile Devices.
Personally, I have serious doubts about the accuracy of these types of testing tools. For example, I ran my site through MobiReady, and it gave my site a 2 out of 5 score which, according to their analysis is bad. I got the exact same score before and after I mobil-optimized my site.
Here’s the problem: I’ve had many friends and colleagues of mine, all with different makes and models of smartphones, on a variety of platforms, tell me that my site looks just fine on their phones. So while testing tools may be a useful resource, the true litmus test is what users of mobile devices are seeing – so be sure to ask them.
That being said, there ARE things you can do to mobile-optimize your website.
How To Make Your Website Mobile Compatible 1. Have a fast-loading site. Chances are, most mobile-web users who are using their phones to access the Internet are using a slower 3G connection. You can help these users out by making sure your website code is clean, which will not only make for a faster-loading site, but faster downloads as well.
2. Don’t use flash. Not all mobile devices can see flash? Personally, I’m not a huge fan of flash sites anyway. But if you absolutely, positively have to have a flash site, be both smart and considerate. Make sure you have an alternate HTML version of your site as well.
3. Have a clean, easy to navigate website. Remember, mobile users are viewing your site on a tiny little screen. In addition, there is no mouse and not all mobile devices are equipped with a touch screen. So don’t make it harder for mobile users to view or utilize your site than it needs to be. Clean up the clutter and streamline your content. Simplify, simplify, simplify. If you keep it simple, your site will be user-friendly for everyone.
4. Use HTML phone numbers. Don’t make mobile users have to type in your phone number. Use HTML so that they can simply click to dial the number.
5. Avoid horizontal scrolling. Mobile users prefer to scroll vertically as opposed to horizontally. It’s easier and less of a hassle for them. Always create your content as a single column of text that wraps for mobile users.
6. Use images sparingly. As I mentioned earlier, most mobile users are using a slower 3G connection. As a result, heavier images can take forever to load. To avoid this problem, you should use images sparingly on your website. But if you do choose to use images, they should be lighter-weight jpeg, gif or png format. Also, make sure to compress your images to avoid zooming.
7. Voice Search. Google’s Voice Search on smartphones, has increased voice search usage by approximately 600% in the past year. Since mobile devices don’t have a traditional keyboard like a PC or laptop, voice search makes searching quicker and easier for smartphone users. So you should definitely keep an eye on this trend for SEO purposes. Bear in mind, people tend to search differently when speaking as opposed to typing. For example, while you might type-search “best virtual assistants,” you might voice-search “what are the best virtual assistant services?” Again, it’s a trend you should keep an eye on.
Indexing Of A Mobile Site
Google mainly recommends the following for better indexing of a mobile site.
• Google has a separate mobile bot for indexing mobile friendly pages. So, always redirect this bot (check for user agent ‘Googlebot-Mobile’) to the mobile version of your site. This bot should not see the normal site.
•Use the XHTML Mobile doctype so that search engine bots can clearly identify the page as mobile friendly.
•For each page, there should be a link for the standard view of that page. It will help Google to categorize mobile pages and its corresponding standard pages. (Source: The Right Way to Build a Mobile Site)
By David Jackson
Want To Sell Your Website? – Making Your Website More Valuable
Most of us do not start up a website with the thought of selling it one day – we usually start up a website with the thought of making that site popular, useful, and/or profitable. But inevitably, for anyone who has been in the online business world for any significant period of time, the thought enters our heads about whether or not we should sell our business.
There are a lot of articles on the Internet that concern how much a web business is worth. It is a topic that we may address some day in the future, but for the purposes of this article, I want to focus on factors that can help increase the value of your web based business.
One important note before we start: these tips are geared towards businesses whose value would be more than a few thousand dollars. This is not geared toward the “Flippa” crowd, but rather to more established online businesses.
With that, below are a few tips on increasing the value of your website.
Financial Records
The lifeblood of any online business acquisition is a business’s financials. If any experienced buyer approaches you, or if you solicit your site for sale to an experienced buyer, one of the very first things that a buyer will request are financial statements.
The reason for this is simple: buyers want to know how much they can reasonably invest in acquiring your business. Whether you are selling Youtube.com or MaAndPopShop.com, a buyer is constantly gauging the relative risk of their investment. Financial statements are simply the easiest way to get a starting point as to where a business can be financially.
Many people will read the above statements and think “but my business is much more than just the financials”. This is most likely true – every business has a host of intangibles that are mixed together to create an appealing business that works well. These intangibles do work together to build value in your business, but in the end, buyers are looking to gauge the riskiness of their investments, and financial statements help them do so.
But it goes a step further – whereas financial statements help a buyer gauge the riskiness of a particular acquisition, detailed and accurate financial statements that are easily verifiable help a buyer put to rest certain perceptions of risk. The point here is often lost on many people considering selling their businesses: detailed, verifiable, and clean financials can help you sell your online business faster and for more money.
Recommendations – If you think you may be selling your business in the near future do what you can to get your finances in order. This would include either hiring a book keeper or buying a version of Quickbooks and learning how to use it. Be sure to separate your business activities from personal expenses and income as well as other business activities. If you are able to, setup a dedicated business entity for the business you wish to sell – businesses that can be verified with tax returns are absolute gold to prospective buyers as it opens up the possibility for them to get a loan to buy your business.
Paint Yourself Out of the Picture
Nobody wants to buy themselves a job. Buying an Internet business comes with a set of risks that buyer’s are very familiar with. In essence, an Internet based business is an assetless business – the only asset tends to be “goodwill” and possibly some inventory (goodwill is a general accounting term used to describe a business’s reputation, relationships, and other intangibles). The problem with goodwill acquisitions is that they can quickly lose their value. If one were buying a restaurant instead of an Internet business, and the restaurant had to close, that person would still have the value of furniture, fixtures, equipment, and real estate to fall back upon.
In light of these risks, buyers find Internet businesses appealing for the same reasons you and I find them appealing: you can run a very profitable operation without having to manage a full store. Often times, you can run a great operation and work just part time.
Keep this in mind when preparing your business to sell: the more you paint yourself out of the picture and allow the business to be run without the owner being an “owner/operator”, the more buyers you will ultimately be able to appeal to.
Recommendations: Write out a current “day and week in the life of” describing your daily, weekly, and monthly tasks with the business. What can be done by someone else? What needs to be done by yourself? Try to get your hourly workload to no more than 10-15 hours per week and outsource what you can outsource. In addition, don’t wrap up your business in a special talent that you personally have (e.g. web design, seo, special writing style, etc).
Look for Single Points of Failure
Keeping in mind the previous section’s discussion on buyers looking to assess risk and the nature of how quickly an Internet business can lose value, it is important to identify single points of failure for your business. A single point of failure is any part of your business that you rely on that cannot be replaced by something else. Below are a few examples:
- You currently rely on just one vendor for all of your products
- You are a web design agency who has one very talented web designer that does most of your work
- You have a handful of clients who make up a disproportionate amount of your revenue base
- Your only source of traffic is from your top Google rankings
That last point is one that may surprise some website owners. It used to be the case that a top Google ranking was something that would add significant value. However, with the impact of the Panda updates and previously the Florida updates, buyers simply don’t trust rankings to be permanent. It is far better to show that the business is well balanced in all regards. Should one key aspect of the business falter, you need to demonstrate that while it may affect the business, even significantly, it would not kill the business because there is a backup plan.
Recommendation: Identify single points of failure and build a backup plan. If you currently rely too heavily on one or two vendors, reach out to other vendors and find out what it would take to start up with them. If you only have Google rankings driving traffic, startup a PPC campaign so you know what the cost structure would be. Startup a newsletter, build your social media presence, and the like.
Selling an online business can be a fun, yet intimidating process. By planning properly, sellers can often add thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to their overall value.
Author: Mark Daoust owner of Quiet Light Brokerage, Inc.
Things To Keep In Mind Before Hiring A Web Design Company
With the present boom in e-commerce, a well designed website that attracts the attention of potential customers is indispensable to the owners of various small-scale and large-scale industries. Endowing the website of a particular company with a prominent online presence requires an in-depth understanding of the needs and business objectives of that company. Therefore the business owner would do well to sit and discuss his requirements with his web designer. Most importantly, the website should be so interesting as to keep the viewers glued on to the page. However, shoddy work is often noticed in websites for which a hefty amount had been paid. This can prove to be distressing for small business owners who often lack the means of employing a professional to redo the damage. Thus, the foremost criteria for building up a good website are to get hold of a good professional website designer who understands his employer’s objectives. It would be of immense benefit to follow a few guidelines to help identify a competent web designer.
Before embarking on the search for a competent and affordable website designer, it would be better to keep in mind a few points:
- The website should inform the customers about the kind of services provided by the company.
- Whether the site will require frequent information updates.
- The budget of the particular company.
- The needs and tastes of the targeted audience.
- Whether the company will depend on search engines to optimize it’s sales.
- The web designer should be acquainted with all the above criteria in order to create a profitable website.
The next stage is starting to look for a web designer. Here again certain things need to be considered:
- It is recommended that the business should check the portfolio of the web designing firm with whom they are entrusting their work.
- It should also talk to the previous clients of the concerned web designing company in order to ascertain whether they got the right service and guidance from the website development firm.
- Besides understanding the pros and cons of the company’s objectives, the web designer should also be able to improvise and build up a site that is capable of standing out from the crowd of other websites.
- The company should also ask the web designing firm to show them examples of their previous work. This will reflect on the capability of the web designing company to design professional websites.
- The website should also be easy to navigate. In order to retain the impatient online reader the web designer should ensure that no information is more than a couple of clicks away.
- It is important to form a long-term relationship with the web designer. Otherwise it will prove costly to add new features to a website, if the original website developer who built it is not there to update it.
- It is important that the website should load quickly. The concentration span of the average reader is very little. Therefore if the page takes longer to load it will have grave repercussions for the company. Prospective customers will veer away from the site.
- While designing a website, the web designer should stick to the particular layout which users have become accustomed to.
- If the company wants an e-commerce website, then the website should be so designed as to make it easy for buyers to buy products online.
- The web designer should not use too many special effects as this will lead to increase in loading time, which in turn might have a negative impact on visitor retention.
Following the above mentioned points, will increase the chances of getting hold of a competent web designing firm who understands the business of its customer and provides valuable services which helps in meeting the cherished business goals.
Why Search Engine Spiders Can’t Index Your Pages
HTML Problems Can Prevent Indexing. This is a common problem. Your web designer has created a beautiful page with nice graphics and great Flash animations. Unfortunately, it seems that search engines won’t list your website no matter what you do.
This can have several reasons:
1. The HTML Code Of Your Web Pages Is Meaningless To Search Engines
Search engines use very simple software programs to index your web pages. A web page that looks great to the human eye can be totally meaningless to search engines.
Search engines cannot see content that is presented in images (GIF, JPEG, PNG, etc.), Flash elements, JavaScript and other script languages or other multimedia file formats.
If you use JavaScript links for your website navigation then search engines might not be able to find your website page.
Solution: Check your web pages with a search engine spider simulator. Spider simulators will show you how search engines see your web site.
If you use IBP’s search engine spider simulator, you can even enter the name of the spider, so that you can test if Google and Yahoo get different results when they visit your web pages.
2. The HTML Code Of Your Web Page Contains Errors
Some HTML errors can prevent search engine spiders from indexing your web pages. While most search engine spiders can deal with minor code errors, some of them will send faulty information to search engine spiders.
For example, your web page could contain a tag at the top of the page that tells search engines “the web page ends here” although your main content has not been reached.
Solution: Check the HTML code of your web pages with an HTML validator tool. You can find an HTML validator in the free IBP trial version.
3. The HTML Code Of Your Web Pages Doesn’t Contain The Right Elements
If you want to get high rankings for a special keyword then this keyword must appear in the right places on your web page. For example, it usually helps to use the keyword in the web page title.
There are many other elements that are important if you want to have high rankings.
Solution: Check the HTML code of your web page with IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer. IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer compares your web page with the top ranked pages and it will tell you in detail how to change your web page so that it can get top 10 rankings.
4. Your Web Server Sends The Wrong Status Codes
Some web servers send wrong status codes. When a search engine spider requests a web page from your site then your server sends a response code. This should be the “200 OK” code.
Unfortunately, some servers send a “302 moved” or even a “404 not found” response code to the search engine spiders although the web page can be displayed in a normal web browser.
In that case, search engines will think that the web page doesn’t exist and they won’t index the page.
Solution: Use the search engine spider simulator to find out which response code your web server returns to search engines. If the response code is not “200 OK”, IBP’s search engine spider simulator will return a warning message. ( Editor’s Note: You can also check your status code with our free HTTP Server Response Code Checker )
If you want to get top rankings on Google and other search engines then you must make sure that search engines don’t misunderstand your pages. Use the tips above to make sure that search engines see what you want them to see.
Autor: Jason
How a Blog Could Revitalize Your Website
O.K. so you think you have an idea or even a product to sell through your brand new internet business.
Internet marketing is a brilliant business to be in. There are boundless opportunities to run online businesses which can make incredible amounts of money, if you have established that there is a market for your chosen niche or product, and have done the necessary research.
All set, ready to go?
Er, not quite.
You should establish a presence in your market before you unleash your product to the world.
If you are about to start an internet business, then you should be wondering about attracting traffic to your site. There are many advertising options available, but if money is tight, some of these options may not seem practical.
Advertising can be expensive especially if you are not too sure what you are doing. Money can be swallowed up very quickly if you do not study advertising techniques.
Promotion can take many weeks or even months to show results, and then may not be effective.
Many courses and books sold by some of the gurus are sometimes out of date. Outdated material and tactics which you pay for then find they just do not work.
You may have an excellent website, but bear in mind blogging is now probably more effective than a static site.
Of course, the most traditional way of running an online business over the last few years has been websites, and is still a very successful method.
However, blogging has moved to the fore because search engines seem to favor blogs over the standard static website.
For those who can constantly add to or update their blog, visits by search engines will become a more regular practice, which will give you more chance of a high ranking in the search engines.
The reason is that search engines seem to prefer blogs over traditional static sites and it is possible to see a page on your blog ranked on the first page in Google within 24 hours.
With a blog, you are updating on a regular basis, sometimes daily, and search engines love sites which are constantly updated, giving you a better chance of getting ranked more highly.
Therefore, blogging is probably the best way to build traffic to your site at the same time enabling you to become an expert in your field in a very short time.
A blog is very easy to use and so adding content to a blog is easy to do. A blog is similar to a diary or journal with which you can keep up-to-date with your thoughts and ideas.
It is easy to keep your customers updated with information or products.
You can build a relationship with your readers, thereby building confidence and respect as you are projecting yourself as an expert.
A blog also allows your visitors to post comments, so you are also creating an interactive environment which of course further develops your relationship with your visitors.
If your subject is one you are passionate about, then writing 300 words each day should not be very difficult. It should be simple to find endless ideas to write about. Adding to a blog on a daily basis will not take very long. You need only write about 300 words every day, and it gets easier the more you write.
Always make your content informative and good quality. Don’t ever give rubbish to your readers. Your readers should always be treated with the greatest of respect. After all, once you build up a large líst of members, who hopefully trust you because you have always given them quality, they will then trust you enough to purchase the products you have recommended to them.
The easiest way to set up a blog is to use a Google service called Blogger or WordPress. You can simply go to the website, choose a user name and the rest is simple. You can be up and running in minutes.
A big disadvantage with Blogger of course is that your blog is owned by Blogger and may be shut down by them without notice. Many thousands have been shut down without notice.
By far the best option is to set up your blog with WordPress because you will have full control over your blogging activities. Set up your blog with WordPress and host it on your domain.
The only downside with WordPress is that you must set your blog up yourself.
The power in your blog comes from the quality information you put into it, attracting readers to your blog and therefore establishing you as an authority and giving you credibility in your market.
Once again, the more often you can update your blog, the more often the search engines will visit. The more you can write, the more exposure you will get.
Your blog post does not have to be a great literary work, it can just be a paragraph or two on your specialist subject, but always make your information quality content, between 350 and 700 words.
You should use your blog to help build a líst of members, because it is one of the best ways of building a relationship with people who are keen to receive information from you.
Building a relationship will also build trust and confidence. Your readers will look forward to receiving e-mails or blogs from you in which you can recommend products and services.
The keyword here is recommend, rather than sell or promote. If someone feels that you have recommended – not sold – to them, then that will go a long way to build loyalty and trust.
If you can build loyalty and trust with your subscribers through your blog which establishes you as a respected expert, then you are on your way to a successful internet business which can easily earn you a substantial income.
Author
Ray Carr
For more information on creating a Blog for your site, please contact us.
Website Designers – Helping You Achieve Your Online Goals
Practically every business today has a website. Whether it’s designed to sell products or services online or purely act as an information port, everyone seems to have one.
Being that the online industry is extremely competitive, there is a lot of pressure on having a web site that is more effective than those of your competitors. Great website designers work with you to make this happen. Depending on the extent of the services that they offer, some designers can take care of your website’s entire effectiveness, allowing business owners to focus on other important aspects of their business.
The purpose of a web site is to attract visitors and not only convince them to do exactly what you want them to do once they get there, but make it easy for them to find what they need to.
One of the first things a website designer will do is discuss your business and your online objectives. If you are in a competitive online market, then you’ll need to enlist in their Search Engine Marketing services. Whilst having an eye-catching web site with amazing images and state-of-the-art graphics will certainly turn visitor’s heads, it’s actually getting them to your web site that’s of foremost importance.
Website designers who have Search Engine Marketing knowledge will carry out a number of things both on and off your website. From an on-site perspective, they’ll need to ensure your web content includes careful distribution of all of the most highly searched keyword phrases that relate to your business and web site. Once your Search Engine Marketing needs have been catered to, your website will be in a good position to rank in the Search Engines ahead of your competitors, meaning you are more likely to get more traffic, enquiries, leads and sales.
When a website designer builds your web site they will design it in a way that quickly engages your visitors, so as not to make them click off your site and onto another one. Now that your site has been properly marketed and your visitors engaged, it’s a matter of feeding them the right information that will persuade them to buy your products and/or services.
Once website designers have finished designing your web site they’ll often build it using a Content Management System (CMS) which will enable you to make any necessary changes to your website’s content, images or layout. A lot of website designers will charge you a set rate for hosting your site as well as giving you access to your Content Management System.
So if you’re about to launch a new business, speak to a web designer as they’ll often be able to tell you if they think you’ll need a website. Having one can make the difference between an average performing business and a highly successful one.
by Suzanne Carter
8 Things Bing Won’t Tell You
Every major search engine provides hints and tips about how to optimize your pages for improved rankings on their sites. But when you read these guidelines you quickly see that most of it is just their own wish list. Things like ‘Write for humans not search engine bots – or – do not hide keywords with a font matching the background color.’ It is all good advice but kind of general and already well known (for the past decade.)
But there are always things a search engine will not tell you. And, of course, these are the things that make all the difference in your SEO efforts and results. That said; here are eight things that Bing does not want you to know (or you can skip to the Magic Formula section at the end):
[Stop Waiting for Website Traffic]
1.) Your Domain Name Matters – A Lot
Search for just about anything on MSN / Bing and at least three of the top five matches will have some version of that keyword as the domain name. For example if you wanted to optimize for the keyword ‘my domain’ you should try to get the domain name ‘mydomain.com.’ If that is taken, opt for ‘my-domain.com.’ If that’s taken try for a name starting with ‘mydomain’ and ending with a word that is commonly associated. This is called LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. A good example would be ‘mydomainname.com’ or ‘my-domain-name.com.’ BTW, Bing treats dashes as a space so as long as long as the dashes merely separate words, they are treated much like the non dash version.
2.) There is No Sandbox
Here’s some great news for anyone just getting started. Bing does not seem to care about the age of your domain name. There is no ‘sandbox’ like Google has. Many people, myself included, have registered brand new domains and had them ranking in a matter of days.
3.) DotCom Trumps DotNet
Today some search engines like Google will often give .net and .com virtually the same value, and possibly higher value for a .org that is for a recognized non-profit organization. Bing however appears to prefer the .com version. You can even see instances where a ‘.co.uk’ site gets high rankings simply because it uses the exact keyword in the domain name and .co is close enough to .com.
4.) We Like Sub Domains
Most web hosts will let you add sub domains to your website. On Bing, if you have the sub domain mydomain.mydomain.com you are in for some potentially great rankings. The same is true if you have my.domain.com, but to a slightly lesser degree.
5.) Less is More – Part One
We have been trained by Google to try to have hundreds of pages of quality content on every website. Bing adheres to the old policy that they are indexing web ‘pages’ not web ‘sites’ (like Google says they do, but Bing appears to really mean it.) This means each page is treated on its own merit so a site with one page has the same chances of being ranked as a site with 100 pages, because each page is genuinely treated individually.
6.) Less is More – Part Two
The same rule as above goes for on-page text. Pages with 800 to 1,200 words seem to do best on Google but on Bing the reverse is true, with 250 to 500 words being the magic number. Just do not overuse your keyword.
7.) Links are Nice But Not Required
Forget about spending your life building an ever growing number of inbound links for Bing. They do not need them. Your site, for now at least, is judged by its own merits, page by page.
8.) Be Bold not Strong
The original SEO method dating back to 1996 was using the H1 or ‘strong’ heading tags in your HTML. Forget them for now. Bing gives higher priority to how you would express importance in a word processor document; larger font and bold text as the main markers.
Here’s my magic formula for a one hour top ranking:
A.) Get the .com version of a three to four word keyword as the domain name (dashes are fine.)
B.) Use the domain name as the page heading in a bolded font, slightly larger than the paragraph text.
C.) Write 400 words of natural sounding text using the keyword up to five times.
D.) Mention the keyword once in the first sentence and once in the final sentence of the page – then up to three times scattered throughout the remainder.
E.) Bold one instance of the keyword. Italicize one instance of the keyword. Use one instance of the keyword as a link back to the same page.
F.) Always fill in your Title, Description and Keywords META tags. That’s it.
Author Mike Small
The Importance of Choosing the Right Colors for Your Website
Colors have psychological impacts, they are attributes of eyes, but are the chemistry of the mind. Colors are perceived though pupils and its effects are produced with associated nerves to the brain neurons. Light reflecting through objects in different wavelengths and frequency stimulates different “cones” or color receptor cells of the retina in the eyes and makes perception possible for different colors.
Colors influence people through psychological changes and are associated with certain feelings and meanings. Colors exist everywhere else, it is omnipresent. Colors represent cultural, social customs and emotional values and its use in arts, printing, designing, websites, graphics, etc. – these days are unavoidable.
Choosing proper color is an essential constituent for your website and its graphics; as visitors to your website first encounters colors and graphics before they read your textual descriptions.
Colors are used in website design and graphic design for various forms; use of colors can be for backgrounds, navigation, logos, and navigation buttons to emphasize, highlight, symbolize your text description and outlining your site.
Despite the fact that your website is enhanced and fabricated with textual and graphical design, if you are using the wrong color combinations, then you are annoying your own visitors rather appealing them. As a result, to attract your customers, it is important to understand psychological behavior of your customers to your websites chromatics. The use of wrong colors results in the wrong impression.
Below are the details for color interpreted through different professions, culture, and physiology science:
Red: Red is a color of intensity, stimulants, love, gaudiness, blood, war, excitement, speed, heat, leadership, masculinity, power, passion, strength, energy, financial loss, Danger, fire, radicalism, aggression, stop, anger, and revolution.
Blue: Blue is a color of peace, unity, harmony, depression, coldness, ice, tackiness, winter tranquility, calmness, coolness, confidence, water, ice, loyalty, conservatism, dependability, cleanliness, technology, winter, idealism, and obscenity.
White: White a color of peace, innocence, cleanliness, simplicity, security, humility, sterility, winter, reverence, purity, coldness, surrender, cowardice, and fearfulness. Black: Black is a color of power, sophistication, Evil, death, fear, anonymity, anger, sadness, mystery, formality, elegance, wealth, style, remorse, mourning, and unhappiness.
Green: Green is a color of nature, spring, good luck, illness, greed, vigor, generosity, go, grass, wealth, money, fertility, youth, environment, envy, misfortune, jealousy, aggression, and inexperience.
Purple: Purple is a color of spirituality, royalty, nobility, enlightenment, sensuality, creativity, wealth, gaudiness, ceremony, mystery, wisdom, mourning, profanity, exaggeration, confusion, arrogance, and flamboyance.
Brown: Brown is a color of richness, stability, anachronism, dirt, dullness, filth, heaviness, poverty, roughness tradition, calm, depth, natural organisms, and nature.
Yellow: Yellow is the color of joy, happiness, optimism, idealism, gold, summer, hope, air, sunlight, hazards, dishonesty, avarice, weakness, cowardice, and illness.
Orange: Orange is a color of energy, flamboyance, playfulness, balance, heat, fire, enthusiasm, overemotional, warning, danger, fire, aggression, arrogance, flamboyance, and gaudiness.
Even choosing color is a professional skill in graphic design business, as it is not only just the colors, but are the color that stimulates the mind of your viewers. Graphic designs inevitably comes with colors, and selecting the best ones for your business is an expertise.
Here is a more in depth description of colors and their psychological effect from this interesting article.
- Purple and violet are psychologically inspiring for the spirit, and benefit the pineal gland, cerebral cortex, right eye, central nervous system and upper brain function.
- Indigo aids concentration, insight and imagination, and promotes peace of mind. Physically it benefits the pituitary gland, left eye, sinus, nose and eyesight.
- Blue is linked to integrity, honesty, loyalty, kindness, commitment and endurance. It benefits the throat, thyroid, parathyroid, lungs and mouth.
- Green promotes compassion and unconditional love, forgiveness, contentment, nurturing, harmony, and generosity. Physically it is linked to the heart, circulatory system, arms and hands.
- Yellow stimulates humour and logic, efficiency, warmth, self-awareness and personal power. It corresponds to the solar plexus, stomach, liver, gall bladder and pancreas.
- Orange is required to stimulate sensuality and passion, vitality, optimism and enthusiasm, tolerance and hospitality. It affects the reproductive organs, genitals, gonads, prostate and spleen.
- Red will arouse instincts of self-preservation and survival, stimulating the senses and bringing out the spontaneous primal urges. It relates to the base of the spine, adrenals, kidneys, bladder, colon, spinal column, legs and blood.
by Bharat Bista
How Hiring An Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant Can Increase Your Profits For Your Business
If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur, you’ve come to realize that marketing your business online has massive potential for huge profits. But if you’ve done your research on internet marketing, you’ve probably also realized that there are so many different ways to market online and many of it takes time and effort.
This is where an Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant can be your answer. So what exactly can an Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant do and how will he/she increase profits for your business?
Here’s a brief list of the different internet marketing tasks a virtual assistant can perform for your business:
Maintain Your Blog or Website Maintenance If you have a blog or website, you can hire a virtual assistant to load your blog posts and schedule them to post on different days. A virtual assistant with search engine optimization expertise can make sure the right keywords are used on your blog or website. He/She can also update your content regularly on your blog or website when changes are needed. With your website consistently maintained and optimized for the web will help bring you a steady flow of traffic.
Write and Submit Articles
It is well known that writing articles and submitting them to article directories is a sure way to drive a flow of traffic to your website and generate quality leads. Your virtual assistant can write and submit 1 to 3 articles a week on your niche. This technique will definitely bring you continuous traffic to your site while building backlinks.
Write and Submit Press Releases
Press Releases are another fantastic way to generate traffic to your website. Each time your company has a new announcement to share, your virtual assistant can write a press release about it. Also, Press Releases like articles create backlinks to your site.
Email Marketing
In order to do email marketing, you need an autoresponder system. A Virtual Assistant who specializes in internet marketing will most likely know how to set up an autorepsonder service for your website. This includes creating the opt-in form for your site and loading all the messages. With this assistance, you’ll be able to concentrate on building a list instead of trying to maintain it.
Post Classified Ads
With so many classified ad sites available on the internet, your internet marketing virtual assistant can post several ads a day on the top visited sites.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is a form of internet marketing which uses sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to achieve branding awareness of a company’s products and services to the masses. If you have an account with any of these social networks, then an internet marketing virtual assistant can maintain these social networks on behalf of your business helping you stay in touch with your audience.
As stated before, this just a brief list of the many different internet marketing techniques that an internet marketing virtual assistant can do to help increase profits for your business. When you are searching for a virtual assistant, just make sure to ask the person about their experience and expertise in this area before hiring. But once you find that qualified assistant, you’ll be seeing amazing results in your business in not time.
Author Lisa Santos
How to Start Online Marketing
So, you’re a business that has just invested in a brand new website. You want to grow your business and make money through your site, how do you get started? The purpose of this article is to show how just having a site and getting it listed on Google is not enough to effectively use it as a business tool.
In order to make the most out of your website, people using the Internet need to be able to find it; they can’t buy unless they can find you. If you want to be found on the Web, you need to start doing online marketing.
Whatever it is that you wish to market and sell, there are several steps that you can take to improve your online presence:
Natural Search
If you want your website to be easily found by people using a Search Engine, you need to prepare it for SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. This means engineering your site to respond to the way that users search for your products or services online. Search Engines such as MSN, Yahoo and Google rank your website, based on a complex set of criteria.
The criteria changes regularly and only a few people are aware of the algorithms used to create the rankings. However, experts use tried and tested techniques to improve their client’s ranking position based on their experience of SEO. The problem is that many amateurs try tinkering with their website for SEO and this can often lead to some fairly costly errors.
Paid Search
One of the best ways to gain presence on the web is to advertise through Paid Search opportunities such as Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing. Pay per Click (PPC) offers a cost effective way of advertising online. PPC involves choosing the most effective keywords for your product or service and writing a short advert with a keyword rich headline and ad text.
When an interested user types your keywords into the Search Engine, your Ad appears. When they click on it, the user is directed to your website and you pay an agreed fixed amount to Google et al for each click. The performance of your PPC Ads can be compared, and their effectiveness tested through feedback on the all-important click to conversion data produced by the Ads.
Copywriting/Articles
The Internet is a text driven medium. The words that are placed on your website not only attract Search Engines but also human visitors. If your visitors find poor quality content, they are unlikely to stick around to find out what you have to offer them.
SEO copywriting involves using a professional copywriter, trained in SEO techniques to create the content of your website.
SEO content engages potential customers/clients and leads them towards taking your desired actions, whilst keeping your site well ranked by Search Engines.
Articles can be used for two purposes. In the first instance, they can be used to demonstrate your knowledge and improve credibility in your area of business. In the second instance, articles can be submitted to optimised article directories. Someone visiting those directories and reading your articles will be impressed by your knowledge and expertise and will click through to your website via a link at the bottom of the article.
Internet Marketing is not an area for the amateur or dilettante. The success or failure of your business could rest on your ability to conduct your own online marketing. Unless you’re willing to learn, or run the risk of damaging your potential income, maybe it’s time to call in an expert.
5 Crucial Components of Website Design
Professional website developers know the importance of web design and the role it plays in making a website successful.
Designing a successful website is no easy task, especially for someone who is new to the world of web development. With the help of web development applications many people can and do create decent websites. But decent in most cases is not good enough to make a site successful from a traffic or financial standpoint.
There are five crucial components of web design that you must focus on in order to make a site valuable to its visitors and successful for you.
• SEO – Getting free traffic to your site.
• Usability – Ease of navigating around the site and finding desired information quickly.
• Aesthetics – Visual appeal.
• Content – Valid, up-to-date, relevant information.
• Graphics – Eye candy that relays relevant visual information to the visitor.
SEO
Before you ever lay down a byte of HTML code for a site, you have to know and understand at least the basics of SEO and how it fits into the design. SEO is the art of designing a site in a fashion that gives the site an advantage for obtaining free and abundant traffic.
The number one aspect of SEO is selecting keywords relevant to your site. The keywords you select should be based on high usage, low competition and relevancy to your topic. Once you select keywords you can then begin the development of your site. Keep in mind keywords are a critical aspect of the design. The keywords you choose will be applied within the design in strategic fashion to benefit the flow of traffic to your site. To understand more on how to implement SEO you should read and learn more about this important subject. If you don’t, your website success will be difficult to achieve.
Usability
Your website must be easy to navigate and designed in a way that makes it easy to find information. Visitors will not stay long if it takes more than one or two clicks to get the information they want or if it takes brain power to figure out how to get the information they want. One of the goals of your site design is to keep usability easy, and simple. To do this, apply the following three fundamentals of usability.
• Provide a site search tool. A visitor in a hurry can quickly find the info they desire then move on to the action they desire.
• Provide simple, intuitive and consistent site navigation. This provides visitors the tool they need to leisurely explore their way through your site.
• Provide logical and simple to follow content. Forget Expensive PPC Advertising – There is an Alternative!
The message of a site should start off in a simple and basic fashion with well defined links pointing the way to more detailed information or explanation as needed.
In the cases above, the goal is to make it easy for your visitor to find the information they want without frustration or difficulty. Doing this well will have a positive effect on increasing the return of your visitors.
Aesthetics
A website has to look clean, uncomplicated and strike a balance in layout that is pleasant to the visitor. Pleasing aesthetics come about when the colors of a site complement each other, the graphics blend and lend continuation of the theme and the layout brings unity and openness to the page.
Often overlooked by novice designers is the color palette of the site. While you can select color in a willy-nilly fashion and still provide a visually appealing site, a better idea for color selection should be based on an understanding of the color wheel and proven color strategies.
Many web designers often view a web page as an opportunity to blast a visitor with lots of information in hopes this will convince the visitor to take action. Usually this results in a quick exit due to the overwhelming visual effect and complicated look. A better approach is to provide less content and open space (referred to as white space) to allow visitors eyes to scan and explore with ease.
Content
An important feature of any website is the quality of the text content. Visitors come to a site expecting to find answers to their questions, solutions to their problems or for entertainment value. The content offered at your site must be well-written and without grammatical or spelling errors. It also has to be relevant to the theme of your site, with valid, up-to- date information for your visitors. Content is King!
Graphics
You can have a functional and usable website without graphic elements. However, if there are similar sites to yours that employ graphics, guess which site will get the most traffic. The necessary companions to any well-designed site are the images and illustrations that grace its pages. The images can’t be any willy-nilly graphic that you might think is cool. Graphic imagery has to support your branding, and communicate the message you are trying to convey. Before you incorporate graphic elements into your site, take some time to look around the web. Notice what looks good and how elements are laid out. These same layouts techniques can be used as models for your site.
The Internet is a highly competitive business arena. To be successful with a commercial website, you have to keep these five crucial web design elements in mind. Contrary to what many will tell you, it is rarely possible to have commercial success without the benefit of a professional website. This is not to say that you must hire a professional, however you must implement professional design elements to improve your chances for success.
Ten Things You Should Know About Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is not difficult if you understand the basic concepts. If you know what to do, your website will get the best possible rankings on Google and other important search engines.
Four things you should know about link building
- Inbound links are very important. The more websites link to your site, the easier it will be to get high rankings on Google. Google considers links to your site as votes for your site. The more votes your website has, the better your rankings will be. If more pages link to the website of your competitor, then it is likely that your competitor will get better rankings than you on Google.
- It is important to get the right links. In addition to the number of links to your website, Google also considers the quality of the links. Links from unrelated websites won’t help your search engine rankings as much as links from related websites that deal with a similar topic as your website. A link from a trusted website that itself has many links pointing to it will help your search engine rankings more than a link from a website with few inbound links.
- It is important to keep on link building. Many of your competitors will continue to work on their links. If you don’t keep on working on your links, your competitors will pass you in the search engine results sooner or later.
- Google doesn’t like paid links Google considers links to your site as editorial votes for its quality. A paid link is not editorial. Google’s anti-spam team has asked webmasters to report paid links. If your competitors report your paid links, Google might penalize your website.
Three things you should know about web page optimization
- Search engines rank single pages in the search results, you should optimize a single page of your website for a single search term. Do not optimize the same page for more than one search term. It is much better if a web page is highly relevant to one search term than somewhat relevant to many search terms.
- Google considers all pages of your website. Although only a single page of your website will be listed in Google’s search results for a search term, Google will consider all pages of your website. If you optimize different pages of your website for different keywords that are all related to a certain topic, then Google will think that your website is relevant to this topic and it will be easier to get high rankings for your keywords.
- Optimized web page content and inbound links work hand-in-hand. If your website has both optimized content and good inbound links then it will be much easier to get high rankings on Google. A web page that has been optimized for the search term “green widgets” and that has many links from other web pages that use the term “green widgets” as the link text is much more likely to get a top ranking on Google than a page that only has the inbound links or the optimized content.
Three things you should know about the technical aspects of your website
- Redirects can cause problems. Web page redirects have been used by spammers in the past. That is why search engines don’t like it much. A 301 redirect is the only server side redirect that search engines interpret as a permanent redirect. All other redirects (except for a meta refresh redirect in some cases) don’t pass the links from the old page to the new page and they might even be interpreted as a spamming attempt.
- Search engines don’t like duplicate content. Google wants to list only one copy of a piece of content in the search results. If your web page contains the same content as another page on the web then Google will pick one version of the content for their search results. Google considers exact copies and near copies as duplicate content. Website navigation and boilerplate are usually ignored. Google compares your page’s unique content with other pages and if it has a certain similarity to another page than it is considered a duplicate.
- You can create duplicate content by mistake. Only link to one version of these URLs, otherwise, the other versions might be duplicates of the other.
SEO is not a black art. If you do the right things in the right order then you will get the best possible rankings on Google and other important search engines.
Your website must have optimized content and quality back links from other websites.
For more information or a consultation on Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing for your website please contact us at 832-253-8848 or email us with your questions to webmaster@mrdesignnet.com.
