Expert SEO Advice To Open The Door To Higher Search Rankings

Search engine optimization is the most important improvement you can make for your business website. SEO ensures search engines place your website at the top of the results when users are seeking things that may pertain to your business. Read on to find out more!

TIP! Consider using a pay-per-click strategy as a good affiliate marketing tactic. This service is the most common, and the pay is fairly low, but it can build up quickly.

To improve your search engine rankings, don’t just add keywords to your site. Also add alternative forms of that keyword, including misspellings, in the meta tags of each page on your site. Search engines will optimize your results for all your listed keywords after they analyze the metatags. To demonstrate this, let’s say your site theme is about knives. You could include a variety of related keywords, including: “knives,” “nives”, and “knifes”, along with any other reasonable options you may want to consider.

Using proper anchor text is important to your internal links on your site. “Click here” is not a good anchor text term, and will have a negative impact on the results in a search engine. If you use the correct keywords in your anchor text, search engine spiders will be able to locate your content quickly.

TIP! Your site should be entertaining if you want a successful website. A major factor of SEO is not only returning to your site, but spending lots of time on it.

Header tags should be used vigorously. When your headers are too large, their size can be changed by using CSS. Search engines use the headers to rank websites. Also, utilize H1 or H2 tags for important information about your goods or services.

Find a certain niche and make yourself a guru. This is an excellent strategy for maximizing profits. First, you must create a website focused on a specific niche and directed at a select group of buyers. Following that, you must make the most of SEO tools so that your potential customers will be able to locate your products and services easily. It is important that the customers receive whatever it is they are looking for, not what you assume they need.

Search Engines

Starting a blog about your website and participating in other related blogs can be an effective SEO technique. Because search engines like well organized data and regular content updates, it can be easy to move a blog up in the rankings. Search engines look very highly upon websites with a lot of backlinks.

TIP! Get a domain name that’s both memorable and relevant to your services or products. This is very useful for the people who discover you through YouTube because it is easy to remember.

See if an informational site or .org domain will trade links with you. Search engines view back-links to reputable sources favorably, and they will reward your affiliation with them. Provide high-quality information that will entice reliable websites to want to feature your site. Provide the kind of articles and information that reputable organizations find trustworthy.

Focus on one product or subject per page. Don’t try to promote each of your products on one post. This practice confuses customers, and as a result, they won’t return. A page that only focuses on one thing is best.

TIP! Using a product feed will boost your online presence and get more people to your site. Product feeds list details such as images, descriptions and prices about the products and services you offer.

Many people are under the impression that simply including keywords in comment tags will make a website more visible to search engines. You must focus on the content of your website.

The easier your website is to read, the more likely people are to return time and time again. You can increase your search engine ranking by concentrating on keeping your site uncluttered and functional. You can also increase your rankings by adding functions for accessibility such as a tool to increase font size. Make your site for people and the search engines.

TIP! Ask a non-profit to be your affiliate. Any reputable site that links to your website will help you greatly when it comes to ranking with search engines.

Using webpage captions is wise for SEO purposes. This means that sites with a great deal of photos or newspaper articles linked can use this to their advantage, using captions that are filled with keywords can improve traffic and visibility.

Using Javascript in the pages of your website is fine, but don’t expect all of the search engine spiders to respond to it. In other words, Java is something you can choose, but because of the uniqueness of the script. It is possible that web crawlers will not pick up on the site the way you might expect.

TIP! The best way to increase traffic is to place new relevant content on your website. When website visitors don’t see relevant information that they want to see and read, they will leave.

There’s a lot to search engine optimization, but as was stated earlier in the article, it’s absolutely essential to make sure your website gets the business it deserves. Make sure to apply these techniques to your website, as soon as possible, so that you can start getting more customers and more profits.

What It Takes To Make A Successful Website Development

TIP! To make your website as easy to use as possible, consider using a fixed-position menu. The navigation panel is essentially stuck in one place as the user scrolls down to view more content.

Even people who have prior experience with web page design are sometimes stumped when it comes time to develop a mobile-friendly website or application. If this is an issue that is currently plaguing you, peruse the following information with regard to website development. You will find these relevant tips helpful.

TIP! Successful websites work well with any browser, so you’ll need to do some testing of your paging using various browsers. Different browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Chrome may not display content the same way; what works in one might not work in another.

Make sure that every page on your website loads as quickly as possible. Some users have slower connections and will lose interest if a website takes too long to load. There’s no reason to make viewers wait.

TIP! Before publishing your website, check it over carefully for any broken links. A visitor will get very annoyed when they click on a link that takes them to either a blank page or one that gives them an error.

Check for broken links before publishing your web page. Visitors will be annoyed if they click on broken links. Most people choose one of the many programs or extensions available that verify working links but it can also be completed manually if you only have a few to do.

TIP! So that you can create a visually appealing site, get yourself a web design program. Pro designer programs are easy to learn and use and can have you creating sites quite quickly.

Consider buying a website development program to help design a better website. Pro designer programs are easy to learn and use and can have you creating sites quite quickly. You site will not have a lot of visitors if it doesn’t look good.

TIP! Make sure your page loads quickly. Efficient sites that are well-designed need to show up in the browser for your readers in just moments.

Keep a simple front page. People judge a site and whether they want to go further by what the initial webpage looks like. Describe your business in detail and what it does, but keep other distractions and details to a minimum.

TIP! Never use an overabundance of conflicting fonts on your website. Also consider how the fonts look on a regular screen.

Be sure to do good keyword research. Though your primary focus is on supplying proper content and information to your customers, you need to build a customer base. Knowing what keywords people use to find your site via search engines is a must for your website to succeed.

TIP! Provide web browsers with independent CSS pages, and then use conditional loading. Doing this will make it easier to test and maintain your website.

Use easy to maintain navigation throughout your site. Navigation links are very important for any site and controls how much time a visitor spends on your site. It is important to keep the navigational structure tidy and organized.

TIP! Do not place adds that pop up on your site. Including PPC ads to make some money on sites is a big design element that does not irritate your users as much as pop-ups that bother their view.

Don’t install pop-up adverts on your website. These ads are always alluring with the promise of making extra profits; however, most visitors find them highly annoying. People will not want to visit or click away immediately. Your ads should be simple, direct and engaging, without pop-ups.

TIP! If you’ve got ideas for more than one site, you should go ahead and get the domain names now. The reason this is a problem is that you need to be creative and the names should match your sites but others may have the same name chosen so lock them up right away.

Don’t rely solely on the design tools provided by the host to build your site. Try to integrate your personality into the site by adding and tweaking things without just relying on dragging and dropping things your web host provides.

TIP! When you are deciding which hosting service to use, make sure that you understand everything that the package will include. The things that are important to know are bandwidth, CPU usage, disk space and any other areas that they highlight in their package.

If you want to work on your website, you need to have an office space with a door. Rid the area of distractions and create an environment where your can focus. It is invaluable to keep all that you need at your fingertips at all times, in order to make smooth and efficient design choices.

TIP! While you may see other strategies and designs that you like, it is important to remain inventive when you are designing your website. Come up with your own ideas and features or improve upon some that you admired on other sites.

Good web page design hinges on the quality of your research. Learn about everything that you can in your niche. Think about how best to design your site to reach your target market. Doing so will make your website development efforts pay off handsomely.

TIP! Allow “site searching” on all of your pages. This will boost the usability of your site and give the viewer the information he wants.

If you want to know the effectiveness of your site’s design, consider utilizing task-based usability tests. Generally, the purpose of each task is to find information and/or functionality buried deep within your site. If the design is right, this should be easy. If a website isn’t designed well, then the testers can point you towards what to improve.

TIP! It is not always true that you need to pay for advice on creating a great website. Although you may think it is a wise idea, it isn’t.

Don’t pay for any literature when you’re wanting to learn more about building websites. Although if you do wish to pay, it is a long-term investment. There are some books which offer good content. This information can be found for nothing online. Costly books don’t contain any information that you cannot find elsewhere for free.

TIP! If you need to design more than one website, then you should check into multiple platforms. Knowing MySQL, Java, PHI and more will benefit you in the future.

Consider the security of your site. Investing in an SSL certificate if the website handles sensitive information such as credit card and other payment information can be a smart idea. Additionally, see if your web host offers security features along with hosting.

TIP! Check the statistics on your site regularly. This is important because you should stay abreast of which pages your visitors visit the most and where your customers are located.

The Internet is always evolving. Methods you had success with a couple of years ago might not help today. That’s why keeping abreast of the latest information is important. These tips are current and will help you with designing your page.

SEO Best Practices Checklist

For those who want a simple checklist to help with your SEO efforts, you’re in luck as we’re bringing you that today.  So without further delay we’ll jump right into it and present our top ten SEO best practices Checklist.

 

  1. Be sure to completely fill out your meta tags.  Pay special attention to the title and description tag.  Your title and description tag will form your online ‘billboard’ when your site appears in the search engines.  Be sure to include your main keyword phrase in both, and keep your title tag to 66 characters or less and description tag to 155 characters or less.
  1. Use your keyword phrase in important places.  Opening sentence of a paragraph, opening paragraph on the page, closing paragraph, title, subtitles, etc.
  1. Create a sitemap.  You can create a free XML sitemap here.
  1. Be sure your site loads fast and accurately with no errors.  Search engines hate errors, and also hate slow sites.  If you have lots of flash or images that make your site load slow, a redesign may be in the cards for you.
  1. Quote authority sources in your niche.  This may seem counter productive, but as search evolves this is going to help your site.  If there is a great post or article about your niche, mention it and provide a link to that site.  If you are quoting facts or figures, give credit to the resource you used with a link.
  1. Build links naturally.  It is not natural to build 100,000 links to a new site the first week it is up.  Create a game plan for your link building and stick to it so that you are building links on a consistent and regular basis.  You want a constant flow of links coming into your site, not lots of peaks and valleys if it is viewed on a chart.
  1. Guest post on authority blogs in your niche.  Contact other site owners in your niche and offer to write unique posts for them in exchange for a link back to your site.  Not only is this great link building, but it is also great authority building as you are posting on authority sites within your niche.
  1. Get social.  Sign up for and use Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin at the very least.  Engage your audience and post content to these sites on a regular basis.  Eventually you can get to a point where you can drive much of your traffic from these social sites and you will be less dependent on your search engine rankings.
  1. Participate in forums.  Forums within your niche are great places to participate.  Find a couple forums in your niche that allow signature links and participate at a high level in these forums.  Add to the discussions, answer questions, make yourself helpful.  It will benefit you in the long run.
  1. Get video on your site.  Pull in on topic videos from YouTube, or better yet create a YouTube channel and start posting your own quality videos.  Video is huge and growing, and it must be a part of any online marketing campaign these days.

 

For more on SEO, please download our free SEO guide today.  If you are in need of SEO services, please feel free to contact us.  We are based in Californiaand are a Bay Area SEO company that specializes in working with small businesses.

Posted in SEO

Web Design Decisions

Every web site needs to have a clean and attractive design. However, should you hire a professional or do this on your own? 

Let us talk about financial side of this issue. If you want to do the web design of your own page yourself, it will definitely cost you less than hiring a web design company.   In addition, there are many tools out there to help you do this without even having to know HTML.  WordPress is one such tool, and creating a blog, downloading a great looking theme and moving forward in that manner is very easy, and your look will come out pretty professional.

The down side to this, however, is that you are somewhat limited by the type of site you can build.  For example, if you are looking to create a web design for ecommece sites, you should either have web design and coding knowledge, or seriously consider hiring a professional.  On the other hand, if you are creating a personal blog, doing it yourself is probably the best way to go.

Another aspect to consider is time. If you choose to do a web site design on your own it can actually take a lot of time and effort.  Although there are software packages out there that will make the process very easy, and allow you to create your web design with no html knowledge, you still will have to learn to use these tools.  This can be frustrating, and if you are not a do it yourself type of person, this is another reason to consider hiring a web design firm.

The best rule of thumb we can give is that if you intend to build a business around your web idea, get a professional to take care of the web design.  If you are unsure of your ultimate goals, doing it yourself may not be a bad idea.  It will cost less, but also will give you a good handle on how things work, which will allow you to make better decisions about future web sites and designs, regardless of if you hire a professional or do them yourself.

Are you Blogging Effectively? Interesting Things to Bear in Mind

Perhaps “blogging” isn’t such a graceful word. For me, personally, it sounds like a worded drudgery the way cereals can be soggy, skies can be foggy, and the way minds can be groggy. But for now, it’s too late to rename this shortened word for web-logging. Widespread blogging is nevertheless one of the most engaging Internet developments of the past few years. As a medium it gives rise to many new and worthy voices and plays a new and vital force in shaping opinions, political realities, trends, and even our language.

I believe that a blog is simply a tool to use for someone who’s got something to say. Let me be clear in saying that a blog is a poor choice for someone who needs a megaphone to scream out to cyberspace in order to elicit a meaningful response from Internet users. If you want attention and want it now and expect blogging to bring it to you, then this will surely be a disappointment. However, if you like to write and engage others on subjects of which you have some command or experience, then it’s a wonderful application with which you can interact with people who share similar interests as you. The hype is well founded.

Anyway, here’s a list of blogging tips…

1.) Be topical.
Cohesiveness in message is not optional. Readers may or may not be interested in your topic, but if your message is haphazard that few will bother remembering to return to your blog because it essentially would offer nothing to remember. This doesn’t mean blogs can’t jump from subject to subject. For instance, a blog with a humorous focus has all the leeway in the world for subject matter, but it would be foolish for such a blog to turn the humor on and off. In such an example, the aspect of humor would be content’s glue, the strength of the blog. The beauty of staying on point and on topic is that eventually, due to the nature of the Internet, you will find those interested solely in your topic. (as opposed to online diaries. There are millions of them on the internet, few have any readers. Email me with examples if I’m wrong and I’ll be able to show you why you’re showing me a blog and not a diary.)

2.) Refresh your content
Create a schedule and stick to it. Realizing that blogging requires time and effort, don’t create unrealistic expectations and be unable to deliver. An occasional lapse or holiday is generally understood but readers returning to find stale, out-dated content are going to find another blog with similar content. New blogs and RSS feeds are popping up on a daily basis. If you have worked hard to develop an audience and a community you don’t want to lose them due to lack of communication.

And remember, what’s old is not new and, for blogs, thusly not interesting. 2006 isn’t the time to rail against Enron or Vanilla Ice. Insight doesn’t matter much to yesterday’s news.

3.) Clear Language Counts.
Blessed is the blog with a clear line of logic. Write without inside jokes, clique-y catchphrases or ambiguous logic. First time readers need to be close to your message. They are more likely to return to blogs that strike them positively. If the first read is confusing there will not be a second read.

4.) Feed the Spiders.
Search engines take notice of active blogs and blog search engines are especially sensitive to activity. If nothing else, search engines are smarter today than they were yesterday and are only getting smarter. In constantly improving they are seeking to aggregate quality; quality blogs are updated several times a week, if not daily, as opposed to once or twice a month. I don’t mean to scare you but a big spider is watching, so dance for them.

5.) RSS.
Think of RSS like a magic to blogging world, because that’s the effect it’s had. RSS feeds are a way to exponentially sound your voice to the interested. These feeds are a great means to increase the distribution and readership of your original content.

6.) Spell check.
Hey man, use the spell-check. I do – if I didn’t you probably wouldn’t have made it to #6. It only takes a minute and can save you from looking like a hack.

Your weblog audiences will be small at first. And, frankly, that’s the way it should be. Who are you to think that half the internet will flock to you after three or four posts of your blog, anyway?

If you tough it out while maintaining quality, readership will materialize. You will link to good, relevant blogs and, in turn, they will to you. While your voice may be unique, your niche likely isn’t and if your content is emitted smartly to the Internet those relevant readers will respond through readership and interaction. That I guarantee.