Custom Web Design

Custom Web Design Blog by Promotion4me.net

2006-02-21T20:40:00.000-08:00

Custom Web Design Blog by Promotion4me.net

Three Steps to Improved Search Engine Rankings

One of today's hottest marketing buzz phrases is "Search Engine Optimization", or SEO. SEO is the process of configuring an organization's Web site in such a way that when a person goes to Google (or other search engine) and searches for keywords related to the organization, the search engine lists the organization's Web site within its search results in the highest possible position.

SEO can be a valuable promotional tactic within any Web site marketing strategy. However, SEO can also become time consuming because Google, Yahoo, and MSN (the big three) use sophisticated algorithms to index Web content. All three companies continually adjust their algorithms to provide users with the best search results. Therefore, you will need to continually test new techniques to achieve and maintain high rankings.

The AVS Group has researched and developed an SEO model that improves search engine rankings. This article highlights three tactics from our model you can use to improve your own rankings:

1. Select great keywords
2. Convert keywords into traffic
3. Link building

Tactic #1: Select Great Keywords

Your first priority should be to select great keywords that describe your organization and the content within your Web site. It might be tempting to save time by developing a list of keywords, some specific and others broad, and then applying all of them on every page throughout your Web site. However, you will achieve greater results by selecting 10 custom keywords or phrases for each page of content within your site. For example, select 10 keywords and use them exclusively on your home page, followed by 10 different keywords for each subsequent page of content.

When selecting keywords, avoid words that are broad or vague. Broad or vague keywords provide little benefit because likely too many other pages are currently indexed in the search engines using those keywords. To illustrate, let's use AVSGroup.com as an example. Open a new browser window and go to Google. Search on the term "Web Site Design". Look at the upper right corner where Google displays the number of pages currently indexed for the keywords. Google has already indexed about 22 million pages for "Web Site Design".

Instead of competing against 22 million pages for "Web Site Design", AVS chose to optimize a page of content for "Web Strategy Development". This phrase precisely describes one of AVS's Web services, and because fewer pages are indexed, there is a greater likelihood of achieving a high ranking. To illustrate, go back to Google. Search on "Web Strategy Development". Google has indexed 623 pages and AVSGroup.com is the number one ranked site.

Tactic #2: Convert Keywords into Traffic

Once you have selected great keywords, the keywords must be incorporated into the right locations within your Web site to drive more traffic. Some of the best places are within your site's page title, META description, and META keywords. Google, Yahoo, and MSN look for keywords in these locations to help properly index a site's content.

If you are unfamiliar with how to view a page title, open a new browser window and go to AVSGroup.com. The page title is the white text that appears inside the bar at the top left of your browser window.

Next in importance is the META description and META keywords. Both are used to describe the content found on a particular page. To locate the METAs, open a new browser window and go back to AVSGroup.com. Click on the "View" drop down menu within your Internet Explorer window. You will see several options including "View Source". Select "View Source". This will display the HTML used to create the AVSGroup.com home page. At the top of the page, you will see the META description and META keywords.

You will achieve the greatest success if you develop custom page titles, META descriptions, and META keywords for each page within your Web site using the keywords that you selected earlier.

Tactic #3: Link Building

Link building is an SEO term that means requesting other Webmasters to add a link to your Web site within their Web site. This usually takes place in two ways. Webmasters will sometimes add your link within their own site's content because your Web site could be a valuable resource to their site visitors. You can also encourage Webmasters to post your content onto their Web site provided they include a link to your Web site within the credits.

For the first example, open a new browser window and go to www.viroqua-wisconsin.com. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a link that reads "Web site design and development by The AVS Group". This link provides AVSGroup.com with additional traffic if someone were to click the link, but more importantly, the link helps increase our "Page Rank". More on Page Rank later.

Next, open a new browser window and go back to Google. Search on the phrase "e-mail marketing tips". You should see a link that reads "Learn Successful E-mail Marketing Tips" (it might even be the number two ranked site). Click on this link and you will find a Web site that is featuring one of The AVS Group's Resources articles. This is an example of leveraging your Web site content by permitting other Webmasters to post it and provide a link back to your site. Scroll to the bottom of the article and you will see a link to AVSGroup.com.

Your link building activities increase what is known as, "Page Rank". Page Rank is a measure that Google uses to evaluate the relevancy of a Web site's content. If you have hundreds or even thousands of Web sites linking to your Web site using these two examples, Google will consider your Web site to be more relevant. You will earn a higher Page Rank score, resulting in improved search results for your Web site against sites that might even be optimized for the same keywords.

In closing, this article shared three key tactics within our SEO model that you can use to improve your search engine rankings. Because of the complexity of SEO, please let us know if you would like to learn more about our full SEO model. Our Web experts will demonstrate the various tactics within our model and discuss the results.

About the Author: The AVS Group is a marketing, training, and communications company. AVS is in La Crosse, Wisconsin. AVS helps clients communicate and market effectively. AVS can be found online at http://www.avsgroup.com.

Custom Web Design Blog by Promotion4me.net

2006-02-21T20:37:00.000-08:00

Custom Web Design Blog by Promotion4me.net

Search Engine Optimization And Why You Gotta Use It

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let's just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site's existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site's content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

About the Author: Mark Flavin Is An Expert In Search Engine Optimization & Traffic Generation Techniques. Discover His Secrets For Free At: http://conquering-the-search-engines.com/seoelite1.html

How To Ensure The Search Engines Find Your Website

2006-02-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

One of the most fundamental aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) is ensuring that the pages within your website are as accessible as possible to the search engines. It's not only the homepage of a website that can be indexed, but also the internal pages within a site's structure. The internal pages of a site often contain important content such as products, services or general information, and therefore can be uniquely optimised for related terms. As a result, easy access to these pages is vital.

There are many do's and don'ts involved in ensuring all of your pages can be found by search engines. However, it is important to first establish how the search engines find and index web pages.

Search engines use "robots" (also known as "bots" or "spiders") to find content on the web for inclusion in their index. A robot is a computer programme that can follow the hyperlinks on a web page, which is known as "crawling". When a robot finds a document it includes the contents within the search engine's index, then follows the next links it can find and continues the process of crawling and indexing. With this in mind, it becomes apparent that the navigational structure of a website is important in getting as many pages as possible indexed.

When considering the navigational structure of your site, the hierarchy of content should be considered. Search engines judge what they feel to be the most important pages of a site when considering rankings and a page's position in the site structure can influence this. The homepage is generally considered the most important page of a site - it is the top level document and usually attracts the most inbound links. From here, search engine robots can normally reach pages that are within three clicks of the homepage. Therefore, your most important pages should be one click away, the next important two clicks away and so forth.

The next thing to consider is how to link the pages together. Search engine robots can only follow generic HTML href links, meaning Flash links, JavaScript links, dropdown menus and submit buttons will all be inaccessible to robots. Links with query strings that have two or more parameters are also typically ignored, so be aware of this if you run a dynamically generated website.

The best links to use from an SEO perspective are generic HTML text links, as not only can they be followed by robots but the text contained in the anchor can also be used to describe the destination page - an optimisation plus point. Image links are also acceptable but the ability to describe the destination page is diminished, as the alt attribute is not given as much ranking weight as anchor text.

The most natural way to organise content on a website is to categorise it. Break down your products, services or information into related categories and then structure this so that the most important aspects are linked to from the homepage. If you have a vast amount of information for each category then again you will want to narrow your content down further. This could involve having articles on a similar topic, different types of product for sale, or content that can be broken down geographically. Categorisation is natural optimisation - the further you break down your information the more content you can provide and the more niche key phrases there are that can be targeted.

If you are still concerned that your important pages may not get indexed, then you can consider adding a sitemap to your website. A sitemap can be best described as an index page - it is a list of links to all of the pages within a site contained on one page. If you link to a sitemap from your homepage then it gives a robot easy access to all of the pages within your site. Just remember - robots typically can't follow more than 100 links from one page, so if your site is larger than this you may want to consider spreading your sitemap across several pages.

There are many considerations to make when optimising your site for search engines, and making your pages accessible to search engine robots should be the first step of your optimisation process. Following the advice above will help you make your entire site accessible and aid you in gaining multiple rankings and extra traffic.

The Secret to Generating Traffic

2006-02-08T13:24:00.000-08:00

The internet has made the world a smaller place. It allows people from different countries to communicate with one another to share ideas and opinions. One of the best places to generate more traffic for someone who has an existing website is through Online forums. By just following some simple tips, more people will visit one site in no time.

1. For this to work, the person should be online most of the time. Since frequent users do the same and always have questions to ask, a great idea will be to give an answer that can help that individual.

The person has to remember that there are also other people who will answer the posted question but if one offers the best answer that is a plus to that individual. It will establish credibility on the part of the person and that user will likely visit the website to see what else can be offered. This will also allow that person to refer the site to other people creating more traffic.

2. Some people believe it pays to be nice and this is true. Forums are also a place where debates occur. By giving an answer in a nice way though one disagrees with the other person, it establishes a sense of respect.

If people see how friendly and courteous one is, this will also entice the users to see what one has to offer in the website.

3. Being an active contributor to the Online forum is a great way of getting noticed. There are a lot of things people want and need to know and by looking for it and informing the person how to also get it, this will make the person a handyman in the web. It will be better if one can write something short about it so the user will have a brief idea if this is relevant in the personís search.

4. Everyone has a certain calling card in getting something done. By putting it in whenever posting an answer in the forum, this will make people know who the good Samaritan is and will want to know more about the website and the services one can offer.

Most people post the name of the person which could be real or fictitious, the email address and the website address so one can easily be reached.

5. Whenever one posts something that is needed by a user, it is advisable to think of a way to make the person go back and visit ones website. If one needs advice on how to pick the right diving equipment, the person can give a short answer then for that person to get more information, that individual has to visit ones website.

The technique to creating more traffic by finding a way to make people visit ones site is called in-context linking. This is also how search engines rank how well ones site compares over others. As more people click on it and are guided to the site, the more important it is. The best way to do this is being active in the web and posting a lot of relevant material for other users.

By following these simple 5 steps, a person will always have a good number of people visiting ones site. Generating more traffic and earning money can be made if the person is willing to give it a great amount of effort. If that person is too lazy to keep the site updated and giving it regular maintenance, then someone can be hired for that job. The individual should just be sure to pay the person well for doing all the hard work.

Making ones website user friendly is essential in making people refer it to others. This can be done by letting friends and family try it first then ask feedback about the site. The most important thing to remember before launching it to the various websites is making sure that ones website is fully operational and will not have problems for users when logging on to it. It is very embarrassing for people to experience problems the first time which will surely discourage one from referring it to others and visiting it again.

Custom Web Design

2006-02-08T12:40:00.000-08:00

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