How to Find Free Content for your Web Site

By Kalena Jordan (c) 2007

I see a lot of webmasters complain in forums and chat rooms that they don't have enough content on their web sites, but they don't have the means or the knowledge to find more.

There are actually many ways to obtain more web site content. You could hire someone to write it for you. You could purchase some ready made content about your site topic or you could spend some time and write content yourself. But did you

Article Syndication

Articles relating to thousands of topics are freely available for syndication on web sites. Authors provide them for this purpose to gain a wider audience and achieve more back links. Generally, the only requirement for webmasters is that the author's by-line, resource box and link are included with the published article. In terms of copyright, you simply need to follow the author's publishing guidelines when republishing their article. This usually involves an "About the Author" paragraph at the bottom of each article with a sentence and link to the author's site. These syndication requirements are generally specified in the article itself.

How to do it:

1) Browse the Internet to find articles you can syndicate. I use the article announcement groups at Yahoo Groups, but you can also find them at sources such as Submit Your Articles.

2) View the articles being distributed by the group and review their freshness and quality. 3) Join the email líst or subscribe to the RSS feed of any article groups that seem to be distributing content relevant to your web site.

4) Go through your email or feed reader regularly to browse and select new articles.

5) Cut, paste and publish the articles into your web pages, giving credít to the author as requested in their syndication guidelines.

6) Voila! Fresh, daily content.

Articles for Blogs

If the article content is to be used on a blog, there is an even quicker way to publish it. Depending on what blog software you use, you can simply forward the email containing the article directly to your blog control panel using the publish via email option and then edit the post to correct any formatting issues. The other advantage of this method is that search engines LOVE blogs and tend to index them more often than regular web pages.

I use blog article syndication quite successfully for a couple of my clients. One is in the travel industry and the other has a large wedding portal. I simply subscribe to articles on travel and wedding related topics and publish them to the blogs belonging to each client. My clients supplement these with articles and blog posts written by their own staff or hired writers.

Advantages

There are a number of advantages to using article syndication:

Relevant, Timely Content - You can choose content that is closely geared to your existing content and of interest to your audience. For example, if you sell airline tickets, publish travel articles about exotic destinations. The idea there is that persons reading travel articles might be thinking about traveling themselves and need to be reminded to book their plane tickets.

Cross Promotion - You can choose content that gives you the opportuníty to up sell to your own products or affilíate products. For example, if you sell scented candles online, you could choose to publish articles about increasing the romance in your marriage and then include a link at the end of the article to your candle sales catalog (would you like fries with that?).

SEO Value - Apart from the obvious value of having fresh content regularly available for indexing, there are other SEO advantages to article syndication. Most articles are keyword-rich, meaning that they contain a lot of keywords and phrases that people might use in search queries. Publishing these articles means that your site has a better chance of being found for related search queries. One of my clients noticed their syndicated article pages ranking in the top 10 Google SERPs for target keywords within two days of publishing! You can also embed links within the articles or at the end of articles to related areas of your site using keyword-rich anchor text.

Increased Traffic & Sticky Content - It's not only search engines that love fresh content. You'll find that you'll attract more visitors when you publish relevant articles. Provided you find ways to interact with your new visitors such as allowing them to comment or sign up for your article feed, your site will become stickier and retain those visitors more easily.

Disadvantages

There are really only two disadvantages that I can think of about using article syndication. One is that the same article published on various web sites can sometimes be treated by search engines as duplicate content. So generally, a search engine will try to determine the original source of the article and index/rank that page while ignoring all other versions. If you publish a fresh article quickly enough, you can sometimes be lucky and have your version of the article picked up and treated as the *original*. The other disadvantage is that it can be time-consuming to trawl through the hundreds of new articles announced daily and choose the ones you want. You also have to scan them carefully to ensure accuracy of facts and to ascertain if the author has used correct spelling and grammar usage. But compared to the costs of paying somebody to write articles from scratch, I think this is a very minor inconvenience.

Want to get the jump on your competition and improve your traffíc? Use article syndication to publish fresh, relevant content on your site every day.

About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

47 Simple Ways to Build

By Miles Galliford (c) 2007

If your website does not create a sense of trust in your visitors, all your efforts will be in vain. Your online business will never succeed. That's the bad news. The good news is that it is very easy to create and build trust in your online visitors. Below, I have listed all the techniques used by the hundreds of websites I have helped launch. If you have additional techniques, please add them to the list.

As the old saying goes, you have only one chance to make a first impression. Building trust cannot be achieved by one single action. Trust is achieved by hundreds of little things you do throughout your website that, when taken together, give readers a sense of honesty, legitimacy and stability.

The other bit of good news is that few website owners focus on building trust in the minds of their visitors. If you do it well, it can become a real and sustainable competitive advantage.

Here are 47 simple actions you can take to get started.

1. Trust is built by lots of small actions on every page of your website.

2. Your website design is the first impression. Make sure it is professional and relevant to the subject matter.

3. Navigation must be intuitive. If visitors can't find what they are looking for easily, they will question your competence in providing what they want.

4. Make the website personal by giving it its own tone and voice. People buy people.

5. Follow the HEART rule of creating online content. (Reminder: HEART stands for Honest, Exclusive, Accurate, Relevant and Timely.)

6. Use language that is appropriate to the audience. It will build empathy.

7. Regularly add new content to your site. It shows that the business is alive and kicking.

8. Check all links. Doubts will quickly form in your visitors' minds if links don't work or, worse still, take them to error pages.

9. Good grammar and spelling matter. Errors give the impression of sloppiness and carelessness.

10. Never make outrageous and unbelievable claims, like "Read this blog and you'll be a millionaire by the end of the week." People are used to scams, get-rich-quick schemes and rip-offs.

11. Publish REAL testimonials and third-party endorsements. Try to always use real names and link to websites where possible. Some sites show images of letters sent by happy customers.

12. Publish case studies about customers you have helped, who use your product, etc.

13. Don't put down, curse or insult competitors. It's unprofessional. It is better to offer an objective comparison of competitive services or products.

14. Focus on building your long-term reputation, not on making quick sales.

15. Write articles for humans, not search engines.

16. Make your 'About Us' page personal and comprehensive. It plays an important part in making visitors feel comfortable that real people are behind the site.

17. Publish your photo or the photos of the key people involved with the site. Again, this reinforces the fact that there are real people behind the screenshots.

18. Clearly identify who is behind the site. Nothing creates more suspicion than a site that tries to hide the identity of its publishers.

19. On the 'Contact Us' page, provide an email form, telephone number, fax and address of the company. In Europe, it is a legal requirement for sites taking money, but even sites driven by advertising will benefit from openness.

20. Provide a telephone number that people can call and talk to a person.

21. Provide Web addresses linked to the website domain, not addresses from free webmail services such as Hotmail and Gmail.

22. Never lie to make money. The most common way is to write a glowing report about a product or service to earn affiliate revenues. It is very short-sighted to lie to visitors to sell them rubbish. They'll never come back or, worse still, they'll actively condemn your site on forums and blogs.

23. Think carefully about reciprocal links. If your site is about organic food and you have links to Party Poker, people are going to question your integrity.

24. Think carefully about the adverts you display on your site. Ensure that they are relevant to your subject and audience.

25. Be explicit when you are being paid to endorse a product or service. An advertorial is fine as long as it is transparent. Paid-to-post is corrupting the Web and will experience a user backlash. I never read websites that accept payment for posting.

26. Write and publish your privacy policy. Be clear about what you will and will not do with any personal data you collect. State that you adhere to all data protection laws. Make it easy to read and don't use legal gobbledygook.

27. Write and publish a security policy. State what measures you take to ensure that all transactions are secure.

28. Ensure that you have a security and privacy policy which is linked from the footer on every page. Make the link more prominent on all the order pages.

29. Clearly publish your guarantee. I would recommend making it a 100% money-back guarantee if possible.

30. Clearly state your refund and returns policy.

31. Piggyback off reputable brands. If you use PayPal, put the PayPal logo on your site. If you have a merchant services account with a major bank like Citibank or HSBC, put its logo on your site.

32. Use Google search on your site for two reasons. First, it is a great search solution which will help your visitors find what they are looking for. Second, having the Google name on your site instills trust.

33. If there are well-known industry associations for your subject, join up and put their logos on your site.

34. Have a forum on your site and respond quickly to questions. Have the attitude that you are happy to help others without receiving immediate reward. As the old saying goes, 'Givers always gain.'

35. Allow people to comment on articles. Interactivity and an exchange of views build community and a sense of involvement.

36. If people provide constructive criticism or comments in the forum, don't delete them, but respond with your point of view.

37. Put photos on the website of the owners, publishers and/or team. Let visitors know there are real people behind the business.

38. Put images of the credit cards you accept on every page of the order process.

39. Use the words 'secure website' whenever you try to get any information from visitors, including newsletter sign-ups, forum input and payment.

40. On every page, state, "We take your privacy and security very seriously." Link the statement to the security and privacy policy.

41. Remember, reputations take years to build and seconds to destroy.

42. If you are selling a subscription, offer a low-cost, entry-level option. This could be a one-day taster, 'a week before billing starts' or a monthly trial.

43. Use a high level of security when processing credit cards. Make sure you make your clients aware of all the steps you are taking.

44. Never send credit card information or personal details over the Internet unencrypted. Tell your customers that their data will be encrypted.

45. Only ask for information from customers that you really need. For example, for an email newsletter sign-up, the only information you REALLY need is an email address, so that is all you should ask for.

46. If you have pricing on your website, make it transparent. I recently went to buy a book which was advertised for $10. When I checked out, they added tax, post and packaging, and the final bill was $19.50. I didn't buy it as I felt they had deliberately tried to mislead me.

47. Keep your SSL certificate up to date. Let people know you are using SSL encryption and who the provider is.

You can never do too much to build trust. Most of it comes down to common sense and good business practice. To ensure that you are continually improving your trustworthiness, every time you go to a website, ask yourself whether you trust it or not. Then ask yourself why you have formed the opinion you have. Continually try to learn what makes a site trustworthy or untrustworthy and implement the relevant changes to your site.

If people trust you, the money will follow!

About The Author
SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profit on the web. Website: SubHub.com

How to Optimize for Yahoo!

With a reported 22.1% of search traffíc Yahoo is second only to Google's 64.4% (src: Hitwise ) for search user volume so it is extremely important not to forget that attaining a top ranking in Yahoo can be a big boon to the bottom line. As a result, I decided to write this update on how to attain superior rankings in Yahoo using today's useful tools and tactics.

Overview: Optimizing for Yahoo!
Algorithmically Yahoo is Google's much younger sibling. I say this because many of the requirements for a successful ranking mirror Google's requirement about 4 years ago and they sum up to one distinct fact; optimize your content boldly on Yahoo and you will be rewarded. When I say "boldly" I do not mean use sp@m; by nature sp@m and optimization do not mix... they are two entirely separate concepts (black and white in fact).

The following are the current generalized specifications for achieving solid rankings in Yahoo.

Web Site Optimization
SEO tactics have not changed a great deal over the past 10 years I have been an SEO. In general terms the only effect time has had on SEO is to vary the intensity of the optimization for particular page elements. That is the rub of course; some search engines appreciate the optimization of particular page elements over others. In the case of Yahoo, this old property with a relatively young algorithm tends to favour the following elements:

Title Tag: Keep your title tag as short as 5 small-medium sized words and include one complete incidence of your keyphrase. Yahoo! blatantly favours sites that include the keyphrase in the title tag. For an example search "car sales" or for that matter any phrase. Within the top 10 results you will notice that the majority of sites listed will include at least one incidence of the keyphrase or a crucial portion of it (i.e. "cars"). The ones that do not include the keyphrase tend to be sites that are extremely popular so even basic title tag optimization is not required to attain a top ranking.

Meta Description Tag: Start this tag with an incidence of your keyphrase and then produce a short 15 – 18 small-medium sized word sentence clearly describing your site. Include one more incidence of your keyphrase in the sentence. Keep in mind that the description tag is often utilized as the description for any rankings you achieve so it is best to make it alluring.

Meta Keyword Tag: Keyword tags have long been considered ineffective and no longer have any importance on Google; however Yahoo does still consider the keyword tag so it cannot hurt to include it. The keyword tag should start with the keyphrase and then all following words or phrases should be ordered according to their relevance to your website; place the most important ones up front. The max size of a keyword tag should be 250 characters – comma-delimited. Do not over repeat words; no more than 3 repetitions of a single word within the tag.

Keywords in URL: Create keyword-based filenames that closely represent the content within the file. Yahoo rewards keyword-based filenames a small amount – perhaps enough to push past your competition.

Headings: Heading 1 and 2 tags should be applied on every page where appropriate to embolden the relevance of the page. In other words, use the page's keyphrase within a Heading 1 tag to further enhance the visibility of the keyphrase on the page.

Alt text for images: Don't forget to provide appropriate ALT text for each image on your website. The ALT text must not provide information that is already written on the website. ALT text is supposed to provide a clear and concise description of what the image is. Fortunately this means that adding an incidence of the keyphrase or a portion of the keyphrase is totally appropriate which can add slightly more credibility to your page score when Yahoo's crawler (Slurp) indexes the page.

Inline Links: In the midst of your page it is beneficial to include links to related pages from related content. These links will apply relevance to the linked page; which is optimized for the same keyphrase you linked from.

Site Structure: Site structure is a vital component to ranking success on Yahoo; especially in competitive marketplaces where every advantage is required to reach the top. One method that would be successful at Yahoo (and happens to work as well on the other major search engines) is a tried and true technique that revolves around the linear progression of related content throughout the website; it is commonly known as Themeing. The following example should shed some light on this subject:

Your site is a car sales site focused on Audi. In order to create a linear site structure you would focus each section of the site on an individual relevancy. Say you pick "Audi A5" as the relevant topic (see Figure 1.0). As you move deeper into the Audi A5 section you only see A5 relevant content. The search engine spider and your users will not be distracted by links to other vehicles – only information on the A5. This progresses as you proceed deeper into this arm of the website and because this section of the site is utterly focused on the subject "Audi A5" the odds of achieving a ranking for that term improve considerably.

Links
When building links for Yahoo concentrate on quality not quantity. Quality links would be one way links from sites that specialize in content directly relevant to the content on your own website. Building these links can be done by creating content and syndicating it to your own industry for link love and to build credibility. In addition, if your website is a worthwhile resource it is entirely reasonable to tell the world about your site in order to build links; hopefully they will link to you because they like your site so much.

Finally, there is another tactic that has mixed results; send out press releases once a month using PRWeb or an associated press release agency. A good press release can easily build the links you need in no time at all. Unfortunately the mixed results I noted occur when press releases inevitably become archived, at which point the link relevance will fade. As a result, link building with press releases is only useful as an ongoing practice and should be considered a small facet of a robust link building campaign.

Site Explorer Settings
Yahoo's Site Explorer is a fantastic tool for monitoring your website(s) and running basic link reports. If you have not already done so you should create an account at Site Explorer and then validate your website (prove you own it) so that you can manage the information Yahoo has for your website. Once you have validated your website I have noted some Site Explorer functionality that may help your website perform on Yahoo:

* Make certain to create a sitemap and submit it to Yahoo: If you haven't already done so use a XML sitemap generator to create a sitemap for your website and then submit it to Yahoo using the "Add Feed" form within your website's Site Explorer profile.

* Removing unnecessary dynamic content from your URLs with new add-on within Site Explorer: Do your URLs contain session ID's or other dynamic content that is unnecessary within the URL? If so, this information can be indexed by the search engines and ultimately can cause havoc with your rankings. Thankfully Yahoo has implemented a new tool within the Site Explorer domain management section called "Dynamic URLs Beta". Here are the instructions to use the Dynamic URLs tool.

Other Considerations
After reviewing our notes from current and previous Yahoo promotions and taking a look at a variety of top 10 results the following points appeared noteworthy:

* Ensure open indexing by using Robots.txt wisely

* A lot of our client's older content appears to be sticking to top rankings with little or no monthly tweaking. As a result, I think it is fair to assume that fresh content is not currently gaining much weíght in the Yahoo algorithm.

* In many cases top ranking sites have pushed the envelope and their sites border on sp@m. Considering the top ranking these sites have it appears Yahoo's sp@m filters are far less sensitive than Google's. I expect Yahoo will change this in the near future, but then again I have been surprised how long this has been the status quo.

* One common claim throughout forums is that achieving a placement in the Yahoo Directory provides an immediate boost to Yahoo rankings. Unfortunately we have not seen conclusive evidence that the annual $299 fee will improve rankings dramatically in the short term. That said, I strongly believe that a Yahoo Directory placement is a very reputable incoming link that does pay dividends in the long run at any search engine that weighs incoming links (the ones that count).

* Yahoo Search Submit was re-introduced back in February 2007 to significant criticism due to the potential favouritism to those who pay to get into the Yahoo index. Despite the negative feedback there appears to be some potential benefits to paying for submission. For one, in July I noted an interesting story where a website was banned from Yahoo and the webmaster got the site back into Yahoo's index by paying for inclusion ("Banned from Yahoo?" ). A second reason Search Submit may be worthwhile is the guarantëe that your site will be indexed. Furthermore, the Yahoo's Search Submit Pro service allows you to recommend your own title and description tags for each page submitted and to submit pages that may not normally be indexed by Slurp.

About The Author
Ross Dunn is the founder and CEO of StepForth Web Marketing Inc.. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. Ross is a search engine optimization and placement expert with over 9 years of marketing experience and is a Certified Internet Marketing and Business Strategist (CIMBS). Blending his experience in the art of web design and search engine optimization, Ross offers a unique and informed perspective on obtaining top search engine placements. Ross can be reached at ross@stepforth.com

How Important is Alexa Ranking?

Alexa Ranking - A Web Site Monetization Strategy?

All businesses that employ online marketing, strive to improve their conversion rate. Now, there are different ways of attracting targeted traffíc. Some try to achieve a good ranking in the SERPs, while others are satisfied with heavier traffic. Either way, everybody has the goal of achieving financial success.

But, while scoring high with Google may seem to certain business people the only way to make themselves known and thus reach their goal, there are others that think that a good position in the Alexa ranking system might benefit them just as well.

What is Alexa Ranking?

This is a ranking system set by alexa.com (a subsidiary of amazon.com ) that basically audits and makes public the frequency of visits to various Web sites. The algorithm by which Alexa traffíc ranking is calculated, is simple. It is based on the amount of traffic recorded over a period of three months from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed.

This traffíc is based on such parameters as reach and page views. The reach refers to the number of Alexa users who visit a particular site in one day. Page view, as the name indicates, is the number of times a particular page (URL) is viewed by Alexa users. Alexa.com makes it clear though that, if a particular user visits the same URL multiple times on the same day, all those visits will be counted as one.

The first step of the ranking process is calculating the reach and number of page views for all the sites on the Web on a daily basis. Alexa ranking is obtained by performing the geometric mean of reach and page views, averaged over a predefined period of time (three months).

How Alexa Ranking Works

It's quite easy to get started. All you have to do is visit the alexa.com site and download (and install) the Alexa toolbar. This toolbar offers a search function, but it mainly displays the rank (at a global level) of the visited site, as well as the sites that have been visited by Web surfers that are linked in some way to the site being visited.

The Alexa toolbar not only displays information, but it also sends data to the central server. Thus, each time you visit a Web page via a Web browser (be it Internet Explorer or Firefox) that has the toolbar installed, information is sent to the server indicating your IP and the page you are visiting. Such data is gathered from all the Web users who have the Alexa toolbar.

With Alexa, the smaller the numerical ranking, the better. Most people say that if you manage to make it in the top 100,000, it is a sign that your site enjoys quite heavy traffíc.

Is Alexa Ranking Worth Anything?

Benefits

• Alexa Traffic can be used as a competitive intelligence tool, but you should take into consideration the fact that the audience sample size is fairly small. Just enter your competitor's site in the "Compare Sites" section and measure the results of your web marketing efforts in comparison with your competitors'.

• As opposed to Google's PageRank, the lower your ranking number, the better.

• It helps Webmasters and advertisers see the real marketing potential of your Web site. The better your Alexa rank, the higher they may be willing to bid to buy advertising space on your Web site.

• Personal pages or blogs are also ranked in the same way as ordinary Web sites. They will even get a distinctive mark (*)

• Because Alexa ranking helps you with information about your Web site, it is a good instrument for search engine optimization.

Disadvantages

• Not everybody has the Alexa toolbar installed, so there might be millíons of Web sites that, even if they have a lot of traffíc, will not be ranked (or not high enough) by Alexa. It is rather relative.

• Many people say that it is inaccurate and that Alexa traffíc can be greatly influenced (or "gamed", as some prefer to call it).

• Subdomains are not ranked separately, and neither are subpages within a domain. The overall traffic is calculated for the top-level domain only.

Ways to Improve Your Alexa Ranking

If you want to boost your Alexa traffíc ranking, you just have to follow some quite simple rules, such as:

• Download and install the Alexa toolbar and then surf your own site.

• Place the Alexa widget on your Web site. It will entice visitors to use it and, you know, each click counts.

• Write useful, quality content, mostly webmaster-related. Promote it on webmaster forums and on social networking sites. The idea is to get as many computer and Internet savvy people as possible to visit your site, since the probability that they will have the Alexa toolbar installed is high.

• Write blogs and articles about Alexa. You will get links to your pages that will help improve your ranking.

• Try to get your articles on such blog sites as digg.com, del.icio.us, or www.stumbleupon.com

• Optimize your site (or relevant pages of it) for Alexa related keywords.

• Tell your friends about the Alexa toolbar, have them download and install it on their computers, and then tell them to visit your site.

• Use an Alexa redirect. This means placing http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? in front of your Web site's URL. Alexa will then take into consideration clicks on redirected links even if the visitor does not have the Alexa toolbar.

• Apparently, Asian people are huge fans of Alexa. Therefore, many people suggest posting in Asian social networking forums.
• Whenever you post on webmaster forums, include your site's URL in your signature. It is very likely that most webmasters have the toolbar installed, and there's a great probability that they'll visit your site.

Conclusion

As we have seen, there are pros and cons to Alexa ranking. The bottom line is that most people consider it valuable only for direct advertising. Given the fact that Alexa ranking for a site is calculated on the basis of how many visitors with the Alexa toolbar installed have visited that particular site, the results can be inaccurate.

Nevertheless, it may prove useful for sites with very good traffíc that attract highly targetëd leads, since Alexa focuses more on the traffic that Web sites receive rather than on links to it. As a Web site monetization strategy, we can safely say that Alexa ranking might be the right solution.

About The Author
Adriana Iordan is a Web Marketing Specialist at Avangate B.V.. She has in depth knowledge of internet marketing services and website analysis applied to the software industry and e-commerce development. Avangate is an eCommerce platform for electronic software distribution incorporating an easy to use and secure online payment system plus additional marketing and sales tools.

10 reasons to hire a professional designer.

A Web Site is Your Online Representative

Would you build your brick and mortar shop and do all of the signs and interior decorating yourself? Most of us would not; we would hire professionals to give us the best image possible. Your web site acts as your business card and/or online shop. It acts as a direct representative of you and your business. If your web site doesn’t have the professional image you need, you are losing customers. If first impressions are so important, why would you want to scare your potential customers away in the first second?

Professionalism

When you hire a professional designer, not only do they know how to give you a beautiful image, but also how to give you the image that’s right for your business and industry. A skilled designer should know the ins and outs of marketing as well as creativity. An effective web site should be unique, be pleasant on the eye, have clear and easy navigation, load efficiently, and work properly in all the major browsers.

Saving Time

Hiring a professional web designer instead of making the web site yourself will save you a lot of time, energy, and frustration. There is a large learning curve in order to make effective web sites and there are many aspects to web development much beyond learning HTML which makes it a full time job. A professional web developers is skilled and up-to-date in several areas including Marketing, SEO, Communication, HTML, CSS, Photo Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, Java Script, and possibly several other languages like Flash, PHP and others.

Getting Ahead of the Competition

As you may well know, competition is as fierce in the internet as it is in the physical world. If your competitors have a web presence before you do, they are already a step ahead of you. But, if you launch a new web site that is more effective than theirs, you will have the extra edge. Not only does a well-built web site give a good first impression, it also will give your customers a reason to trust your business over that of your competitors.

Uniqueness and Customization

There are about 56,000,000 web sites on the internet as of November 2004 according to netscape.com. How are you going to make yours stand out? Buying a nice template can be a quick and cheap solution, but you may risk having your web site look like several others. Furthermore, many features that you may require for your web site including contact forms, galleries, forums, and other special scripts are simply not available with pre-made templates. If you have a web site built with a pre-made template and in the future you want to expand it, you may have to rebuild the whole site again to include the added features that you need.

Communicating Your Message

A professional web designer is experienced in knowing how to properly communicate your message. They are skilled at marketing and are concerned, above all, with how to effectively communicate your message by organizing your information in a digestible manner as well as communicating your message through the use of colors, fonts, shapes, layouts, and more to convey the message you want to represent for your business.

Attention

A nice web site designed by a professional designer will bring attention to your business. Not only does a nice web site attract new customers, it will also bring professional attention from your peers or potential advertisers that you may be in search of. Word-of-mouth and good referrals are some of the most powerful marketing tools there are.

Search Engine Optimization

One of the most important factors about a web site is its presence in the search engines. It is useless to have the nicest web site in the world if it doesn’t have a good presence in the search engine listings. Good search engine ranking are important because they are usually the number one way potential customers will find you on the internet. They also act as a free and effective advertising tool. A professional web designer will know how to develop your web site to make it fair decently in search engine listings by building it search engine-friendly from the bottom up. This is the most effective and ethical way to insure top rankings for your web site.

Browser Compatibility

Browser incompatibility occurs when a web site doesn’t show the same way or appears “broken” to site visitors on different browsers. The reason for this is that different browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Safari, etc.) have different standards for displaying web pages. What looks perfectly fine in one browser may show up as a jumbled mess in another. Professional web designers are skilled at knowing how to make web sites display properly on a variety of browsers. A good web designer will test and construct your web site across browsers, insuring that the majority of people on different browsers can see your web site the way it should be.

Making the Difference between Personal and Commercial Web Sites

There is a huge difference between a home page and a professional web site. It can take years of experience to learn how to build an effective commercial web site and it is something that is best left to an expert. Having a professional web site will provide you with a sense security in your business that no home-made web site can do. Your web site will be something that thousands of people around the world may view every day. Make sure your web site shows what you want the world to see; a high-quality, clean, accessible, professional, and top ranking business.

Source
http://www.intuitivedesigns.net/reasons

Website Design - If You're Going to Optimize, Optimize!

The keyword was affordable custom website design. I was researching some of the competition on it, and really, the results make a strong point about search engine optimization. You will always get advice that you should design your sites for users rather than the search engines, and it's good advice, it really is. After all, at the end of the day, a thousand clicks that don't result in any sales are no more useful to you than a day without any clicks at all.

But my recent experience led me to another theory; if you're going to optimize for a keyword, your site should be a viable result for that keyword.

When I went through the top results for the above keyword, I was amazed to discover that of the highest ten sites, only one actually clearly listed a price. Now don't get me wrong, I understand the basic marketing theory. Website design is a rather expensive service, you certainly don't want that fact to scare your customers away. Likewise, it is a service that can involve quite a degree of variation between jobs. You don't want to risk listing flat prices only to wind up spending more time than you're getting paid for doing updates, revisions, and the like. You do need to get a read on the site before you give a solid quote.

With that all in mind, though, the majority of those sites I looked at gave nothing more than a request a quote option that I could see. Granted, I did not look deeply into the sites, but I do not feel I should have had to. The premise behind my theory is simply this: if the term "affordable" is part of the keyword--indeed, the first word of the key phrase--it suggests that the visitor is rather concerned with pricing. With that in mind, should there not be a clear indication of at least the range of pricing and what will be available at a given rate?

Now, I'm not going to assume that this lack is costing these sites vast amounts of business on that keyword (though I would not be surprised if it was). However, it does provide a useful example for the rest of us. If you are going to optimize for a keyword, consider more than just the monthly searches and competition--consider what the visitor is looking for. This is especially important when you're running a pay per click campaign, where a visitor who doesn't like what it sees just wasted some of your advertising money.

Even in a standard SEO campaign, though, it is hard to get a lot of quality keywords in the title tags, external links, and so on without making your site look silly. It may very well be that you can only reach the top for a few keywords. Shouldn't your site be built around selling to the audience that is searching on those keywords? It's the classic question of the target market. Your market consists of the people searching for those keywords that you are at the top for.

Remember, people on the Internet are notoriously impatient. Some might be willing to look over your site, read what you have to say, and in doing so, may indeed come to realize that your company is exactly what they are looking for. Most won't. And they won't want to contact you or fill out a form to learn about it either. In short--don't expect the visitors to do any work to sell themselves. If all the information that will convince them to buy is not both readily available and designed in such a way to make them want to read it, chances are, they're gone.

Maybe this isn't one of the main points of SEO. No doubt there are a variety of other factors that contribute far more heavily to a marketing executive's calculations. Regardless, it is something worth bringing to and keeping in mind. If you're going to optimize your site for a keyword, optimize your site for a keyword. By providing a visitor exactly what it is looking for as soon as it arrives, you've increased your chance of making a sale by that much. By not providing those things that are clearly of importance to the visitor in an easily accessible format, you've reduced your chance by that much.

I wonder how many template design sites would come up if I typed in "custom website design"...

Copyright © 2007 Dustin Schwerman.

Dustin Schwerman is the primary web designer at Truly Unique--Affordable Custom Website Design. Truly Unique specializes in impressive, custom sites designed to capture the essence of the businesses they represent, as well as creating useful web-based programs to improve and simplify some of the tasks of running a business. Their goal is to provide these services at affordable, pragmatic rates based on effort involved, rather than arbitrary costs based on number of pages or hours.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dustin_Schwerman

Integrate Ecommerce Shopping Cart Systems Into Your Online Business for Better Results

Introducing Web Design

To define the same in technical terms, it is the process of forming concepts, making plans, presenting models. Also executing the media that is electronic over the Internet using “markup language” that can be interpreted with the help of the web browsing tool and displayed as the GUI or the Graphical User Interface.

Web Design Purpose

The purpose behind web designs is the creation of websites which are in actuality the collecting of files electronically that remain on the web servers and that which makes presentations of contents and other interacting features to the user on the net through web pages that is retrieved upon request. Texts, GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs and other technical formats can be used on the page through the application of HTML, XHTML and XML. Plug-ins is used for more complex animations, videos and graphics such as Quick Time, Flash and Java among others. The CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is used along with XHTML and XML for positioning and manipulating the elements on the web pages.

Web Design Classification

Web design pages are under the classification of (1) Static and (2) Dynamic. Static web design pages are where the contents and layouts are not changeable unless the programmer or web master manually gets the pages updated. Dynamic web pages can change their contents and appearances and this depends on the input or interaction of the user or other changes in the environment of the computer.

Particulars of a web design

As this is a collection of web pages with respect to a certain subject, web designs arrange and create web pages to make a website. Basic designs of such web sites are:

• Content is that which is the information on that particular sites that bears relevancy to the site itself and looks at targeting the public who has the interest that the web site carries.
• Usable factor consists of the web design to be user-friendly to the end user in navigating and interfacing actions which are simple and bear the stamp of reliability.
• Appearance is that in which the graphics and the texts include a singular style that is continuous in order to be consistent. This style requires professionalism, appeal and relevancy.
• Visibility factor is where the web design site should be easy to locate through most of the noted search engines on the internet and through the electronic media of advertisements.
• Multidiscipline requirements such as information systems, information technology and communication designs are part of the web site designs as is page layouts, user interfacing, graphic material, texts and audios.
• Accessibility of web design which is the art in the creation of web pages that have accessibility to everyone who uses this tool including the ones.

Content Management Systems India and Shopping Cart Systems are become more popular when we are targeting the websites for online business.

The author Rishi Kapoor is Web developer and Content Writer for Web Developers India

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rishi_Kapoor