Davill Design

 

Once you create a website for your business, you quickly figure out that people are not flocking to it. When you assess the different ways of driving traffic, your options include advertising your website address, promoting your website address through Public Relations and gaining media coverage, encouraging other sites to link to you and getting placed in online directories.

However, these marketing activities will deliver small and sporadic volumes of traffic. The single biggest thing you can do to drive traffic is search engine marketing. Here is why: it is estimated that 80% of traffic to most websites comes from search engines. There are roughly 500 million searches performed everyday and 88% of that traffic comes from the top 4-5 search engines, Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. Of these, Google is by far the largest. Approximately 90% of people searching do not go past the third page of results and few go beyond the first page.

Therefore, if you want to drive traffic to your site it is imperative that you get onto the first three pages of Google and the other top search engines. Surprisingly, the majority of small businesses have not figured this out yet and for those who have, the majority are asking the question, How can I get my site to appear on the first page of Google search results?

Different Options

There are two main methods of appearing on the first page of search results.

Paid for results or Pay Per click (PPC)
This is where you pay to appear in the sponsored links section of the results page. In Google, this is at the top of the page and the right hand side. You decide which search keywords e.g. London restaurant, you would like to appear in. You appear in the search results and you pay for every user who clicks through to your site. The cost will vary by keyword and can range from 10p to several pounds or dollars per click, depending on how many other companies are bidding for that keyword.

Natural results achieved through SEO
Natural results are when you appear in the main list of results. You do not pay to appear or when a user clicks on your link. However, to appear on the first three pages of results, you need to implement a number of design and content changes to your website, which are termed Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

Which is best?
Both have their merits, but natural results are by far the most preferable because once you have invested in SEO, you do not have to pay for the traffic that is generated.

PPC is a great solution if you:
Have just launched your website and you need immediate presence on the first page of result or if you have not yet successfully optimised your site to appear on the first page. Remember, there are thousands of websites all looking to appear on the first page of search results for certain keywords.

Spiders and Links: The Basics of How Search Engines Work

Without getting bogged down in the technical details of how search engines work, here are a few basics that you should be aware of.

Search engines want to ensure that the most relevant sites are displayed to customers who are searching for keywords e.g. London restaurants.

Each page is ranked by the search engine on different criteria.

Each search engine uses different criteria when calculating the ranking of the site, but there are some commonalities such as:
Automated Spiders are sent by the search engine to index each page on your site. These spiders log the content of your site. This allows the search engine to know whether the key words that a user is searching for appear within your site and on specific web pages. However, in addition, the search engines have decided that it is not sufficient to simply have the keywords appear in the site. They believe that the most useful and relevant sites for the person who is searching are those which have a lot of other relevant sites linking to it.

The important points you should take out are:
You want to make it as easy as possible for the spiders to visit and index your site.
You need to have relevant keywords on your site that are easily found by the spiders.
You need to have many other sites linking to your site.

Four Components of SEO

In order to optimise your website to appear in natural search results, there are four components that you will need to address.

1. Design: What to do when designing your website

Many small businesses make the mistake of designing their website and then start thinking about driving traffic to it. The problem is that the way you design your site can result in your site being ignored by the search engine spiders, which means you will receive very little traffic. When designing your site, ensure you avoid the following pitfalls and ask your marketing agency to confirm that they have been avoided.

Avoid flash sites
Sites are designed in HTML or flash codes. The spiders that are sent to your site by the search engines cannot read flash.

No frames
Some agencies design sites within frames. For example, the menu on the left might be within a frame and the main body of the page within another frame. It makes designing the site easier as the only thing that changes from page to page is the content within the frame. However, spiders cannot read what is inside a frame so you will not get indexed and noticed by search engines.

No dynamic pages
Some sites are developed with a database which generates dynamic pages. You can tell if there are dynamic pages on your site if there is a ? within the page URL. Again, most but not all of the search engines can read dynamic pages.

Text within graphics
To ensure text is read uniformly by different browsers, design agencies often put text within a graphic. It looks great, however, a spider cannot read what text is in a graphic and simply moves on.

Keywords
At design stage, think about the keywords you want to be found by on search engines and incorporate that into your design. For example, if you were to design your site so that a page was allocated to the most popular keywords, it would be easier to include more keywords on the page which would be found by the spiders.

2. Content: What to do when developing your content

Keywords

Choosing the keywords that you want to appear in search results for is one of the most important things you can do. Think of it as planning the location for a physical shop. Choosing keywords that people search for a lot (i.e. generates a lot of potential traffic) and then ensuring that those keyword are peppered around your site (i.e. more chance that the spiders will index them giving you a good chance of appearing high in search results) could result in your being positioned on Oxford street as opposed to a back alley.

Invest time in choosing the keywords. Think about how you would search for your product or service. If you are running a restaurant, you should immediately think beyond the generic search keyword of restaurant and consider descriptive keywords such as seafood restaurant or family restaurant. You also need to think of target keywords, so consider London restaurant or London seafood restaurant.

Once you have decided on your keywords, you need to place them throughout your site. The main areas are:

Web page title
This is what you see written in the title bar of the browser. It is also what you see when you bookmark a page. This should explain what the purpose of your site or your page is and include keywords, but always in such a way that makes sense to a user who reads it.

Meta tags
The tags are not visible to users but they explain what the content of the page is. Keywords should be placed in here as they are easily searchable by spiders.

Homepage content
Your homepage is searched by the spiders and you should ensure that your keywords appear near the top header. They should also be sprinkled throughout the homepage. See keyword density for guidance on this.

Keyword density
A question often asked is how many times your keywords should appear on a page. The guidance for SEO is that each page should have a minimum of 250 words; your keywords should account for 2 - 8% of the word on the page. That means they should appear between 4 and 16 times.

Two important points to bear in mind are:
1. You need to balance the need to write your copy for your users, in order to sell your product, and the need to write your copy for search engines, in order to be found.
2. To help you achieve both objectives you should focus on a couple of keywords for each page rather than a large number.

3. Links

Inbound links are key
To combat a lot of sites achieving high page ranking by simply stuffing their sites with keywords, the search engines have placed a higher weighting on the value of the number of sites which link into a site. The rationale is that if a site is linked to by lots of other sites, then it must be offering popular and relevant content.

Therefore, your site might be designed in a way that is easily searchable by spiders and your content might be sprinkled with keywords, but you need to have other sites linking to you in order to achieve success.

Audit your links
Ensure you know how many other websites are linking into your site and set a goal for increasing that figure. You should have at least 100 quality links.

How to get links
There are many creative ways to generate links to your site:
Ask friends, customers or suppliers to link to your site.
Post comments on forums or discussion groups with a link back to our site.
Register your site with sites such as stumbleupon and if users like your site, they will bookmark it, creating a link to your site.
Issue an online press release which should result in online media coverage and links back to your site.
Register your site with multiple directories.

4. Maintenance:

Once you achieve a high ranking in the search engines, it is important to realise that you need to maintain your ranking. The criteria the search engines use in the algorithms constantly change and what works today may not work next week. Your site will need to be tweaked to bring you back up the rankings

Evan Mangan
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/how-to-appear-on-the-first-page-of-google-search-results-107737.html

 

 

It was only a short while ago that the “Wordpress” developer team has successfully launched their latest version of Wordpress, called “Wordpress Ella”. Numerically, the version number is called version 2.1.  Now we’re already up to 2.8.4 with 2.9 in beta.

To the uninitiated, news like this seems like a normal announcement from software developers and are often passed on by. However, from the eyes of a trained mind and savvy businessman, the news of “Wordpress Ella” contain many benefits that online business owners can immediately tap into and profit from.

“Wordpress Ella” comes with the following enhancements which are a great resource for online business owners.

1. First on the list of enhancements from Wordpress Ella is an ‘autosave’ function that ensures you will never lose a post again. This is an invaluable tool especially at times when you have spent a lot of time in front of your computer screen, brainstorming on what to write to promote your business.

Imagine the horror or frustration especially in instances where the battery of your notebook died and you forgot to save. Or perhaps there was a blackout or you accidentally closed the browser window without saving your work.

“Wordpress Ella” autosave function is a real time saver and is an abosolute must for any online businesses.

2. Next in line on “Wordpress Ella” is the “Import” and “Export” functions. Let’s talk about the import function first.

The latest release of “Wordpress Ella” has an import function that allows you to import your blog created from other popular blogging platforms such as ‘Movable Type’, ‘Typepad’, ‘Livejournal’, ‘Blogger’ and so on, into Wordpress itself.

This way, you don’t have to lose any important data such as your blog posts and comments. This flexibility is another reason why Wordpress itself is so successful and continues to gain a huge following and user base.

Why would anyone want to transfer their blog from another platform to Wordpress? Well, one reason is because with most of these other blogging platforms, the user has to pay a monthly fee. Wordpress, as almost everyone knows is free, and you can easily install with a few clicks using Fantastico from within your hosting account’s Cpanel.

Another reason to migrate or transfer the entire blog to Wordpress could be due to the limitation of some blogging platforms. Blogger, for example does not support the use of categories, which are critical when it comes to optimizing the blog to rank high for specific keywords related to the business.

Now, let’s discuss about the “Export” function.

“Export” as the name implies, will export all the Wordpress posts and comments into a file (called XML). This file can then be imported into other Wordpress blogs. It’s like a cross transferring of data between similar or related “Wordpress Blogs”.

This is useful when one is starting a new blog and perhaps need to populate the blog with useful content instead of just displaying news feed. For example, if you have a blog on muscle building, and you started a new blog on weight loss, you can import the content (which are the posts and comments) from the muscle blog into the weight loss blog.

This way, when you drive traffic to your new weight loss blog, you can at least provide the reader with some useful content while you build up the content around weight loss. Naturally there is some correlation between these two topics. After all, if you want to build muscle, naturally you need to burn off the excess fats and turn them into muscles!

3. Another enhancement of “Wordpress Ella” is the new search engine privacy. What this means is that you can indicate whether you’d like your blog to be indexed or ping by search engines, especially Google, Yahoo or MSN, which are the three top search engines online.

Most experienced marketers know about the pinging power of blogs. Everytime when a post is published, Wordpress will ping or notify specific blog directories about updates to your blog, causing them to index or visit your blog, brining you that additional and much needed targeted traffic.

As crazy as it sounds, considering that most business owners would like to get their site listed in the search engines, there are also times when you might want to hide or mask your blog from the radar screen of search engines. This is true especially in cases where it’s only meant for paid customers only. For example, you might be providing some sensitive information meant for paid customers and you don’t want anyone doing a search on the search engines to stumble upon your blog and have access to the information.

4. Another powerful upgrade that “Wordpress Ella” brings is the ability to specify a static page as the front page for your site or blog.

Most savvy marketers employ the use of a mini site or a one page only sales letter when marketing their products or services. Normally such one page sites will also contain an opt-in box, where visitors and readers are enticed to provide their email address in exchange for a free gift, software, e-course etc.

When they do so, they will normally be enrolled in an autoresponder course that automatically does the follow-up with the said subscriber which either results in a sale or no sale.

With a blog, however, the main page or the front page will always a display of the latest chronological posts. You can create pages for a blog, however, in the past it was not that easy for the layman to do so.

With “Wordpress Ella”, all you need to do if you want a static front page is to select this option in the Wordpress control panel. It can’t get any easier than this.

These are just some of the enhancements that you can immediately benefit from “Wordpress Ella”.

This article assumes you already have some basic knowledge about the marketing power of blogs in terms
of its syndication power, targeted traffic and search engine optimization capability for keywords.

Brandon Hong
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/profitng-and-benefiting-from-wordpress-ella-103768.html

 

 

“How can I attract thousands of visitors to my site?”, many people ask me this question. Well, driving high traffic to Website is very important, but what’s even more important, is designing a website in that way which makes them stays longer.

In this article, you’re going to learn 7 important website design tips to make your site more attractive. So not only your website will attract many people, but it will also motivate them to stay for a long time.

1. Be Aware during Selection of the colours scheme:-

If your company has a logo or preferred colours on its stationery that’s a good start. For those of you starting from scratch, choose two or three complementary colours and stick with them – don’t change colours on every page. The most common colour schemes include:

- Red, yellow and white

- Blue and white

- Red, grey and white

- Blue, orange and white

- Yellow, grey and white.

- Onion shade, Tan, white

If you’re not sure what colour scheme to choose, surf the internet and find a website that you like. You can then model your colour scheme on what already exists.

Always Select those colours which Attract the visitors, and the person revisit your site.

2. Page Backgrounds

Ensure your visitors can read the text on the background, i.e. no black writing on dark blue background or yellow on white. Means if the page background is dark always use light colour for the writhing a text or if the light colour is used for the page background the always use dark colour for writing a text, like this colour scheme for the background everything is visible to the visitor. Also be careful that your links are visible before and after being visited. The default for links in most programs is blue (before being visited) and burgundy (after being visited), so if you have a dark background, ensure your links are light.

3. (Page loading) site open within a minutes

All I’ve seen for the last 10 minutes is ‘page loading’, I think something might be wrong with my browser this is probably one of the biggest gripes a site visitor has. If your page takes more than a minute to load (on dial-up) and you have anything less than the meaning of life hidden within your content - something needs to be done. The average person does not have time they just go for another site without passed his time for these type of site those take time to open. So a good website takes less time for loading a site.

4. Appropriate page Size

Web pages are measured in pixels. Pixels are the unit of measurement for the screen. A Web page can literally be any size. Standard Web pages usually fit into a few sizes:

* W × H * 600 × 800 * 640 × 480 (Dream weaver default) * 1024 × 768 * 550 × 400 (Flash default)

The default Web page sizes provided in Web friendly applications and listed earlier are a great place to start. You will probably use a smaller, custom size for pop-up windows. The Web page size you choose is up to you. Remember to use actual space for the Web page effectively so that the content is in the proper proximity to the user’s navigation patterns. Web page size affects the way users move around the Web pages and the Web portfolio site. One rule: Pick a size for all main screens and stick to it.

5. Logo

Create a simple logo to identity your website. Have a captivating tag line somewhere with the header, and write an About us page which describes the uniqueness of your website. These will leave an impression for your visitors to remember your website.

6. Application of graphic designs

you must be careful in choosing for the appropriate design that will best represent your projects, and tell about your business. Create a design which coveys in a stylish way what it has to

7. Be aware about grammar and spell

Grammar is overrated [and the spill-checker too] Most web authoring and word processing software comes with a spell/grammar check utility - don’t let your hard earned money go to waste, use it. Some of the more common grammatical mistakes are misusing its, it’s, there, their, they’re, your, you’re, and noone (correct=no one). Proof reading your final product is also helpful. No one is infallible, that’s why pencils have erasers and computer programs have [ctrl+z].