Of all the areas of Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization is the most misunderstood, and potentially the most important to your marketing efforts. There are millions...]]>

Of all the areas of Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization is the most misunderstood, and potentially the most important to your marketing efforts. There are millions upon millions of pages of web content out there — you can work hard, build a great site, and then be totally lost in the shuffle. SEO is important. It’s also a very complex process that requires patience, careful planning and a long-term approach.

If you’re just getting started with:

• Selecting an SEO firm
• Trying to start a search engine campaign on your own
• Reviewing your current SEO efforts

This article should provide you with a high-level review of the SEO process, dispel a few SEO myths, and help you understand legitimate optimization strategies.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, defies easy definition. But here’s a short version:

Search Engine Optimization
Using keyword analysis and other legitimate practices to gain the highest possible search engine and directory rankings, under a given key phrase, for a given URL.

Every SEO professional in the world just cringed, so I’ll break this definition down a bit and hopefully prevent a hail of angry e-mails:

Keyword Analysis is the process of mining keyword search data to find the best balance between the keywords you need and the best potential search niche. More on this later.

Search Engine means an automated search engine. ‘Search Engines’ include Google, AlltheWeb.com, Yahoo (powered by Google plus their own directory information), AOL Search, Ask Jeeves and MSN Search. A search engine obtains its results from ‘spiders’ or ‘bots’ — small programs that come to your web site read it in much the same way you would: By reading the content on a page, and then moving from page to page via links. A directory, on the other hand, is built at least in part by human beings reading sites and other information and deciding where each site fits into the directory structure. Yahoo’s directory area and Open Directory are both examples of directories.

Ranking is the numeric rank reflecting your position in the results list when someone performs a search on a particular set of keywords.

Highest Possible means getting as close to number one as you can. Sometimes you just can’t get that number one spot. Maybe someone else has a 400-page web site solely dedicated to the key phrase for which you’re attempting to optimize. Or maybe they’re paying a fortune in advertising. That’s life, sometimes…

Key Phrase is the keyword or set of keywords someone types into the little ‘search’ field in Google or Alta Vista or any other search engine.

A URL is the address of one page on your site. Most search engines display keyword search results and provide a link directly to the page most relevant to those results, rather than your home page. It’s very, very important to keep that in mind when you build and optimize your site.

Legitimate Practices is a pet peeve of mine. A true search engine optimization campaign will not use practices such as page or content cloaking, redirects, or lists of links (so-called ‘link farms’) but relies on good coding practices, well-written content, steady link popularity work and site features that will be every bit as valuable for site visitors as for search engine ranking. Anything less is a short-term fix that will likely reduce your rankings more often than increase them.

So, the long version of the definition would be:

Search Engine Optimization
Using keyword analysis, good coding practices, well-written copy, link popularity analysis and careful site organization to move a web page as close to the number one search results position as possible for a given key phrase, in both search engines and directories.

Hey, that’s not so bad after all. But how do you get started? First, you separate reality from myth…

SEO Urban Legends

There are quite a few SEO myths out there. Here are my favorites:

The Keywords META Tag Matters. Mostly wrong. Only Inktomi pays any attention to the keywords meta tag. You should do something basic, but don’t bother putting in keywords that aren’t supported by your page content.

Search Engines can read Flash, images and video. Sorry, and Ford isn’t selling a flying car yet, either. Search engines can read one thing: Text. Anything else, while perfectly legitimate as a design tool, will not help your ranking. And relying too heavily on Flash or images may reduce your site’s visibility. Google is one partial exception — they can read some links in Flash, but still have very limited ability to read Flash content.

Mirroring my site in multiple locations will improve ranking. Actually, just the opposite. Duplication of content will generally have no effect or, worse, reduce your ranking in major search engines. Most search engines now have rules against this form of ‘spam’ and may reduce your ranking or ban your site altogether.

‘Doorway’ pages improve ranking. Pages that have lots of keywords but then quickly redirect to the main site will not help you in major search engines, such as Google. And, if someone catches you and reports you to Google or the other search engine, you may be banned altogether. A ‘landing’ or ‘bridge’ page, though, that’s designed to be as useful for users as for search engines, and does not redirect the user, can help by providing keyword-rich content that’s genuinely worthwhile.

Firms promising to get me #1 rankings in 10,000 search engines for $99.95 can help. I alternate between tooth-grinding and hysterical laughter when I see these ads. First, there aren’t 10,000 search engines. Actually, there are probably 10-20 you should really worry about. Getting listed in the other thousand or so is largely a waste of time. Second, no one can guarantee any ranking in any search engine for a specific keyword. Period. And finally, the price is less than half the cost to get an express submission in a single directory (Yahoo). Chances are anyone trying to get you to spend the $99.95 is operating a ‘link farm’ where they list dozens, or hundreds, of sites. While they won’t hurt your ranking, they won’t help, either.

Firms charging me more money and guaranteeing a #1 ranking on Google can help. This is the latest SEO scam. I can get you a number one ranking on Google, too, as long as I get to pick the keyword or can get you ranked under a fairly unique company name. But no one, and I mean no one can guarantee a #1 rank under a specific keyword. Even Google says so.

Forget the myths — if an offer seems too good to be true, it is. The truth is that search engines are now almost savvy enough to read your pages like a human being would, so anything that will drive away a typical site visitor will also probably reduce your ranking. Things that will increase your search engine ranking include:

• Well-written content
• Good, clean HTML code
• Useful, relevant TITLE tags
• Useful, relevant DESCRIPTION tags
• Relevant, appropriate links from other web sites

There are some basic steps that, well executed, will do more to increase your page rank than an ocean of snake oil.

The SEO Campaign Process

A typical SEO campaign starts with keyword analysis, and then emphasizes insuring your site doesn’t impede search engine bots and follows up with ongoing link and traffic analysis. If you like pretty pictures, here’s one:

What’s a Bot?
A ‘bot’ is a program used by a search engine to read the content of your site into a directory. I mentioned this briefly in ‘What is Search Engine Optimization?’ above. Keep up, now….

Step 1: Keyword Analysis. Ah, keywords. If you say the right word enough times on your site, you’ll get that coveted #1 spot, right? Wrong. Choosing the right keywords starts with you making a list of the keywords or phrases under which you’d like to be found, and typically ends up somewhere completely different. Typically, selecting the best keywords is a four-step process:

1. List the keywords and phrases under which you’d like to be found.
2. Find out whether anyone searches on those keywords, and whether they’re searching for relevant items.
3. Find out how many other sites are struggling for rankings under those keywords.
4. Pick keywords with the same meaning but a better search-to-competition ratio.

Maybe I want to rank #1 under ‘Search Engine Optimization’. Guess what? There are 686,000 other URLs in Google trying for that spot. Hmmm. But wait! Under ‘Seattle Search Engine Optimization’ there are only 19,000. So, I targeted that key phrase, instead. And guess what? We got a #3 ranking.

Don’t forget about relevance, either. If you want a high ranking under ‘tires’, you’re going to have your work cut out for you. And in the end you’ll likely end up getting found for ‘bicycle tires’, ‘automobile tires’, ‘spare tires’ and who knows what else. Is it worth it? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But you have to do your homework to find out.

Data Mining and Keywords
If you’re doing a campaign for a large site, you may end up testing and comparing thousands of keywords and phrases. Having a good data-mining tool (even Excel will do) on hand is important when you’re doing keyword analysis. We use S-Plus, by Insightful Software. It’s saved our lives, and clicker fingers, several times.

There are several tools that help you research the number of searches and competitors for keywords. Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) is a good one — don’t depend on their results from Overture, though, unless you’re specifically preparing an Overture campaign. Metacrawler’s MetaSpy tool is worth a look, too. Ideally, look at results from a few different sources.

Keyword analysis is the hardest part of a campaign, in number-crunching terms. It requires a lot of work and may not tell you what you want to hear. But in my experience it’s critical to a successful campaign.

Step 2: Search Engine Readiness. Almost every web site we review has one or more problems that will prevent search engine bots from properly reading all content. Typical showstoppers include:

• An all-Flash or all-images home page
• A home page that automatically redirects to another page
• Pop-up ads (does anyone really read these things?)
• A site full of pages with fewer than 400 words on a page
• Broken links
• Navigation that is generated by JavaScript
• No TITLE or DESCRIPTION tags

A major step in any SEO campaign is making sure that the site will present the friendliest profile to search engines. Happily, the investment in optimizing will also pay off in a faster, more universally compatible site.

Step 3. Content and Site Preparation. You’ve done your research: You know which keywords match your message, and your site’s HTML code is one big search engine welcome mat. Now it’s time to make sure that your site contains those keywords. This is where I most often see folks get confused — should you rewrite your web content to emphasize keywords? Yes, but with extreme caution. Should you make small, appropriate changes? Yes. Here are my guidelines for content preparation.

• Don’t write for keywords (much). This almost always leads to stilted, hard-to-read prose. Writing keyword-rich content that really works for users is an art form. Be careful.
• Do a little careful editing. If you use the word ‘car’ but ‘auto’ is the keyword you need, chances are you can do a few replacements without marring your carefully crafted copy.
• Spend time on the titles and description tags. Make sure every page in your site has a unique, relevant TITLE and DESCRIPTION tag.
• Never use an automatic page generator. Tools like WebPosition Gold offer to generate optimized pages for you. Don’t. They tend to hurt your ranking as much as help, and they generate ugly, ugly pages.
• Write more stuff. More content is almost always better. If your site is just missing a specific keyword or phrase, but you think it’s important, then your potential customers probably do too. By adding a few more pages, or a white paper, or some other content focusing on those absent keywords, you’ll likely help visitors and improve your keyword ranking at the same time. And, the more text-rich your site is, the better the odds that you’ll catch longer, stranger but really important key phrases that you can’t anticipate.

Step 4. Link Analysis. Quite a few major search engines (Google, most importantly) weigh your ‘link popularity’ when ranking your site. A more accurate term, though, is ‘link analysis’, because these engines don’t just count up the number of links to your site. They look for links near and containing relevant text. So a page full of links, one of which happens to be yours, won’t help very much. But a link from a related site, near a short paragraph that contains relevant keywords, will probably give you a boost. Having keywords in the link itself is even better. A quick example:

http://www.portentinteractive.com doesn’t help much.

For search engine optimization, visit http://www.portentinteractive.com is much better.

For search engine optimization, visit Portent Interactive where ‘search engine optimization’ is the link to Portent, is the absolute best case.

There are a few ways to build your link popularity:

• Contact sites that relate to yours and request a link exchange. This works really well, but obviously takes a long time.
• Syndicate your content. If you can provide an easy way for interested webmasters to link directly to relevant stories on your site, you provide an instant link popularity boost, and get your message out to boot.
• Start an affiliate program. If you sell a product, consider setting up an affiliate sales program.

Google’s ‘One Site, One Vote’ Rule
Google awards a lot less weight to a link to your site if that link is on a page with lots of other links. That’s why so-called ‘link farming’ doesn’t work. Ideally, you want a link to your site from a page that includes relevant content and not that many other outgoing links.

Step 5. Submit your site. Many search engines, Google included, allow you to submit your site for free. Generally you can submit your home page and let the search engine crawl the rest of your site. Some directories and engines offer paid ‘express’ services, and some, like Teoma, require that you pay for URL submission. Which engines you choose depends on your budget and campaign.

Step 6. Review, Revise, and Keep Going. Think you’re done? Wrong — search engine optimization is an ongoing project. At least once per month, review your rankings, site traffic reports and link popularity and tweak your site as necessary. The tools you need to measure results are:

• Site traffic reports. Any web hosting company should provide you with a web site traffic report, and almost all of the reporting tools in use today provide a ‘referrals from search engines’ section. Take a look at this section for a good measure of campaign results.
• Link counts. Use the link: command on Google (see above) to determine your link popularity.
• Your keyword list. Search on the relevant search engines to see if your ranking has improved.
• Your brain. You have to interpret what you see, and decide whether changes are warranted. There’s no hard and fast rule for this, and no magic formula. Sorry about that…

So now you’ll get instant results, right? Well, not quite…

A Word About Expectations

Search engine optimization can take time. Even Google only refreshes its entire index once a month, so don’t expect instant results.

If your first registration run doesn’t generate increased rankings within a month or two, don’t panic. Look at your site traffic and search on the keywords you chose. Make sure that the search engine you’re checking actually includes your site, too — most likely the bots just haven’t gotten around to ‘crawling’ your site.

Still stumped? Find a professional. Sure, we cost money. But you may have missed something about your site that’s preventing a good keyword rank, and a second set of eyes can help.

A Solid Marketing Strategy

Obviously, Search Engine Optimization is a big job. But nothing can send more traffic to your site, for lower per-click cost. If you follow the basic steps, and keep at it, you will definitely get results. What’s really, really important is to make sure you don’t award too much weight to one step (such as link popularity) at the expense of the others. A well-rounded campaign will provide solid, long-term results.

What about pay per click?
Pay-per-click services, such as Overture and Google Adwords, are very different animals. If you’ve done your keyword analysis you’re halfway there, but there are other tasks. I’ve not talked about them in this article because, well, they need an article of their own. Check back soon…

In last, today every site wants to be featured in the top ten list of the search engine. Therefore, to reach such cliff, you need to understand the algorithm of the search...]]>

Today every site wants to be featured in the top ten list of the search engine. Therefore, to reach such cliff, you need to understand the algorithm of the search engines and you should implement changes according to the search engines. In order to achieve the benefits of search engine optimization, an effective SEO strategy is necessary. One of the biggest SEO strategies is link popularity, keyword research and website marketing.

Doing the proper research and finding the correct keyword combination will bring you’re the proper rankings in the search engines and a traffic that is targeted to your site, and the added benefit is that it is free traffic. As you heard many time before content is king, your content should be structured to include the keywords that are relevant to your site, and your website needs to be SEO optimized so the search engines can spider it with ease. All the other pages on your site should revolve around a central theme and all be related in some way.

When visitors come to your website the text on the home page should explain and reflect the theme of your site and all of the other pages should relate to it. Search engine optimization or SEO is the hottest way to drive targeted traffic to your website. Your investment in the future of your website will be worth while. The reason you need to optimize your site is to get rankings in the search engines, by concentrating on search phrases and by promoting these keywords you will begin to build your rankings in the search engines.

Billions of sites are updated daily and they all need to be crawled on a daily basis. You can purchase high PR links and shorten the waiting period of getting your site in the serps. Check you site for broken links, not having links that work will have a negative effect on your sites ranking if the links stay broken for a period of time.

High quality articles are quickly snapped up and published prolifically. Every time you write an article and you get it published you receive another link pointing back to your site which will in turn increase your link popularity. Traffic is generated to your website from your signature box. This article can be freely published on a website as long as. With this wonderful innovation in web writing, each article will surely be given ample attention in terms of engine optimization and accessibility. The natural listing depends on the optimization techniques employed on and off the web site. A single article can be reprinted hundreds of times, and each time is another link back to your site. Ensure that each web page of yours would focus on a particular keyword or key phrase. If there is an article in that page, make sure that the article will only discuss and include one keyword or key phrase from the list you have made.

Getting more traffic is pointless if your site isn’t an efficient sales machine. Since there are only a “handful” of search engines that everyone uses (the major ones), this is where we place our best promotional efforts. If you encourage them to link to your site, join your newsletter, read your articles, and so on, then the traffic will increase your search engine popularity. If you only sell product, then that is what you get money for products. Traffic is a must if any online business is to succeed.

Web presence is extremely important for any business to succeed. Gone are the days when websites only offered contact information or salient features of the products. Today...]]>

Web presence is extremely important for any business to succeed. Gone are the days when websites only offered contact information or salient features of the products. Today, websites are responsible for sales, increasing Return for Investment (ROI), and promoting brand awareness, to say the least.

So, if you are planning to put up a website on the Internet, do your homework well. Choose the best website designer available in the market to create an innovative, eye-catching, and informative site for customers and potential customers. Here?s how to select the apt designer.

What is the Work of the Website Designer?

A designer’s work can vary depending on the type of need a customer has in store. For instance, does the site primarily sell products? Or, does it offer live updates. Does the site best suits for a Web2.0 technology or does it only cater to passive reading.

If you know how big and technologically powerful your site is going to be, calculate the budget you wish to spend on the site. Based on these clues, you can choose a designer to design a suitable site for you. A true designer would take care of the navigation, optimization methods, page accessibility, etc to create a complete website. Additionally, designer also checks out the color combination, placement of the images and text, contour, and panoramic look of the site.

Designing

Designing a website from scratch requires a lot of analyses. First, the business related data needs to be examined about market share, revenue, expenditure, customers, and potential traffic that is useful to the business.

Once this is fixed, the next phase is to create a blueprint on the website design. Optimizing it and further enhancing it to make it stand out from the rest of the sites.

Re-Designing

When re-designing a website, research work is absolutely necessary. Adding to the research is the analysis as to how and why change the design of the website. Do the existing customers come back again and again to the site? If no, a designer would analyze how to improve the conversion rate of the traffic.

How does Website Designing Help in Boosting Business?

If you ever had a website stacked with information, do you think it would attract traffic? Even though all salient information has been placed, a site that does not have a good design is worth nothing.

Badly designed websites with cluttered information can ruin the basic prospect of boosting sales in a business. To look for options in designing that can boost a business; take stock of the following aspects:

• It should cater to the target audience
• It should not be cluttered with information
• It should highlight brand positioning
• It should give the right message across to the target audience
• It should encourage action from the users
• It should have intuitive navigation

In a nutshell, a good website design should be creative, easy-to-use, competent, and optimized for the search engine robots.

Why Hire a Designer Specialist from Us?

We design, re-design websites to meet the challenges faced by the online industries today. Websites are no longer just a decorative piece for a company. It helps to boost sales, generate leads, and take the business to the limelight through optimization technique.

However, easily said than done, profits or accomplishing a break even in a business can be tough. Why hire us then? Here are few reasons why to trust us with the designing job:

• We optimize your site through attractive and popular features
• You get the latest tech ideas at an affordable cost
• We have a comprehensive talent pool for you to choose the apt designer
• We offer quality based websites
• We promise to keep your confidentiality a secret
• You can communicate with us at anytime of the day
• We guarantee our service

And, we help in building a long-lasting relationship with our valuable customers

Why Hire a Dedicated Website Designer?

Dedicated website designing has a many positive aspects. For instance, the team keeps a constant monitoring on the performance of the website. From online catalogs to message boards, shopping carts, and FAQs, the prominent features of a website are explicitly delineated by dedicated team. Moreover, the team offers:

• Complete trust and dedication on the job
• A composite talent pool to cater to your needs
• High Return for Investment (ROI)
• Round-the-clock customer care support
• You the total selling rights of the website features

If these aspects interest you, why not pen down your thoughts, or chat with us. Be sure to get the real value of your hard earned money.

Online marketing has become the most successful method of advertising for any kind of business on the planet during the last decade. It is lightning fast and can promote your...]]>

Online marketing has become the most successful method of advertising for any kind of business on the planet during the last decade. It is lightning fast and can promote your business to thousands of potential customers daily. As marketing is a primary factor for a long and successful business, the internet facilitates this process in a way that will ensure the maximum exposure to what you are offering.

Traditional marketing is becoming more expensive and slower to produce results. It also requires much more time and effort. It often has to be done by many employees and is restricted by many barriers and regulations which make it hard to get the most beneficial results. Then along comes the internet as it makes the entire globe seem like a short alley rather than a large city where you can reach customers overseas in a matter of seconds. Online marketing is superior to traditional ways of marketing in almost every aspect, and here we list the top 10 reasons online marketing dominates traditional advertising.

1. SPEED

Email marketing campaigns are fast, targeted, cost-effective, highly efficient method of marketing your business. They reach a lot of customers in the shortest time. Traditional mail marketing can take months and a lot of money and effort to generate results.

2. GEOGRAPHICAL RESTRICTIONS

The whole globe can be your customer base when you are marketing your business online, as the internet reaches almost every house on the planet. On the other hand, you are often restricted to local customers from a smaller geographical area when you market offline.

3. MARKETING EFFECTS

Online marketing is based on pull marketing effects, which means that online customers come across your website when they are looking for similar products of yours. While offline marketing is based on push marketing effects, which means you have to introduce your business to every single customer that come into your location.

4. SALES PROCESS

When your business is marketing online, you can make a sale in a matter of seconds; where the customer chooses what product or services they wise to buy, they move to the check out page, pays for the product or services on a secure page, and then receives their purchase. Offline advertising is very different as the selling process is very complex and requires a lot of effort and persuasion and sometimes can’t be completed after all.

5. HOURS OF OPERATION

Your website is self-managed and requires you only to make few changes, and after that it can operate non-stop and can be selling products or services while you are sleeping. Offline stores are restricted to the human active times, this means you open in the morning and close in the evening and you can’t make a sale while you are closed. In other words, the offline selling process has a shorter sales life than the online one.

6. COST OF MEDIA

If you want to make a commercial on TV or radio or a newspaper, you will pay a fortune. While online marketing allows you to make a short video or audio commercial and submit it thousands of media communities and it will cost you next to nothing.

7. LIMITED ADVERTISING LIFE SPAN

When you post an ad online about your business or website, with an article for example, it can be online forever and the place where the ad occupies will be untouched for a long time. On the other hand, offline ads can be only active for an agreed-upon period of time and then it will be replaced.

8. COST PER CUSTOMER

These costs are reasonably low with online marketing but relatively high with offline forms of advertising. They are simply the costs incurred to generate potential customers for the business.

9. CUSTOMER SUPPORT

With one email you can solve all your customer problems and concerns. This process is much more time consuming and require more effort offline.

10. ONGOING MARKETING INFORMATION

It is very easy and only takes a few seconds to collect all the information and data about every aspect of your business when you market online. Offline information and data are stored within piles of documents, where it requires a squad of employees to collect the required information.

As you can clearly see, online marketing is far superior to traditional forms of marketing. Online marketing is all about saving you money, time, and effort; yet brings you the required results you seek and most of the time exceeds your expectations.

A website is an online representation of you and your business. It has to be perfect, professional, and friendly to the users so that traffic ? especially the target audience ?...]]>

A website is an online representation of you and your business. It has to be perfect, professional, and friendly to the users so that traffic ? especially the target audience ? gets attracted to it. Promoting a website is a continuous process where different strategies are needed to be applied in the site to make it more user-friendly, intuitive, and interesting. In short, the site should be such that the traffic should be glued to it once they start browsing. Here are some important strategies to help promote your website.

Professional Look

A website should not have an amateur look. A site which is exquisite in design and graphics images but lacks vital elements, such as page titles, keywords, etc don’t fetch much value to the potential readers.

Make sure that there are no broken links and that navigation is effective, consistent, and intuitive. From any page, the user should be able to come back to the home page. He should not search for information in the site that is cluttered with text.

Keywords should be the ones that are just appropriate for the business. It should not be a case where a user is misled through wrong keyword selection or page titles.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods should be implemented while you are creating the website. It is the easy-to-the-eye layout, adequate white space, and user-friendly navigation which help a site to get promoted for the search engines.

Interspersed with 6 percent of the keywords, the body text should reflect the wants of the users in an effective manner. Make sure you don’t use Black Hat SEO methods as it would spoil your chance to promote your website.

Language, Graphics, Technicalities

The language of the website should be lucid, direct, informative, and interesting for the target audience. Make sure you use the content that is just right for the target audience ? else they would feel disinterested.

The graphics should be less heavy yet innovative. It should make sense and project the brand identity of the business. Make sure that the refresh rate or the uptime is as less as possible.

You can use Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) to help create innovative formatting, fonts, and colors. The source code would also remain spic-n-span. Avoid using programs which take space in the source code.

Build Links

You should build quality inbound links for your website to gather more coverage you’re your website. Participating in social media networks, writing articles, blogs, and comments can help in promoting your website incessantly.

It is through creating e-mail signatures, newsgroups, and RSS feeds apart from other forms of writing that one can help in promoting a website. Keep these strategies in mind as they inevitably help in enhancing the prestige of your website.

Let's take a look at the pros and cons of three different types of paths you could take to get a website up and running for your business. The first one we are going to look...]]>

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of three different types of paths you could take to get a website up and running for your business. The first one we are going to look at is Custom Website Designs.

Custom Website Design is a great way to go if you want the best of the best. You’ll be spending a lot more than the other two ways but it’s going to look and function a lot better. If you choose to go this route, make sure you choose the right design company. Look around at their portfolio and visit the sites they claim they designed. Call up some of those sites if you can and talk to the owner to verify that the design company did indeed create the site. Ask how his / her experience was with the company. If you’re going to spend a lot of money, do your research first. Some company’s claim to do custom web designs but only edit templates or worse. Let’s recap on the pros and cons!

Pros:

• Great looking design and functionality
• One of a kind
• You will be working with a team of experts
• Can basically have the website do anything you wish

Cons:

• Can leave your wallet very light
• Can take a month or maybe two to finish
• Some company’s lie about being a Custom Website Design firm so do your research

Template buying is a popular was to get your website started also. There are many sites that offer thousands of templates and decent prices like Template Monster. The average price of a template will run you around $50. Buying a template is one of the cheapest ways to get your website up and running but there are a few things to keep in mind. Hundreds of people may have bought the same template as you so you might have a lot of websites looking the same. If you don’t know how to edit a template or even upload it to your hosting server properly, you will be paying someone to do it for you.

Pros:

• Cheap way to get a fully functional website
• Can have it up and running within hours if you know what you’re doing
• Thousands of different templates to choose from

Cons:

• Lots of other people may have bought that same template so you may have hundreds of other websites looking just like yours
• If you don’t know how to edit websites or upload them, you will be paying someone to do it for you.

Some websites have software that you can use to build your own website like Homestead. They charge you a small monthly fee, usually about $10 a month and you can build your own website and host it through them. In theory this is a good idea but from my experience people don’t stick with it very long. The software is pretty simple once you get use to it, most of it is just drag and drop. If you’re looking for a nice flashy, functional, unique website this is not the place to go. Websites using these types of software are basic with not a whole lot of functionality to them. You just can’t get the perfection that you get with a team of expert website designers and developers.

Pros:

• Cheap price of $10 per month
• Can build and edit the website yourself
• Easy to drag and drop

Cons:

• Most website using this type of software come out looking “Basic” and “Dull”
• Can get annoying with its limited abilities
• Most people that use this will end up hiring a designer to build them a website

After looking at these three items, which is the best way to go you ask? Short answer, there isn’t a best way. You will have to take in the pros and cons and figure out what is best for you and your current situation. I hope this helps!

Everybody perks up when search engine optimization?basics are to be discussed. ?That's due to the fact improving your search engine optimization basics is recognized to be the...]]>

Everybody perks up when search engine optimization basics are to be discussed.  That’s due to the fact improving your search engine optimization basics is recognized to be the key to having that totally free internet site traffic we all so need. It would seem to not become a big deal, nonetheless, search engine optimization basics that a person can easily pick-up, could possibly be the actual distinction between successes and disaster for your targeted traffic.

Search engine optimization basics are usually separated into two camps: On-page and Off-page optimization. Let’s initially take a look at a number of on-page search engine optimization basics.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization Basics

Just as it sounds, this comprises any optimization you should complete ON the page itself. The first thing I think of, is SEO key terms. Anytime people are searching for a subject, these are the words and phrases that are being typed directly into the search engines like Google.

Good judgment is actually important when choosing your keyword phrases. Set yourself inside that other individual’s shoes, and imagine everything that a person could type in if you ended up browsing for exactly those things you now have to offer. Words that are actually far too common could quite possibly show that there are hundreds and hundreds of searches month to month – really what you want, correct?

No, not at all! The wide-ranging common terms may contain far too many individuals not in fact after what you have got. It is really even better to always be a lot more specific if you want to get hold of the correct individuals, as opposed to the most individuals which were not necessarily so targeted.

As an example, my internet site happens to be on the subject of birds together with their migration habits just for compelled birdwatchers. We won’t want to use “birds”, despite the fact that it easily has a huge search volume, simply because I would acquire individuals that want birdhouses, as well as a variety of different non-related “bird” subjects. Individuals would just bounce right off the internet site once they observe it’s not exactly what they had been looking for.

“Bird migration” can be a considerably more effective key phrase and would likely get the best individuals to this internet site, although this would undoubtedly just be a smaller sized number of people.

Search engine optimization basics teach you to always include the targeted search term within the title of the article. It really is important to have it within the title of your website, as well as even as part of the domain name if possible.

It counts to get “extra credit” to incorporate the key phrases within any headings or subheadings, plus they ought to be used 1-2% density throughout the entire body of your articles. Anymore than that, it starts to seem just like keyword stuffing, which in turn the search engines do not permit.

Images are yet another possibility to get search engine optimization basics involved. Ordinarily, a picture is just inserted directly into place. Though you should try “alt tags” inside the Web-page coding that will tell in words, what exactly the picture symbolizes … one more location for your keywords!

Another part of search engine optimization basics is to always be certain the search phrase is going to be used immediately in the beginning, thus it will be a portion of the description tag. That is generally the very small part of a person’s page which will come up in Google’s record each time it is presenting one’s internet site, plus it convinces Google that your page is indeed about that keyword.

At this point, let’s look at various Off-page search engine optimization basics.

Off-page Search Engine Optimization Basics

Off-page search engine optimization basics can actually just be expressed with a single word: Linking

There are zillions of different places on the world-wide-web one will be able to get linked with. Your creative thinking will be key here. However all backlinks will not be created equal – many may carry a lot more benefit compared to others. Here’s why.

The most popular back-links choice in search engine optimization basics, will be to distribute article content in article directory sites, for example, EzineArticles.com. That is so greatly successful, since additionally, it matters just what the google page rank is for the site you’re linking to your website. The greater the rating, the better. And these particular article sites get very high rankings, and this passes further value on for your web page link.

One other way found in search engine optimization basics, to attain a very valuable hyperlink, will be selecting “anchor text” in your article for being the hyperlink. What’s anchor text  If you turn words, or a phrase into a hyperlink – the keyword phrase itself is actually this hyperlink – then simply that is called anchor text. Then, whenever that anchor text ends up being your search term, you have Google’s consideration big time.

And I believe that the best hyperlinks of all, are whenever you’re able to link to .gov or .edu internet sites. Search engines in fact have a second look at these considering that they’re like super authentic sites.

According to the search engine optimization basics, building links could come about because of posting comments on another person’s blog site as well as inside a forum which is similar to your website.

Search engine optimization basics involve social networking as another method to generate a network of backlinks to your site. Regardless of whether it happens to be Facebook, Youtube, or Delicious, it will nonetheless provide you with yet one other link back for your web page.

With Off-page search engine optimization basics, the point is to identify how many links, particularly the extra valued links, you can have attached once again for your web page. This indicates to Google how well-known your site has started to become in which case, this ought to be an outstanding web page for them to bring up to the front of the line whenever displaying end results for the keyword search.

So there should really be several search engine optimization basics listed here, which you’ll be able to set straight into practice, right now. It will entail a little work, if people truly try to get connected by using SEO, however, it’s actually not complicated by any means. Do not let people teach you it is!

Just simply go for it, and observe your ratings in Google go through the roof when implementing these search engine optimization basics!