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Advice for the Inexperienced Web Designer

by on Aug 17, 2008 (0) Comments

Website software and templates have made it easier for inexperienced website designers to create and maintain their own websites. Prior to the development of such items, if you wanted a website for your company you had to retain a reputable website design firm to create a website for you. Website development is not an easy procedure, but if you decide to undertake the process yourself, there are a few simple strategies that can make the process of creating a high-quality website a little bit easier.

The Bad Website Syndrome
Avoiding the bad website syndrome is easier than you may think. When you design your website, the last thing that you want to do is turn readers away by having a bad or ineffective website. A website is a great way to showcase the professionalism of your company, and increase the confidence that a customer or visitor has in your company. Bad websites generally have hard to read content and text and show a lack of organization.

Content
Inspired web designers know the importance of creating content that is easy to read. One way to do this is to use a medium to large size bold font that does not clash with the color of the background. Don’t use hard to read colors for the text or background such as lime green or lemon yellow. Limiting the amount of CAPITALIZED TEXT is important as well because too much capitalization can be hard on the eyes, and cause the text to blend together. Content must also be easy for the reader to understand and free from spelling and grammatical mistakes. It is important to proofread your content for inaccuracies and errors, and correct them accordingly. Enlist the help of your friends and family members to ensure that your website content showcases your products, services or information appropriately. There are many programs and services available to assist you in this process if you need a little help.

Umbraco, is it the best Open Source CMS?

by on Aug 17, 2008 (6) Comments

I worked on several projects involving SiteCore CMS, Ektron, DotNetNuke, Joomla, Mambo and custom Content Management systems. Out of all of the above mentioned CMS softwares, Sitecore stood out the most. In fact I was so impressed that I even got certified for Sitecore version 5.3.1

The features I like about Sitecore are its Structure, the ease of Navigation and most of all –its stability. The one drawback, however, is that the process of creating a site through SiteCore is different than conventional ways. This new approach might make a project more tedious but the final result you get through Sitecore is well worth the effort. Relatively speaking, all CMS’s have their pros and cons, though.

Many of you might have heard about Umbraco. All the news and blog entries about Umbraco sparked an interest in me to play around with it. I downloaded the latest version 3.0.3 from their website Umbraco.org. It far exceeded my expectations for a CMS, let alone a free Open Source CMS.

I have to be honest, I didn’t get to explore it as much as I would have liked to,but it looks promising. It only has a 4mb footprint and it’s extremely fast compared to DotNetNuke. It might even replace my use of DotNetNuke!

Reviving The Long Tail of SEO

by on Aug 16, 2008 (0) Comments

The topic of long tail search engine optimization is elusive at best. The fact is, when considering keyword research and acquisition you have the choice of targeting the appropriate keywords that deliver relevant traffic that converts to your website.
The concept of the long tail was originally coined by Chris Anderson editor in chief of Wired Magazine in 2004. The basis is that typical keyword research only scratches the surface and focuses on competitive keywords with one or two words to describe a desired target, whereas most consumers search queries contain 4 or more words containing additional qualifiers and modifiers to zero in on a specific item (depending how far along in the sales cycle they are).

Someone searching for information for a research paper may use a very generic or broad match phrase to find information, however statistically the more specific a search becomes, the less competitive it tends to be as each additional keyword (modifier) takes the competition for that specific “exact match phrase” to manageable and attainable levels.

Instead of dedicating months of SEO resources to acquire an extremely competitive keyword, the logic of long tail search engine optimization is to target all of the offshoots and low hanging fruit that exist to gain a robust presence across a broad range of semantic phrases.

Improving Your Chance of Link Bait Inspiration

by on Aug 15, 2008 (0) Comments

There’s been hundreds if not thousands of articles written about link bait. I’d hazard a guess that there’s probably even more articles about how to write the bait than there is paid up pieces of link bait for clients.

But with this post I’m going two try and write about something slightly different. With
link bait the content is hugely important. There are some great articles out there about how to write titles, about making your content scan-able even which images to use.

But before you get on flickr looking for creative commons images you need to come up with an idea. That’s the difficult bit, and that’s where I hope to help with some advice on how you can increase your chances of inspiration and when it does come along how you can make more of it.

Have a pad at all times – when you’re on the phone discussing the minutiae of an analytics report on the phone explaining why two almost identical landing pages have completely different bounce rates an idea will come to you that’s foolproof.

Write it down that second on a nearby pad because by the time you’ve hung up the phone the idea will have returned to the ether.

Note ideas even if you don’t have a client – most of us won’t be lucky enough to be a full time bloggers. The chances are we will be writing link worthy content for specific clients these can cause a few problems. When you are coming up for ideas of bait for a financial services a brilliant concept for a piece for a pet store will come to mind.

Keep those ideas somewhere because in six months time you’ll be trying to come up with an idea for a piece for a pet store and a great financial services piece will come to mind.

Read the Small Stories in the Tabloids – a while ago I used to work on Zoo magazine, the journalists there were great and putting together a great title and a couple of supporting paragraphs. They’d storm digg and stumbleupon if they ever set their mind to it.

SEO, is it Method, Art or Science?

by on Aug 15, 2008 (0) Comments

Aside from SEO being a collection of mere tactics and techniques, practicing search engine optimization is just as much of an art as it is a science.
Finding the appropriate responses to inquiries that pose to create obstruction from a relevant high ranking position is second nature to the intuitive SEO. Mutually, since multiple systems are layered and built on top of other algorithmic systems, tracing the rounds of cause and effect through tracking a chain reaction is also another method employed by heuristic conclusion.

Analysis, Discovery Time and Heuristic Conclusion

Regardless of how you arrive at a conclusion, conclusions serves one specific purpose, which is to create a plan of action. Based on the range of the action(s) a measurable result is produced that contributes to the overall process.

SEO involves a constant state of refinement in order to stay ahead of the curve. You never know when the bottom will fall out from outdated methodologies and one of your most prized keywords loses relevance due to a shift in the algorithm.

Keeping a Constant Watch / SEO Defense

Not only does SEO require a constant vigil, to ensure a competitive advantage, SEO defense. The thrill of using a series of tactics to unlock each page of your websites’ potential through finding the highlight of each page strengths is crucial.

Guide to Buying Traffic

by on Aug 15, 2008 (0) Comments

While many niches depend on PPC search traffic, there’s a wide group of sites that benifit from bought traffic from individual sites.  Often times you can get very high quality traffic that converts very well from niches that tend to deal in a more direct site to site type traffic deal, rather than 3rd party ad networks.

This guide is mostly to be used when buying traffic from forums, from individual websites, and from “plug” type packages, yet there are many things that transfer over to more traditional PPC outlets.  Without further ado, on to the guide:

1. Know what they are sending. Get 3rd party tracking software and use it. I use LinkFacts.com. I’m sure there’s TONS more. The great thing is, this tracks in real time and tracks BEFORE ANYTHING LOADS… It also tells me uniques vs. raw and countries that traffic is from.

I use this to track links FROM my sites for most larger campaigns (mostly just to check my system numbers and give a 3rd party view of what happened if there’s problems). Often times you will find that it’s not the traffic, rather it’s the way you track it.

2. Don’t buy out of your means! If you need the profit for paid traffic to buy your next meal, you’re probably going to get burnt. Remember, the return for your traffic isn’t always going to show up right away. As you grow, you also have more opportunities, more places to trade with, better sponsor opportunities, etc. Also, don’t buy HUGE packages from BIG sites just because they are big.

3. Understand that traffic is only worth what you can make on your site. This is where too many sites get in trouble. You don’t have any idea what traffic is worth on your site. You should know exactly how much every visitor on your site makes. You should know exactly how much you can spend to break even.

6 Common Website Mistakes That Are Costing You Money

by on Aug 14, 2008 (0) Comments


100% Organic - A Column From Search Engine Land As I’m reviewing company websites to prepare for our August SEO Training Class, I’m struck by how often I see the same website mistakes.

Since we’ve been offering the SEO classes over the past 7 months, we’ve reviewed over 40 websites. In each class of 6 online marketers, there’s never a dearth of problems to point out to them. I’m not talking about minor glitches here, but stuff that prevents the website from reaching its full potential with the search engines. In other words, as long as these problems exist, they’re not going to be able to gain all the targeted search engine traffic that they could be.

To put it into terms that anyone can relate to–the company is basically losing money every day they don’t fix their website.

Here are 6 common website mistakes that could be costing you money:

1. JavaScript or other crawler-unfriendly navigation that may impede indexing. Most newer sites don’t have this problem, but there’s almost always at least 1 site we review in every class that has its main navigation pretty much invisible to the search engines. If your navigation basically doesn’t exist as far as Google is concerned, then it’s very difficult to get all of the pages of your website indexed.

2. Navigation that buries important pages within the site architecture. The deeper that pages are buried within the website, the less importance they are given. For SEO, as well as usability purposes, it’s often helpful to showcase important sections of the website up an additional level in the site’s hierarchy. This can usually be achieved via a search-friendly CSS mouse-over menu.

3. Duplicate “pages” getting indexed under multiple URLs. While Google has, for the most part, worked out many of their canonical issues of the past and now generally realize that www.example.com/index.php is the same as www.example.com, many content management systems (CMS) take things a step further and provide a whole array of URLs for any one particular page of content. Sometimes this is done purposely for tracking reasons, as with session ids or tracking links appended to the end of URLs; but other times, it’s simply done because the CMS was never designed with search engines in mind. This is not a good thing, as it can cause the spiders to be so busy indexing the same content that they miss the more important stuff.