Improve your website and Increase your webtraffic with these SEO tips

2 years ago I left my job as a sales manager to start a home based Internet business. I had already bought a lot of books promising substantial incomes within days or at least a month.

Nothing could stop me now I had several project up and running in no time.

First mistake to avoid is rushing into a home-based business that program that you know little or nothing about. Many people on the Internet want to make money from selling you the perfect home based business. In many cases they haven t even tested the program themselves.

Second mistake to avoid is thinking you can go from zero to a successful Internet business in 30 days or less. I am not saying it is impossible, but most end up with a giant information overflow and no money in the pocket. You must plan for a modest income the first 3-5 months.

Produce a list of alternatives and try to identify the critical success factors and skills needed. Be realistic you have to have some of the key skills needed it you are going to succeed.

Third mistake is quitting a program to soon. What I did and you should not repeat is thinking that it is something wrong with the program when the money doesn t start pouring in. Often it is a question of making minor changes, measuring the effects of the changes and wait for things to start happen.

Forth mistake is starting cheating when you get desperate and low on self-esteem There are a lot of scrupulous people out there making money from guys like you who has been knocked in the first round.

A lot of communities is exchanging clicks for Google AdSense. Did you really think you could get away with it? You end up getting banned from the program and excluded from one of the best home based Internet businesses you can find. Again be patient you will succeed if you really try.

Fifth mistake to avoid is not learning the basic stuff. The basic skills for succeeding with a home-based business is to create content, attract visitors and make money from you visitors. You can buy some product and services that helps you on the way, but you must understand and be able to handle the basic stuff if you want to establish your home business and survive.

Starting a home based Internet business is like a boxing match. Be patient work hard and smart and you will become the champ of home-based Internet marketing.

Petter Rogstad makes a living from Internet
and is a Webmaster and business entrepreneur.
He has tried and failed and suceeded.
If you want to know more please visit
http://www.how-to-start-a-home-business.com.

I know it held me back for nearly two years before I finally saw it. You don't need to take that long :-) Learn from my mistake today and succeed.

I wanted to title this article The Ultimate Secret To Your Online Success. But I suspected that not many people would actually believe the claim. As I wanted as many people learn from it as possible, I settled for a less catchy but more believable title.

I consider what I 'discovered' the ultimate secret not because you can't find it anywhere. You can. In fact many successful people talk about it quite openly.

I do consider it a secret because it took me almost two years online to discover. It stared me right in the eyes the whole time, yet I couldn't see it. As far as I was concerned it was hidden from me.

Then after two years of struggling to make any decent income online, it was time for some deep soul searching.

I had my back against the wall: It was either turn it around and start making money online, or go back to my old career. For a while I also considered selling one of our homes, but my wife and I decided that this was a dumb idea. Selling a house was not going to solve my problem. It would only prolong my online agony.

What I really needed was to discover what I was doing wrong for the past two years, and change it. Otherwise, I was quite prepared to go back to my successful computer programming career. (But I just didn't like the idea of working for someone else again.)

It didn't take me long to discover what I was doing wrong. And this brings me to the ultimate secret:

LASER FOCUS

If you have been trying to make money online and haven't been very successful, you can probably relate to some of the following.

While still at my old job, I discovered the world of the online marketing. Got quite excited about the possibilities.

I did some research and have invested in what I considered to be the best ebook on the subject.

Few months later when the opportunity came up (or so I thought at the time), I decided to become a full time online marketer. I also decided to specialize in affiliate marketing.

I really applied myself the first couple of months or so.

Then I discovered another great book on affiliate marketing. Bought it.

Then I discovered this great tool that would help you not only create great looking affiliate websites, but would also tell you what you needed to change on each page in order to make it optimized for search engines.

I really liked the idea, so I bought the tool.

Slowly but surely, I was becoming more and more confused. Which guru do I follow? All three approaches worked. But I had to know which one worked better (I'm very analytical by nature ;-) ... Instead of following one, I began to follow them all.

I lost my focus. As I lost focus, my search engine traffic stopped growing. As my traffic stopped growing, my income stopped growing as well. I started becoming more and more frustrated and searched for other, "better" ways of making money online.

Then I discovered that another affiliate marketer got quite successful buying ads on Google. I had to find out how. Bought that ebook too :-)

It only started getting worse from here on.

Over the period of little more than a year, I managed to spend thousands of dollars on various Internet marketing ebooks and courses. Most of them were really good. I always do a pretty thorough research and rarely am unlucky enough to buy rubbish (although it does happen occasionally).

The problem was not with the materials I bought, the problem was that I didn't apply any of them long enough to see the full results.

I wasn't following any one expert for long enough to give myself a fighting chance. I was too distracted. In short, I lacked FOCUS.

Affiliate marketing is one of the greatest opportunities on the face of the Earth. And so too are dozens of other methods of making money online. Search engines do reward with free traffic those that apply themselves diligently. Yes, you can make money with Google AdWords, if you stick with it and study it hard enough.

Why am I telling you all of this?

It certainly doesn't give me any satisfaction to talk about my failures. The only reason I wanted to bring this up is to make you aware of what you are probably doing wrong yourself.

Please learn from my mistakes. Life is simply too short to make all of the mistakes yourself.

I want to save you months or years of frustration. Once you waste that time, it's gone forever. Not to mention the financial and emotional cost.

You need FOCUS. Not just any type of focus. You need LASER FOCUS. If you look at a 40 Watt light bulb, all you see is a nice, soft light, probably not strong enough to light up an average size room properly. But you take the same 40 Watts and put it out of a laser gun, and what you will discover is that this FOCUSED beam of light can cut through various objects like a knife can cut through paper. Wow. Same amount of energy, different focus. LASER FOCUS.

Focus means, doing only one project at a time.

Focus means, bringing your current project to fruition, before you embark on another one.

Focus means you stop buying every new ebook or PHP script that comes out - which you often do out of fear of missing out.

Focus means unsubscribing from all ezines, except one or two that you consider the absolutely best ones for your particular situation.

Focus means not wasting your time surfing the net. At least not until all of your tasks for the day are completed (and even then you need to put a strict time limit on it).

The day you regain your focus, your life will change around. Mine has.

May the focus be with you.

Andrew Obremski is the editor of
http://www.focusandgrowrich.com,
a free email newsletter that help
the work-from-home community discover what works
online and what doesn't,
and helping them to become more profitable sooner.

Since the beginning of the understanding of Search Engine Optimization SEO there have been tons of different theories developed about how to do it right. The truth is, however, that there is no one single method that is one hundred percent known to be better than the rest. Since the large search engines such as Google and Yahoo! don t release the details of their ranking elements in addition to the fact that they are constantly changing what these elements are, and how they are weighted in the grand scheme of things we can only apply the efforts that have been tested and have worked for a given online marketing effort.

The following are the SEO techniques that have been known to work for marketing strategies used by experienced web designers and webmasters. Keep in mind that SEO is an ever-changing experience, and that while these techniques will work for you today, they may not be the same when tomorrow arrives.

1. Google AdWords this is an SEO technique specifically offered by Google to make certain that you are indeed getting use out of the keywords you want to use. This technique is considered to be quite cost-effective for achieving good search results for your website. It works by allowing you to state the maximum amount that you are willing to spend on a daily basis on your chosen keywords. This can be changed monthly as you witness the results that the Google AdWords SEO technique brings you.

2. Overture Keywords similar to Google s AdWords, you can choose the keywords you want, however, you cannot limit your daily spending, so this may be an issue if you re on a tight budget. However, it has been found to be quite cost effective when balanced against the number of new visitors and active customers created.

3. Yahoo! Regional Directories when you have your site indexed by Yahoo! Regional Directories a place where submission is free then you will always be in their list. Many new clients are found through this reliable process.

4. Keywords, Site Descriptions, Alt-Tags, Title Tags, and Page Content these are the main focus of SEO experts and SEO businesses today. These are the five elements that take the most amount of effort when optimizing websites. It all has to do with what is contained within the coding of your website. Unless you are truly confident that you know what you re doing, it is very beneficial to hire a professional SEO company to ensure that you re including all of the right elements, and doing it properly. Have this done before you submit your site to the different search engines, or re-submit your site after you ve done your SEO for your website. SEO is well worth paying for to ensure that it is done properly. Professionals will know which keywords to use, how to use them, and how to make sure that they are properly laid out for search engine spiders to crawl the site. Furthermore illegal tactics will never be used, which can result in having your website permanently banned from search engines.

5. Online Directories by submitting your website to any number of different free online directories, you will have an excellent new path for prospective customers to follow to find you. Many are free, others include a nominal charge. If there is a fee involved, do some investigation into the directory first, to make sure that it is worth the money.

6. The Open Directory Project this is one of the primary resources utilized by the big search engines such as Google for sending their spiders out to crawl new sites. The directory is entirely maintained by humans that is, every site submitted is reviewed and indexed by a person, not a spider. This does mean that it takes additional time to have your site indexed, but it is well worth the wait.

7. A Blog adding a blog to your website is a fantastic method for continuing to attract new and repeat visitors to your website. They are drawn to the fresh new content that is constantly being added.

8. Make It Great Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) is only as good as the website it supports. If you bring lots of visitors to your website, and it has nothing to offer them, or the content is terrible, all of your efforts will be in vain.

Search Engine Optimization s a Fertile Field

Search engine optimization is a phrase that is bandied about every day on the Internet. In the decade since the Internet superhighway began to generate as much if not more business than hanging out a shingle, search engine optimization has become a vital and growing field.

So how does one make a web page compliant with search engine optimization? One method is search engine copywriting. The copy is generated based on the idea that it reads well for someone surfing the web. By reading well, it means the text reads enough to keep the reader scanning and clicking on the page.

Is there a downside to search engine optimization? An ethical SEO company will be straight about the following ups and downs in the search engine optimization business. The first downside of search engine optimization is related to the differences in search engines.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, Starware and many more utilize different algorithms to produce their page rankings. In the early days of the Internet, Meta tags were the ideal behind search engine optimization. The Meta tags were embedded in the web design html, listing the searchable terms that the web page was keyed to. For example, a web page on pets may have had cats, kitty, kittens, dogs, puppies, and litter in their Meta tags. Those words were the searchable terms that the page referred to.

Meta Tags were great, make no mistake, but they were infinitely abused. A designer could plop down any terms they wanted into the Meta tags and the search engines could deliver the page no matter the content. The sophisticated algorithms of today are designed to avoid those pitfalls and traps. Instead, by building the design and the content around search engine optimization, when a search engine delivers a page: it usually contains information that the searcher was looking for.

However, there is a cost and limitation to using copywriting for search engine optimization. First of all, it is very time consuming. Yes, anyone can just sit down and generate a page of copy. The average copywriter can probably type up 350 words in less than an hour. They can likely layer the search engine optimization terms in during that initial draft, no problem.

What happens when optimizing a site requires 100 pages of text? 800 pages? 1000 pages? That one-hour can become literally hundreds of hours of time and energy. Professional copywriters have made a science out of generating good, clean copy, but they are not cheap. The average copywriter will charge by the word, not the page. A lot of companies would prefer to pay by the page.

In most businesses, the higher the quantity would generate a lower price. However in search engine optimization copywriting, the larger the quantity, the more the work. Generating ten to twenty pages of copy surrounding similar search terms without plagiarizing or creating repetitive text is not only difficult, it s mind-numbing.

Quality counts and quality copywriters will generate quality search engine optimization text. When it comes to building a website based on search engine optimization and quality content, the professional copywriter is an invaluable resource. Be prepared for the investment. Be prepared for the day when the search engines alter their algorithms to tweak them and this process is repeated.

Keeping the surfer engaged is great, that is only part of the purpose of writing that is part of search engine optimization. The second, primary part of these types of articles is to target specific search terms. By building the articles around these specific types of terms, it is possible to elevate the page rank of the particular page and overall site in a search engine.

The nature of a search engine s algorithm is a zealously guarded secret. Search engine optimization copywriting works because it creates genuine content versus nonsense information interspersed by searchable terms. Building around these terms sounds simple, but the elements of the page are as important as the content itself.

Developing the copy for search engine optimization can often require a professional copywriter. They possess the skills to write interest-generating content that can be layered around searchable terms. The content that works best often features more than just one set of searchable phrases. By strategically placing searchable terms within the content, the copywriter will provide the website with page ranking on those key terms.

Ultimately, search engine optimization works because the number of searchable terms on the Internet is huge. However, search engine optimization works because while it may improve rankings on one search engine it does not work as well across all search engines. As the search engines tune their algorithms, so page ranks shift. This is a constant, evolving business and competitiveness involved in search engine optimization continues to grow.

Mark Nenadic
Mark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North
http://www.15dn.com , where you will find articles and resources
to help with SEO, marketing and Web design.

Search Engine Optimizing is a set of practices developed to help you get a high traffic and PageRank, while simultaneously building a useful and functional website that will respond to the needs of your potential users. While some website owners are getting their site indexed by following and enhancing these guidelines, others are looking for a way to sneak in and crawl up search engines by developing various strategies to cheat spiders.

Most search engines have their specific rules on which SEO practices are legitimate and which are not. While they disagree on some borderline issues, they do have a set of basic principles in common.

Good SEO Practices

• creating logically-structured pages
• logical paragraph use
• including a site map
• providing clear links to each page
• using descriptive and not too long meta-tags
• validating you code
• providing information-rich content that visitors would find useful
• creating your website content based on the users' needs as if search engines didn't exist
• using spell-check
• avoiding duplicate content

Bad SEO Practices

• using invisible text and links to create false keyword density
• using non-compliant HTML to manipulate relevancy (e.g.: a title that doesn't have anything to do with the page content)
• using CSS to manipulate relevancy (e.g.: using hidden elements by executing code to reveal them)
• sending automated requests to search engines
• using doorway pages created just for search engines
• using machine generated code to produce keyword-rich content
• cloaking - presenting a different content to users than to search engine spiders
• linking to spammers and other bad websites
• participating in linking schemes to increase PageRank
• creating pages that install viruses and other badware
• using unauthorized software to submit pages, check ranking etc.
• re-submitting the website without any reason

Borderline Issues

• inserting comments in the HTML code
• using invisible form elements to hold keyword values
• using HTML elements for keyword stacking (e.g.: image alts)
• using machine generated code for usability reasons (e.g.: in order to check for browser versions)

These borderline issues are controverted and ambiguous techniques. Most of the time it is very difficult to say whether these techniques were used to trick the spiders or only for usability purposes. The search engine is the one who has to make the ultimate decision.

Major search engines are constantly fighting against illicit techniques to get your website indexed and increase your PageRank and developing new and improved automated solutions to detect them. They even encourage users to report any website that is trying to abuse SEO guidelines. Thus using illegitimate ways to crawl up search engines may result in your website being banned. Once it's been removed from the search engine index, it will no longer appear in search results.

Google, as well as other search engines, are trying to develop a pro-active attitude among website owners and convince them it's more efficient to make use of legitimate SEO practices. One thing you should always ask yourself when building new features and writing content is whether you would be doing it even if search engines weren't there at all. This is the best way to drive traffic to your website and get better ranking.

SEO - General Guidelines

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimizing and refers to a set of good practices that teach you how to improve your website so that it would be easily tracked, indexed and ranked by search engines. Getting your site indexed by Google and other major search engines will help you attract visitors and increase traffic.

SEO is an exciting and ongoing process that involves not only an initial optimized website, but also permanent maintenance and evaluating search results on a regular basis. With the ever-changing Internet technology, SEO experts sometimes have contrasting opinions on what makes a good website. However, there are some general guidelines most of them agree on.

Design & Content

• You should build your web pages for human beings and not for search engines. A clean design and a strong content will ultimately drive search engine spiders to your site.
• Make a clear hierarchy and provide text links to each page.
• Don't put to many links on a single page (maximum 100).
• You should include a site map to help users navigate easily through your website.
• Make sure you have clear TITLE tags, no HTML errors and all the links work.
• You should use text instead of images to display important elements, as search engine crawlers may not recognize a text inside an image.
• While keeping your content useful and clear, do use keywords that you know users would type to get to your page.
• Technical Issues
• Most search engine crawlers see your website similar to the way a text browser sees it. Consequently, you should use a text browser, such as Lynx, to check your website. If you can't see the whole page because of JavaScript, session IDs, DHTML or Flash features, search engine spiders will probably have trouble with crawling your website.
• Check with your web host to see if the server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This header tells Google whether the website content has changed since its last visit.
• While it is advised session IDs to track visitors' path through the website, you shouldn't do this for search bots.
• The robots.txt file on your web server tells spiders which directories can be crawled and which cannot. Make sure it's updated and it doesn't somehow block search engine crawlers.

Website Promotion

• After you've built your website and put it online, try to get high PageRank sites link to it.
• Submit your website to major search engines (Google, Yahoo/Altavista, MSN) to get it indexed, along with a site map that will tell them the site structure.
• Submit your website to relevant directories, such as Yahoo and Open Directory Project.
• Get involved in community based websites, blogs and forums and build a strong reputation.

Whether you choose to implement these techniques yourself or go to a SEO expert, no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google and other search engines. Search engines change their crawling algorithms often and competitor websites appear all the time. However, following these basic SEO guidelines will improve your chances of increasing your website traffic and is a better practice than looking for a way to cheat on search engines in order to get your pages indexed.

Copyright 2006 Andreas Obermueller
Andreas Obermueller is webmaster of
Hit4Biz.com - Marketing Related Information
and recommends Marble Host for reliable Web Hosting.

You have been working on a product for over a year now, and are finally ready to unleash your product on the world. However you do not know the best way to try to sell this product to your consumer. You have a feature set, but you just can not put the rest of the words together in a way that will lure prospective customers to purchase your product. Here are a few tips to writing a sales copy that sells.

1. Create an Attention-Grabbing Headline – If you do not write an attention-grabbing headline in your sales copy, then you have almost no chance to get someone to stop and read about your product. The internet is flooded with millions of products for sale, so if you do not write something to make your product stand out, you will never realize the potential of your product in the marketplace.

2. Write in a Persuasive Style – Your sales copy must be written in a persuasive style. Remember that you are trying to persuade someone to buy your product. You can not just sit back and give consumers the facts. You have to try to tell them why their lives would be better if they purchased your product. Since you can not tell them face to face, your sales copy must do the persuading for you.

3. Clean and Easy to Read – Make sure that you write your sales copy on a white background with black font that is easy to read. Your web site might contain many other colors, but you want to make sure that the potential customer can read your sales copy easily.

4. Use Sub-Headings – Most people only read the headlines of a sales copy. If you use sub-headings, then you will at least get the person to read more information about your product. This will give you more chances to wet the appetite of the potential customer, and give them a reason to read your entire sales copy.

5. Close with a Call to Action – Like all persuasive writing, a sales copy that sells must have a strong call to action. You do not want to tell the consumer that your product is the best thing in the world and then leave them to make a decision about it. You want to tell them to buy your product now, or they are going to regret it. Tell them that without it they will be missing out on something special.

About the Author:

Jack Born is the creator of Personalized Web Copy, a new push-button tool that adds personalized handwritten notes to your online sales letters and increases your sales, profits, and conversion rates instantly. Affiliate program available.

If you have been trying to get traffic to your site without paying for it, you must know by now that participating in online communities is one of the best ways. There are many different types of online communities that you can join and most will help you get a certain amount of traffic to your site. For this article, I will focus on only three types. Most commonly, new webmasters try to promote their website by subscribing to an online forum or a news site such as Slashdot or Digg. In addition, there are two other overlooked communities that can help you drive lots of traffic to your website and that includes social search engines and social bookmarking sites.

When it comes to using an online forum or news site as part of your marketing campaign it is important that you remember the most essential rule and that is, do not spam. Make sure that you are actively participating in the discussion and that you are not there just to promote your website. Many of these forums such as Slashdot and Digg use a moderation system that allows other users to give your posting such a low score that the vast majority of people will never see it. This is what will happen to you if you spam the forum other than of course getting banned all together. If you ad meaningful comments to a discussion, other users will become interested in what else you have to say and they will visit your website either via your signature or your profile.

In addition, social search engines have, recently, been gaining popularity. The internet consists of billions of websites and dishonest webmasters have been busy keyword optimizing their sites just to profit from Adsense. It has become very difficult for surfers to find the most relevant sites to their queries. Even Google’s results even though the best compared to other search engines often are not the most relevant. In an effort to avoid this clutter, web users are coming together in social search engines such as Rollyo.com to create a searchable collection of websites with useful content. If you are a webmaster and you want to promote your content rich site and your search engine optimization is not working then you might want to consider submitting your website to one of these social search engines.

Finally, social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us are becoming very popular and you can definitely use them to promote your site. In social bookmarking, you store links to your favorite websites online so you can access them from any computer that you are using. Most importantly, you can make your collection of links public so that others can also use them. In addition, you specify a set of tags for each link that you submit. You and other web surfers can use these tags to search for links of similar interest to their own. This is how you can promote your site. Simply bookmark your site and tag it with the most relevant keywords. Then, when other people search using these keywords, your site will come up and they might pay you a visit. If people enjoy your website, they might bookmark it themselves increasing the chances that others will come across it.

About the Author:

Peter E. is the creator of The Dollar Factory, a portal for webmasters with articles, news items, website spotlight and forum. If you are a new or old webmaster, join our growing community at The Dollar Factory (http://www.TheDollarFactory.com)

If you want to be successful as an affiliate marketer, you have to have your own website. It doesn't have to be fancy, but it does need to look professional.

Have you seen those websites that are completely filled with banners? I call them banner farms. How many of those banners do you think that YOU would click on? Enough said!

Now that you know that you need a website, how do you get one? The first thing you need is a domain name. Ideally, it should contain the main keywords of your website's topic. But, you can start with using your own name - or a variation of it.

You will also need website hosting. Somewhere your website files can reside. There are many web hosting companies, but be careful that you get one that is reputable. Ask some of your online acquaintances who they use.

What about the design itself? I believe that simple is best, especially when you're not quite sure what you are doing. All you really need is a nice header set in a simple template.

One of the most difficult tasks for a new affiliate marketer is to learn how to create and maintain his or her own website. But, there is software available these days that makes it almost easy. You can also use Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is pretty expensive, and difficult to learn, for a beginner. You could also host your website with a company that has a "Site Builder," complete with design templates, included with the package. You just point, click and type in your content.

Some affiliate programs will provide you with an affiliate website that you can promote. The problem with these sites is that there is no way to build your own mailing list. Building your list is the number one reason you need your own website.

If you really believe that it's impossible for you to learn how to "do it yourself," there are many designers that you can find online that you can hire to do it for you. However, you still should learn how to add your content and affiliate product html codes yourself because it can get very expensive to have a designer do it for you.

You can do a Google search for "website designers" to find someone. There can be quite a difference in their fees so do a comparison among them. Look at their design portfolio and then make a list of the top ten (or so) companies or individuals that you are interested in. Record their fee, what all is included in their design package, and their contact information. Contact them to see if they are responsive to your inquiry. Compare them and then choose - carefully- the one you want.

In the long run, it doesn't matter how you get your website built, as long as you build one. It IS necessary to your long-term affiliate marketing success.

About The Author

Good niche blogs are hard to find. Many people get bored talking about the same thing all the time, even though they know that their readers want to hear it. And they do. A new online tool is helping niche blogs find their place on the web and helping niche blog readers find the best blogs to read.

Squidoo is an online community of sorts that provides its members, called lensmasters, with web-authoring tools that make it simple and pleasant to create niche websites, called lenses, on topics for which they have an interest or are an expert. Each lens is then ranked according to several factors (traffic, content, ratings) and can be accessed through a search feature or tag clouds, which are groups of relevant keywords that show you by the size of the font how popular they are (truly a fascinating feature!).

When you create a lens on Squidoo, you add pre-formatted modules. Each of these modules is designed to allow you to do something different, whether that be create a bulleted list, write copy and add a picture, insert a video clip from YouTube, or sell items you have created on CafePress. One of the modules is an automatically updating RSS feed. It pulls posts from a chosen blog and displays them in the lens. All of these features allow lensmasters to create highly niche mini-sites that draw visitors for very specific reasons.

How does all this web-wizardry translate into exciting news for your niche blog?

If you maintain a blog, you are eligible to have it featured on a Squidoo lens! You don’t even have to maintain the lens yourself. If someone else has a lens that relates to the topic of your blog, you can contact them and offer your RSS feed. As long as your blog meets their expectations of quality, most lensmasters are happy to oblige, since it could mean a better LensRank and higher commissions for them. Or, of course, you can create your own FREE Squidoo lens and see what happens!

Niche blogs are always appreciated – both by readers and the search engines. However, maintaining them can sometimes be a drag. By using Squidoo to showcase your blog and create a new following, you can stay motivated and give new life to your well-done subjects. Help your blog stand out by associating it with an expertly created lens at Squidoo – it’s free and you can get started today!

About The Author

Kimberly Dawn Wells is a freelance author and avid Squidoo-er. Learn more about Kimberly and how Squidoo can boost your business by visiting http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/kdwells

Unclear website navigation is much like trying to read a map in the dark.

Many people who are new to web design and e-commerce have trouble creating effective website navigation. Having the expectation for your shoppers to use your website without clear and easy navigation is just like expecting them to blindly find their way to a destination with all the lights out. They will leave your site, lost and confused, without bothering to find out what you offer, and will go to find a website that is easier to understand and navigate.

Building a quality and easy-to-use website navigation will lead to many more sales and is actually very easy to do. To help you create a more effective website, experts at Bright Builders have compiled five easy tips to help you create effective website navigation that will quickly guide your customers to the products or information they’re searching for.

Tip One: The Navigation Bar

The Navigation Bar or Menu is the list of links that appears on every page of your website. It is the first cue to your customers about which pages they should visit in the website. Link names should be short, clear, and accurate at describing the products, services, or information contained on the linked page. It is also a good idea to use keywords as often as possible in the links in the navigation bar.

Navigation bars should not be too long. The customer shouldn't have to scroll down to view all of the links in your navigation bar. If your site offers a large number of products, create links to general categories instead of listing each product individually.

Tip Two: Using a Sitemap

A sitemap is crucial for any website. Simply put, the sitemap is an organized page of links to every page in your website. Normally organized as an outline, a sitemap includes links to each category, subcategory, and page on your site.

Sitemaps make it easier for both search engines and customers to easily access all of the information your site has to offer. One of the main goals of any website should be to have all of its pages indexed by search engines. This is because the more pages your site can be found for and ranked for, the better your chances are that customers will be able to find you in the search engines.

Tip Three: The Three-Click Rule

Studies have shown, on average, if a customer cannot find a wanted item or piece of information within three clicks of entering your site, they will leave your site. This means that your competition is getting the sale that you could have had, simply because the product or information was more readily available.

Many website owners do not understand that buyers are not the same as shoppers. Buyers know what they want and they want it now, but shoppers are simply browsing to see what is available. Make sure your customers can access all of your products and pages within three clicks from any page on your site to ensure that they buy from you.

Tip Four: Repeat Links

Having a Navigation Bar is very important for the ease of your website, but it is just as important to repeat those links in other areas on your site including in the body text or accompanying images.

You should also repeat important navigation links at the bottom of each page of your site in a link tree. This gives customers the ability to look at an entire page and then continue onto other pages without having to scroll up to the top to find the Navigation Bar links.

Tip Five: Page Titles and Subject Headers

If a customer ever has to ask “Where am I?”, you are almost guaranteed not to get a sale. Page titles and headers are just another way to clarify to the customer what page they’re visiting.

Found at the top of each page or dividing content by subject, headers should be bold and in a larger font than the page content. This clearly defines the purpose of the page and the content found on it, allowing the customer to easily navigate throughout the page.

Conclusion

Customers need to be able to navigate through a site with as little work as possible. The easier it is to navigate throughout a site, the more likely it is that your customer will stay long enough to purchase and continue to come back. By following these five simple tips, you help customers and search engines navigate through your site, thus increasing your sales potential.

About The Author

Shawn Hart is an internet marketer for Bright Builders.
For more information about online buisness
and website management visit BrightWebsite.com.

Online presence has become an integral part of more and more businesses today in order to either partially or fully sell their products and services. Just making a presence online is not sufficient, it should be able to catch the eyes of its prospects and to do so it is crucial that the website should be search engine and user friendly. It should be properly coded and designed to give the site an optimized and professional look, so search engines can locate and categorize it in search engine listings. The following are the steps for building complete professional & search engine optimized website:

1. Graphic & Layout Designing
2. Optimize For Search Engine (S.E.O)
3. Domain Name
4. Website Hosting
5. Submitting To Directories & Search Engines
6. Search Engine Marketing
7. Web site Promotion

A detailed understanding of the above steps can be seen below.

1. Graphic & Layout Designing:

First impressions are the best impressions and hence the first impression of the site can be got from its graphic and layout designing, further down they are judged by content. The designing should be simple and lucid. All the pages need to be consistent in background, color usage, text format and screen layout.

Background and Text Colors-

The color scheme expresses the characters of your website and makes it unique and attractive. Choose carefully a set of colors for background & text. While choosing, remember to use dark against light. In other words, use light text against a dark background or dark text against a light background. Don't make the mistake of using a background pattern that has both dark and light colors, it is difficult to choose a text color that is readable against such a background. Background image or texture chosen should contrast well with the text color, so that it is easy to read on screen.

Fonts-

One of the most important parts of a web page is text. It can make your page look very professional or very unprofessional. Always be consistent In other words, avoid using different fonts throughout your pages. The standard fonts used on the Internet are Arial and Verdana as are easiest for computer screen and for headlines use is Georgia, as it displays slightly in larger fonts.

Formatting Page-

Lay out the page with tables, and set the width in percentage terms (100% to window size) instead of a fixed number of pixels. That way the content of the page will be flexible with changes in browser window size, without the need to scroll horizontally. Links should be well organized, easy to detect by using appropriate colors. Underline your links & use a different color for visited links, put a link to your homepage on all your internal pages. Provide text navigation links at the bottom of long pages, so users don't need to scroll back up.).

Page Contents-

The content of professional website should be in bulleted or numbered list with direct to the point in short paragraphs, as long blocks of text passages can be boring for reader. It should give clear intention of the web pages. Load the top of the individual pages with most important and essential content with a brief header. Create a simple logo with captivating tag line on the top of the page as a identity of the website. Use common names for menu options: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Help, and Products. Make a copyright statement at the bottom of the each web page

File Size-

Web page size is defined by the total size of text, images and supporting files (including JavaScript, flash etc.) within the page download from the server. So, try to keep the size of a web page small by keeping less use of bulky contents such as video, audio, flash animations etc, which slow down the display of the page. If the page has too many items to load and slows to display, break it into smaller pages and link them to a new web page, with link back from the second page.

2. Optimize For Search Engine (S.E.O):

Professional websites can be successful only if they receives most targeted traffic, the source for traffic are the search engines, hence the websites should be made search engine friendly or rather say optimized for search engine. Coding and writing content of the site, as to get sequenced in the list of search engines is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Below are the basic points for coding for search engines. Two or three main keywords are to be decided for each page (the words that most commonly search engine users will type to find the page) These words are to be repeated often say in the page title, description meta tag, links and page body.

Title of the Page-

The title of the page is one of the most important elements for site optimization. It should be included in the HTML tag under head section (). The tag must contain keyword rich phrases, place name and company name respectively. It should be as a newspaper headline and unique for individual pages, which reinforce the viewer to go through. The title should be limited to 62-64 characters.

Meta Description Tag-

The Meta description tag usually consists of 160 to 180 characters including spaces. This too comes under head section of html tag (). It should describe what the page is about in descriptive manner with the main key phrases in it. It has to be written in an interesting site so as to make it more appealing to the readers there by catching their interest in the site, as this will appear as a description in the listing.

Meta Keywords Tag-

The tag should be placed after Title and Meta Description Tag (). The tag includes the keywords and key phrases from title, description and some other phrases (believed to be typed by search engine users in order to track the page) but it should be tried not to exceed 1000 characters. It must contain company and place name. The phrase must not be repeated thrice. The keywords can be modified in different phrases and placed in the tag.

Heading Tag-

Each page should have at least one heading tag at the top of the page with primary keywords/key phrases ( ) and subsections of the page with h2 tags, and so forth. all the heading tags have to be relevant to the title and content of the page. The tag should be short and descriptive.

Alt Tag-

The tag is used for images along with img src tag. When the cursor is placed over an image a text called as alt text () is highlighted. The text has be corresponding to the image and must contain key phrases. The tag should limit to 70 characters.

Content Of Pages-

The content weighs heavily for all major search engines. The content must grab search engine attention by including all keywords and key phrases in a balanced ratio (keywords: Total text). Density for keywords should lay under 3% to 5% to the text of the page, excluding stop words (words which search engine automatically ignores).

The main keyword should be placed in the first 25 words of the visible content because they're given more importance than other areas. The last few lines also hold considerable weight, though it's less than the former.

Navigation-

Proper navigation carries lot of importance for optimizing search engine. The navigation tab must contain Keyword rich anchor text on the top of the page. It should have descriptive title indicating summary of the page. HTML hyperlinks that lead to major pages inside the website are to be added to the home page.

A successful navigation design should include a sitemap for Search engines, so that they can scrawl all the links and this "Site Map" is to be placed on the home page of the site.

3. Domain Name:

Short Domain name having keywords and phrases of the website along with the company name should be chosen as, search engines do give importance to key word rich domain names. Though it can go to 67 characters max.

Hyphenated domain names are easy for search engine as can be distinguished for keywords occurring in domain name. Consider domains starting with A, B or C as some directories do alphabetical placement of websites. Avoid promotion digits like "1" or 1st, since the Open Directory considers only the meaningful part of a domain.

Common TLDs (A top-level domain) the last part of an Internet domain name; the final dot of any domain name available are ".org",".net",".com" else country specific use.".org" are use for non-profit organizations. Country specific TLD should be use by websites which carter product or service limited to particular country. It is advisable to use ". com", though one can consider registering a ".net" domain, but since most people are familiar with ".com", it is always better to stick to convention.

4. Website Hosting:

Web Hosting empowers sharing information, selling products and services, and interacting with people through a web site, so, a reliable Web Hosting Service that gives fast loading, 24/7 tech support, client owned domain name, minimum 20MB - 50MB server space, back-up system, Unlimited free access via FTP/Telnet, email accounts, Easy access to log files should be chosen.

Web hosting platform should be selected according to required operating system (unix or windows) depending on the website functionality. Unix/Linux based hosts provide PHP, Perl/CGI, FrontPage, and very limited ASP functionality. If running an Application that requires ASP, .NET, MS SQL, SBS or Access, the need will be for a Windows based web host; usually a little more expensive.

Types of web hosting server that can be selected:

1. Shared Web Hosting.
2. Dedicated Web Hosting
3. Managed Hosting
4. The Virtual Private Server (VPS)
5. Co-located Hosting
6. Reseller Hosting
7. Free Web Hosting

5. Submitting To Directories & Search Engines:

The next step is to submit website to directories. Directories are search engines powered by human beings. Human editors compile the list of website in respective categories. Select the required category for the website and submit it to "add site" page with the required data information.

Getting listed with the important directories is very important, because many people see their listings. In addition, if you are listed with them, then crawler-based search engines are more likely to find your site and add it to their listings for free.

Similar to directories search engine are also collection of website, but they are powered by ROBOTS. These Robots crawl automatically web pages to compile their listings. You have to fill out the form to submit the website by giving the url of the site. Submit only home page, as search engine will follow the links from the index page.

Submit website to major search engine manually, don't rely on software; it may result in over submission. Actually, handful of major search engine and directories distributes their results or indexes to many huge portals and search engines, in other words there are many affiliated search engines. Thus, before submitting you should be aware of which search engine is powered by whom. If you submit to every front-end search engine then you will be submitting the WebPages to same search engine, which can result you in penalty by removing from index or de-ranking the site

6. Search Engine Marketing (S.E.M) :

Search Engine Marketing involves marketing of your Website through Goggle ad words, MSN Ad Center, banner ads and other keyword purchasing programs as well as purchasing links, ads, and sponsored listings.

Goggle ad words, msn Ad Center refer to Pay Per Click (PPC). PPC advertisements are usually text written ads placed near search results or indexes. When a user clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged with an amount. The Advertiser also has to pay for the placement

7. Web site Promotion:

This category includes article Marketing, Press Releases, link Popularity, buying traffic, blogging, forum Posting and more.

If you want to be one big step ahead of your competition you have to build as many one-way links as you can. The best and easy way to do this is writing and submitting optimized topical articles to articles banks over the Internet. Along with your article, you will include a short bio about yourself where you can place your website URL. This will also generate traffic to your site.

Posting comments related to your topic, involved in the conversations, be helpful by giving quality solution, that means joining the forums or blogs

The forums are a place where people give quality comments and do post questions for their queries.

Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.

Above steps ensure a search engine optimized and professional website, which can probably gain good traffic and good page rank with top position in result pages.

About The Author