The Benefits Of Owning A Website

Owning a website can be a great asset to any business!

Everyday, more and more people are getting online to find services and products

In there area as well as world wide. Let?s face it people, the internet isn?t going anywhere any time soon and phone books are really just a lot of work. Many people prefer the ease of searching for the things they are looking for, online.

So what does this do for your business? Well, it increases the amount of customers you will have buying your services or products.

If you own a flower shop in your town and have about 50 usual customers that come in to your shop to order flowers, just imagine how many hundreds of thousands of people you could sell your flowers to online, from your website!

Voila! Not only will they order your flowers online but they can order your flowers 24-hours a day, 7 days a week!

Yes, that?s right!

The internet never shuts down like your office does. You could seriously be making money in your sleep.

So no matter what type of business you have, there is always a way for you to increase your profits by getting that business online!

So how do you do this? You need to hire a professional website designer to design, program and SEO your site. Don?t be afraid to invest part of your advertising budget on a website. It will really pay off in the long run.

Search Engine Marketing Secrets You Are Lucky To Get Them Here By:519Studio

Yes, you now have a great website, greatly designed hosted with wonderful content but no one seems to notice the site except you and your friends. Trust me these are the most unlikely people to catapult your website over others that are older and well established online. A boost on your ranking is what you now need to consider. This is trying to increase the visibility of your website to the visitors and search engines.

Search engine marketing and optimization is extremely difficult to understand for most laymen. The most basic concepts are easy to incorporate into your site, but the more competition you have on the web, the more help you need. Enter the experts.

Experts in search engine marketing and optimization have all of the knowledge and skills required to take your website to the top of the search rankings. They understand the intricate and complex workings of the crawlers used by the engines. It is these crawlers that must be pleased in order to get your site where you want to go.

there are some ways to promote sem

1.Fresh, targeted content is a must! All content for your website needs to be search engine optimized. Every page, even your contact page, should have a 2-3% keyword density. This is the only way you will get on the search engine's radar.

Don't stop at your website. Use optimization for all of your marketing tools such as classified ads, article submissions, blogs, and directory listings.

Get on Twitter and Facebook now! These are great ways to increase traffic to your website. Registration is free for both these services and Facebook offers the opportunity to create a company page. These sites are social networks whose registration numbers are increasing rapidly. You can register for twitter at: twitter.com and for a FaceBook company page visit: facebook and select the company page option at the lower left hand side of the page. To create your facebook company page you may want a few images on hand such as your company logo, samples of your work or products, etc. You will be giving the opportunity to upload these images during the page creation process. It's very user friendly and goes quickly. Exposing your business to these huge markets is another great way to get your name out there for free. Use these social networks to advertise your business through images, links to your website, and daily posts. The result can be more traffic to your site, more sales and consequently, increased search engine standings for your company website.

Do a thorough keyword research before you do anything else. Keywords are the key (pardon the pun) to driving traffic to your website. If you don't have the right keywords, you have nothing! Go after the highly-relevant keywords that are relevant to your products and services.

Search engine marketing or SEM, is an essential Internet marketing technique used for web site promotion and escalating a site's visibility in the result pages of popular search engines. Internet Marketing includes various ways to bring best results to your company. according to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), SEM methods include, but not limited to.

Whatever type of website you have, you undoubtedly want search engine traffic. It is through targeted search engine traffic that people make money online and those that know how to get it have one leg up on the rest.

Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings By:Anoop Rohera

Your website's ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for "spam" pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine's index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the "spam" net and tossed from a search engine's index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links "bad neighborhoods."

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven't linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a "Pagerank" which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page's link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the page is penalized. The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called "keyword stuffing." It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called "Keyphrase Density" to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is "renters insurance," be sure you don't use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final potential risk factor is known as "cloaking." To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is "cloaked" because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site's search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page's ranking to the top of the list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as "pagejacking." This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of "off page" elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk. Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

Google Analytics Keyword Positions By:Lilly Jose

One of the biggest questions advertisers have when manage their pay per click account is how much they should bid for their keywords. Bidding too high may incur too much cost and advertisers might not be able to sustain a profitable ROI, whether bidding too low might not allow their ads to be positioned at a visible spot.

There is a function in Google Analytics that allows advertisers to see at which positions their keywords receive the most visits, transactions, revenue, conversion rate, and etc.

Simply login into Google Analytics, select a report which has the proper filters applied. Then click on Traffic Sources. Within the expended pull down menu, select Adwords then click on Keyword Positions.

Now just type in the keyword that you want to analyze into the ?Find keywords? box to see the stats on that keyword. Click on the keyword once, then you can start seeing the position break down on the right.

This handy little tool might not be practical for huge companies that have tens and thousands of keywords, since manually analyzing each single one of them would just be overly time consuming. But for small businesses that have a few core keywords which make up the majority of their conversions, this is a great way to get some general ideas on how much they should bid to maximize their investments.

One thing to be careful though, is not to solely rely on the number of transactions to make decisions; instead you should also take the conversion rate, and number of visits into account.

For example: let?s assume for the time period you are analyzing, your keyword have spent 90% of the time at position one and only 10% of the time at position three, so most likely there would be more transactions happening at position one than at position three.

But at the same time, the keyword might only be getting a 0.3% conversion rate at position one whereas at position three, it might be getting a 3.2% conversion rate. Assuming there isn?t a big different on the number of visits between the two positions, it actually makes more sense to lower your bid and have the keyword on position three for most of the time.

As with any other analysis process, make sure you have a sufficient data collection before making any judgements.

Design Dating Web Sites Faster with Love Icons By:Victor Ivlichev

Designing a new dating Web site soon? Tight deadlines often affect product quality, and software and Web projects are no exception. But if your site is on a subject of human relationships and dating, you really cannot afford spoiling your clients' experience with questionable design. Having nice-looking design is a must for dating products, and professional graphics is a major part of it.

Love Icon Set by 777 Icons http://www.777icons.com/libs/love-icons.htm is a collection of royalty-free love icons that enables software developers and designers develop dating sites and software faster while making their projects look better, all that for a fraction of the price charged by a typical design studio. Being royalty-free, the love icons can be used on as many Web sites or in as many software products as you want without you having to order additional licenses.

The set of love icons contains images representing different aspects of human relationships. Icons for Love and Heart, Valentine's Day and Help, Arrow and Broken Heart, Heart on Fire, Flying Heart, Couple and Kiss, Present and Rose, Gift and Gift Boxes, Mailbox and Mail, Love Letter and Love Message are just a few examples of what you'll get. Included are love icons representing all signs of horoscope such as Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces, and there are images for Male and Female, Sex, Award, Romance, Party, and, finally, Wedding. Oh, and no dating site can exist without the No Photo icon!

Each of the cute icons comes in a variety of file formats, sizes and resolutions. All icons are supplied in sizes of 16x16, 20x20, 24x24, 32x32, 48x48 and 256x256 pixels. All love icons are supplied in Windows Icon (ICO), PNG, GIF, and BMP formats for fast integration with software and Web sites. Both 256-color and True Color variants of love icons are supplied with every order. The entire set of more than 60 love icons costs less than $50. U can do it find it and make your own Website.

Bulding and Establishing Websites By:Greg Morrison

A website is the centerpiece for online businesses. This is why the website must be designed, built, and established in a professional manner. If not, it will not do as well.

But there's another side to the website business that most people don't know about. It's building, establishing, and selling them to make money!

How are the sites built?

An experienced person can build a website by simple opening up the notepad application on their computer and encoding it with HTML (HyperText Marketing Language)codes. Others use website building software tools to do this.

How are websites established?

Websites are established through promotion of it. Methods of promoting websites range from submitting articles on article submission websites, SEO marketing, affiliate marketing, and other methods.

How and why to sell your website?

There are many factors that you should consider when selling a website. One is will you earn more money by keeping the website or selling it. Another factor is how to convince people to buy it at the price you want. While most people are willing to pay thousands of dollars for a website, others will not pay more than a grand or two for one. Website quality is everything.

To build that dream website you should use software like Dreamweaver and XSite Pro. Each program cost less than $500 and offer tutorials that will guide you in making the website of your dreams.

Atlanta Web Graphics Design OnDemand Website Solutions By:Brad Zockoll

Atlanta: Home of the New Wave of Web Graphics Design

The South is surging with innovative technology

Not many cities can make the claim to business success like Atlanta can. Not many cities have such a growing need in the area of web maintenance, web graphic design, and overall website solutions. The ever-expanding metro area is awakening to its potential to not only handle the problems of internet technology, but also to aggressively be a world leader in web business.

Atlanta has achieved the well-earned nickname of the Business Capital of the Southeast, and it's easy to see why. According to the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, Atlanta has the fifth largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies in America.

With companies like Home Depot, UPS, Aflac, and (of course) Coca Cola making Atlanta their home base, it's no wonder that the city enjoys a prosperity that few other regions can boast. However, it's also the smaller companies that have moved in and enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the bigger fellows in the city. Outsourcing, bartering and technological exchanges are just a few of the business dealings that happen every day in the Georgia metropolis.

In fact, it's fairly difficult not to succeed in Atlanta. Unless, of course, you come unprepared.

The sad fact is, many do.

?It's amazing how many companies are top notch in appearance, energy and dedication,? said Nigel Gower, CEO of 24OnDemand. ?But their web sites are atrocious. There's a desperate need for website solutions. No fresh content, no web graphics design, nothing. One of my colleagues met with a president of a company last month. That gentleman told my friend that he had not updated his site since 1999. Seriously. My friend was shown the website and was aghast. The graphics and content were laughable. It was amazing that the man was still in business at all. That's really what it is, a need for state-of-the-art web solutions.?

Gower's company offers website solutions that are virtually turnkey. ?All the client needs to do is to let us know his business, its location, its aim and its product of service, and we're off and running.? As a recent resident of Atlanta, Gower is excited about the opportunities he had encountered. ?I meet business people who have a passion for their product but just don't know how to present it in a world of technology. That's where we take that whole burden off of their back ? we're here to walk them through the supermarket of options and let them pick and choose the website solutions they want. Then they let us sweat the details while they go on about their business. That is not restricted to Atlanta; it's all over the world. But here in Atlanta, the networking of tech-hungry corporations is fascinating. From web graphics design to user-friendly password protected sites, they want to know it all, and use it all.?

24On Demand meets the needs of companies who want to utilize the latest technologies, from online ads to keeping an in-the-website accounting log of business transactions. The company has been recognized as an innovative new corporation whose reputation is encouraging progression toward all-in-one marketing and management.

Atlanta is ready and willing to work with 24On Demand. It not only wants to, it really needs to. It really can't help it. The 28 countries that comprise Atlanta's metro is now the eighth largest metro area in the nation. It's not slowing down: at last census count, Atlanta's metro area was trailing only Atlanta, Dallas and Houston in growth. With more people come more businesses, more opportunities and more technological needs.

The city has had more than one day on the international stage, especially with the global spotlight that came with hosting the 1996 Olympics. It realizes that it still remains under an international microscope as wrestles with the technological needs of a major urban region. And, of course, there's that growth thing ? companies keep moving in at an alarming pace. Don't tell that to Gower though ? he's not intimidated by it. He understands it completely. His company grew within these city limits because of the opportunities afforded by the need for new and creative ways to do electronic business.

?That's why we're here,? said Gower. ?We offer website solutions by specializing in web graphics design and other corporate necessities. Who doesn't need these things? We could've settled anywhere in the country, but we chose Atlanta because of the local energy. Sure, we have international accounts as well as business with companies across the nation. But for getting face-to-face with local high-octane movers and shakers, well, you can't beat Atlanta.?

A Guide To Approaching The Strategic Redesign Of A Website By:Jonathan Fink

Every website has a life-span; they eventually become dated and no longer fit for purpose - especially if the business has been re-positioned since the site was launched. Sometimes a website needs to be replaced because it's simply not giving any return on investment.

For many business owners, the hope is that a new website will automatically perform better than the old one, and that the visual re-design in particular will result in more sales. However, thousands of pounds can be spent on a new site and no benefit be seen unless the re-design is approached correctly, and that always begins with asking the right online strategy questions. Latching onto the way the new website looks, before considering what it needs to do, how it achieves that, and how it fits into the company's industry is a recipe for wasted efforts.

Strategy to inform action

Wanting a site to look modern and up-to-date is natural and does play a part in how customers will react to the new site. However, it is the content that does the hard work, and knowing what content to put in and where is informed by strategic research. These are the questions you should be discussing with your website development team before anyone even begins to mock up a design.

What do you want the site to do?

For e-commerce websites, this question is very easy to answer; sell more! But for businesses who don't sell directly through their site, this can be more complex. Sometimes it's getting site visitors to sign up to a newsletter, sometimes it's to provide information about services and then increase enquiries, sometimes it's to reinforce brand ? often it's all of these and more. It's surprising how many companies don't take the time to consider these goals at the beginning, but being aware of what you want to be the primary and secondary goals of the site informs the structure, prominence given to certain information, calls to action and many other content and design considerations.

What is currently working well?

It's tempting to throw the old website out entirely, having focused on all the things that aren't working and may have irritated you over its lifespan. However, taking the time to consider what does work well is important. Have customers ever complained about not finding your contact details for example? Often the answer is yes ? but if it's 'no' then you know the way those are presented in the current site is working for your customers, and may be worth carrying over into the new design.

What needs to be improved?

Looking at the kinds of questions people ask after visiting the site (perhaps through a contact form) is a good way to tell whether the current content is presented intuitively. If the answers to those questions are on the site, then it's clear your customers aren't finding the information in the way you anticipated. How can a redesign address these problems?

What are your competitors doing?

An analysis of your competitors is always a good way to get ideas for your re-design ? not simply emulation, but also looking at what you find hard to do or which information is hard to find. Often business owners are so familiar with their own site that it's impossible to see it like a new user, however if you go to another site in the same industry, you may be able to get insights about your own. Getting a third party to do this for you is even better, as they will be totally unbiased and be able to evaluate your site alongside your competitor's sites fairly.

What language does your industry use?

This is a critical component of strategic research, and something that many business owners find difficult to gauge, for the same reason that they find it hard to see their own website as a visitor would. A business owner is often so deeply enmeshed in their own industry, that they find it hard to separate out the terms commonly used by customers from the jargon that could exclude them.

Knowing the language used across the industry informs the content that needs to be used on the site, both to attract and keep site visitors, but also gain search engine visibility. This in particular leads to the first stage of the re-design: structure and content mapping, not the colour palette!

The content is more important than the new visual design

Site structure and the content within it will achieve the majority of goals behind a redesign. Clearly good visual design is incredibly important, as it will help to draw the eye to critical calls to action, make the site easy to use and reinforce brand. However, a beautiful new site will not guarantee improved performance. Before a military campaign, intelligence is gathered and a strategy put in place. Whilst a website redesign obviously is a different experience, the reasoning behind the military approach is still valid to inline strategy. Gather intelligence about your site and your industry, then make the plan before any designs are mocked up or copy is written, otherwise you may end up with a site that looks good, but does nothing to help your business.

7 Tips For Designing For Older Users By:Marianne Markowski

The discussion on web design for older site visitors often drifts towards accessibility and gets mixed up with looking at disabilities rather abilities, but this should not always be a given.

Not every person over 65 years has eyesight so poor that they have to increase text size or change the contrast of text colours. Not every person over the retirement age has problems with motor control or significant short term memory loss. The diversity of the 65+ user group is

enormous. A website might be easy to use for someone over 75 years old; simply because they're experienced web surfers or familiar with the site. In contrast you might find someone younger, but with less Internet experience, struggling to use the same site.

You can find a comprehensive list of design guidelines for users over 50 at the American Association of Retired Persons website and in the UK City University's guidelines. Having researched and worked with older users it becomes obvious that there are very specific themes that come up repeatedly for the average senior surfer. These are simple things such as ?what's clickable and what's not?, window management and jargon that acts as language barrier.

Here is a digestive list of the most important design tips based on research with users.


1. Make obvious what's clickable and what's not

You must clearly distinguish between paragraph, heading and link styles. Underlining link text within written text helps links to contrast with copy, but underlining links in the main navigation isn't necessary as each and every item should be obvious. Also, don't employ underlining to identify headings.

Buttons must also be made as large and prominent as possible so they become a clear call to action. 3D effects for buttons can help to make them stand out. Also, make links and buttons easy to target and hit by increasing their clickable area.

In addition, next to the cursor visibly changing into a ?hand?, you should offer a highlight around the area to click on.


2. Use checkboxes rather than drop-down menus

A drop-down menu can be fiddly and time consuming for site visitors, and can result in people selecting the wrong item by accident. If you

have less than 10 items in a drop-down menu, use checkboxes or radio buttons. These have the advantage of showing the number of options at a glance without having to click.

However, you should keep drop-down menus where they are established conventions, e.g. when choosing your country. Here, it's better to stick with what users are used to.


3. Stay in one window

If possible, always stay in one window. If you like to provide useful tips or explanations, consider implementing it in a way that the explanation appears on the same page. If you need to include a pop-up or re-direct to a new window, then inform the users by telling them.

A good example of showing useful tips on the same page is twitter's sign-up page. Here the explanation comes up when users click into the field ?Full name?.


4. Implement the shallowest possible information hierarchy

Ensure that you fully understand your users' goals and provide them with the shortest paths to completing their task. Pull out important and frequently visited topics and display them on the homepage. You should also maintain consistent labelling of links and page names and allow site visitors to get to the content within 2-5 clicks.

The path must be kept as clear as possible of distracters such as advertising, though you can display some after the task has been completed

successfully. Provide about 3 helpful cross-reference links that are related to the current task goal, but not many more in order to avoid distraction. Overall, try to minimise the options on screen to be as succinct as possible.


5. Include a site map and link to it from every page

A sitemap gives users a good overall picture of how the site is organised and clearly defines all the resources the website has to offer. The link to the sitemap can usually be found near the top or the bottom of the page and frequently placed near the link to 'contact us'.

Internet savvy senior surfers are aware of sitemaps and make use of them to gain an overview of the site. They will also likely click on a sitemap link when they get lost on the site or if they can't find what they want while browsing.


6. Keep your language simple

Avoid technical jargon at all cost. However, if you employ newer functionality such as ?tagging? for example, don't try to rename it, but provide an easy to understand explanation for it. Include instructions in plain English where necessary, but always try to reduce the number of words displayed on the page.

Use simple and short sentences and include bullet points where possible. For links on the homepage or landing pages include a short description to tell site visitors what to expect when following the link.


7. Appear trustworthy

Senior surfers tend to be more cautious when browsing and can get confused when something unexpected happens such as a new window opening or an application installing.

Firstly, clearly state the purpose of your site on the homepage. Also, offer a brief description with content links, so users know what to expect when following them. Explain in 'large print' how personal information will be handled before asking users to enter it.

Make use of the well-known 'padlock' icon to indicate a secure part of the site. Show words such as 'secure', 'safe' and 'confidential' in bold. Offer a content section on 'security' when your site offers financial services.


Conclusion

Follow these 7 simple design tips and it will help the majority of site visitors over 65 years use your site more easily and of course it will help all other users too. It will be an enjoyable experience for novice Internet users as well as those who are experienced surfers but new to your site. In addition, any user who might require assistive software will not be compromised by any of these design tips.