A higher search ranking is what many website owners dream of. What they don’t realise is that by optimising their site for the search engines, if done correctly, they can also optimise it for their site visitors.

Ultimately this means more people finding your website and increased sales and lead generation. But are search engine optimization and usability compatible? Aren’t there trade-offs that need to be made between giving search engines what they want and giving people what they want? Read on and find out (although I’m sure you can guess the answer!)…

1. Keyword research carried out Before you even begin building your website, you should carry out keyword research to identify which keyword phrases your site should target. Using publicly available tools such as Wordtracker, you can discover which keywords are searched for the most frequently and then specifically target those phrases. Doing keyword research is also crucial for your site’s usability. By using the same keywords in your website that web users are searching for in search engines, you’ll literally be speaking the same language as your site visitors.

   For example, you might decide to target the phrase, “sell toys”, as your website does in fact sell toys. Keyword research would undoubtedly show you that web users are actually searching for, “buy toys” (think about it - have you ever searched using the word, “sell”, when you want to buy something?). By placing the phrase, “buy toys” on to the pages on your website, you’ll be using the same words as your site visitors and they’ll be able to find what they’re looking for more easily.

2. 200 word minimum per page Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, ultimately penalising that page in the search rankings.

   In terms of usability, it’s also good to avoid pages with very little content. A page with less than 200 words is unlikely to contain a large amount of information, so site visitors will undoubtedly need to click elsewhere to find more detailed information.

   Don’t be afraid to put a reasonably large amount of information on to a page. Web users generally don’t mind scrolling down anymore, and provided the page provides mechanisms to aid scanning (such as employing sub-headings - see point 6 below) it shouldn’t be too difficult for site visitors to locate the information that they’re after.

3. 100kb maximum HMTL size If 200 words is the minimum page content size, then 100kb is the maximum, at least in terms of HMTL file size. Anything more than this and search engines may give up on the page as it’s simply too big for them.

   A 100kb HMTL file will take 20 seconds to download on a 56k dial up modem, used by three in four UK web users as of March 2004 (source: UK government). Add on the time it takes for all the other parts of the page to download, such as images and JavaScript files, and you’re looking at a highly un-user-friendly download time!

4. CSS used for layout The website of Juicy Studios saw a six-fold increase in site visitors after switching from a table-based layout to a CSS layout. Search prefer CSS-based sites and are likely to score them higher in the search rankings because:
   • The code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines
   • Important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document
   • There is a greater density of content compared to coding

   Using CSS for layout is also highly advantageous for usability, as it leads to significantly faster download times.

5. Meaningful page title If you know anything about search engine optimization you’ll know that search engines place more importance on the page title than any other attribute on the page. If the title adequately describes the content of that page then search engines will be able to more accurately guess what that page is about.

   A meaningful page title also helps site visitors work out where they are, both within the site and the web as a whole. The page title is the first thing that loads up, often quite a few seconds before the content, so a descriptive, keyword-rich page title can be a real aid to help users orientate themselves.

6. Headings and sub-headings used Search engines assume that the text contained in heading tags is more important than the rest of the document text, as headings (in theory at least) summarise the content immediately below them. Search engines assign the most importance to < h1 >, then < h2 >, and so on.

   Headings are also incredibly useful for your human site visitors, as they greatly aid scanning. Generally speaking, we don’t read on the web, we scan, looking for the information that we’re after. By breaking up page sections with sub-headings that effectively describe the content beneath them, scanning becomes significantly easier.

   Do be sure not to abuse heading tags though. The more text you have contained in heading tags within the page, the less importance search engines assign to them.

7. Opening paragraph describes page content We’ve already established that search engines love content, but they especially love the first 25 words or so on each page. By providing an opening paragraph that adequately describes the content of the rest of the page (or the site if it’s the homepage), you should be able to include your important keyword phrases in this crucial area.

   As web users, whenever we arrive at a web page the first thing we need to know is whether this page has the information that we’re after. A great way to find this out is to scan through the first paragraph, which, if it sufficiently describes the page content, should help us out.

8. Descriptive link text Search engines place a lot of importance on link text. They assume that link text will be descriptive of its destination and as such examine link text for all links pointing to any page. If all the links pointing to a page about widgets say ‘click here’, search engines can’t gain any information about that page without visiting it. If on the other hand, all the links say, ‘widgets’ then search engines can easily guess what that page is about.

   One of the best examples of this in action is for the search term, ‘miserable failure’. So many people have linked to George Bush’s bio using this phrase as the link text, that now when miserable failure is searched for in Google, George Bush’s bio appears top of the search rankings!

   As web users, we don’t generally read web pages word-for-word - we scan them looking for the information that we’re after. Compare the following two paragraphs:

   This is some text, lots and lots of lovely text. Now, here’s a sentence with a link in it. To read more about our widgets please click here. Following this, there is more text, lots and lots of lovely text. And one more sentence, containing yet more text to illustrate this point.

   This is some text, lots and lots of lovely text. Now, here’s a sentence with a link in it. Please read about our widgets whilst visiting our website. Following this, there is more text, lots and lots of lovely text. And one more sentence, containing yet more text to illustrate this point.

   The first paragraph isn’t so good as when you scan through it, you can’t take any meaning from the word ‘click here’. The second paragraph, with its link text that effectively describes its destination, is far easier to scan and you can understand the destination of the link without having to read its surrounding words.

9. Frames avoided Frames are quite an old-school technique, and although aren’t as commonplace as they once were, do still rear up their ugly head from time to time. Using frames is one of the worst possible things you could do for your search engine ranking, as most search engines can’t follow links between frames.

   Even if a search engine does index your pages and web users find you through a search engine, they’ll be taken to one of the pages within the frame. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation (navigation is normally contained in a separate frame) and therefore no way to navigate to any other page on the site!

   Frames are also disadvantageous for usability as they can cause problems with the back button, printing, history and bookmarking. Put simply, say no to frames!

10. Quality content provided This may seem like a strange characteristic of a search engine optimised website, but it’s actually crucial. Search engines, in addition to looking at page content, look at the number of links pointing in to web pages. The more inbound links a website has, all other things being equal, the higher in the search rankings it will appear.

    By providing creative, unique and regularly updated content on your website, webmasters will want to link to you as doing so will add value to their site visitors. You will also be adding value to your site visitors.

Conclusion

Optimising your website for both search engines and people needn’t be a trade-off. With this much overlap between the two areas, you should easily be able to have a website that web users can find in the search engines, and when they do find it, they can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.

No Comments Yet »

Have your banners viewed across the internet and only pay for results. This gives you the exposure you need to establish branding and awareness, but without the huge costs of banner advertising. An Affiliate program is a marketing system where you offer others an incentive (such as a commission) for other companies to advertise your site. The companies who join are called affiliates and they only earn a commission on actual sales you receive from their site. You can offer the affiliates a choice of marketing options, the most popular being banners, e-zine adverts and text links. You pay affiliates only after the results of the advertising have come in i.e. $500 of sales, or 10,000 clicks. The more sites you join to your affiliate network the more traffic and exposure you get, promoting your site all over the internet. Fig 1a is a graphical representation of this. You only pay for results of your choosing, the most popular types of affiliate program being, PPS (pay per sale) and PPC (pay per click). There are many types of affiliate program that you can have, the most popular are listed in the section below. AllAffiliatePro affiliate software can be used to create virtually any type of affiliate program, not limiting you to only one type, you may offer several types of program at the same time, allowing your affiliates to choose their preferred incentive. Then there are some example figures showing the basic maths of how affiliate marketing works. There is also an affiliate revenue calculator where you can try out some figures of your own.

No Comments Yet »

(Common mistakes and misconceptions about search optimization and marketing)

There is so much misinformation floating through the internet regarding search engine marketing and optimization that it’s important to shed some light on a few common errors and misconceptions. The following list highlights some of the most critical issues involved in determining the success or failure of a web site’s search engine optimization and marketing strategies.

1. Lack of “Search Friendly” Content.

Every week I review web sites with no real search engine indexable content. Web pages composed mostly of graphics, flash and other bells and whistle are commonly over-looked by the search engines. Search engines determine what content is of value per web page based on the text used on that page. A truly optimized site should contain at least 200 words of keyword-dense text. There is some debate among experts on exactly how many words should be used, but generally 200 words will suffice. As a point of reference this paragraph contains about 200 words. It is equally important for text content to contain keywords that match the page titles. For example, a site selling peanut butter owned by a company called “ACME Foods” might have a title of “Acme Foods, Inc. Wholesale Food Products”. We have to consider how many people are likely to search for the term “Acme Foods, Inc. Wholesale Food Products” it is much more likely that people will search for the term “peanut butter”. Knowing this, we can say with confidence that it would be a wiser choice to title a page, “Peanut Butter, ACME Foods” and the page content should reflect this same keyword strategy.

2. Insufficient Link Popularity.

Search engines make every attempt to qualify the results which are displayed in search results. One of the ways that they do this is by tracking the number and quality of the incoming links to a web site. A site with a large number of incoming links from quality sites is given a higher ranking in search results. This is an important consideration that is sometimes over-looked by those attempting to market web sites. Services that promise to link your site to thousands of other sites are far from productive; in fact they can sometimes do more harm than good. Most search engines these days consider services like this to be spam, so called “link farming” and often give sites with these types of links a low ranking or drop them all-together from the search results. Incoming links to a site that compliment it and are relevant to the site contents are golden and can greatly boost a site’s ranking. Google’s page ranking system is a good example. A site with a page rank of 1 if given a link from a site with a page rank of 8 can see its page rank boost to 4! Link popularity is one of the most time consuming and difficult aspects of search engine optimization. It’s no wonder that many of the search engines give so much importance to this web site measurement.

3. Lack of Keyword Research And Updates

So, you have a web site. Do you know what pages in your web site are generating the most interest? Do you know what terms people are searching for that result in them finding your site? Probably not. Let’s use the peanut butter analogy again. You own a web site that sells peanut butter. You spend some money on paid search advertising, logically; you assume that the key phrase “peanut butter” is a prime candidate to target. What happens? usually one of two things, one, the term peanut butter is such a popular search term that thirty million other web sites are competing for the same key phrase. Two, the term peanut butter is so unpopular that it’s unlikely that it’s searched for more than once in this lifetime. Proper keyword research can solve these problems. Let’s say for the sake of argument that keyword research is performed and that it is determined that a significant number of people are searching for “organic peanut butter”. It just so happens that our peanut butter company manufactures a whole line of organic, all natural peanut butter. We have discovered a niche. The right amount of people searching for the specific product that we want to sell. It’s the perfect match. So, what must be done to capitalize on our findings? First we optimize our web pages for our target keyword, we change the title, and the content so that they include the term “organic peanut butter”, then we scrap all of the paid search advertising that wasn’t working and focus on targeting our “organic peanut butter” market. The point is, successful search engine marketing relies on constant research and updates the internet is fluid and evolving. What works today might not work tomorrow, we have to be able to identify strengths and weaknesses in our internet marketing campaigns and must be prepared to research, update and adapt.

4. Designing First, Optimizing Later

I have seen this mistake repeated hundreds of times. Even experienced web designers fail to consider the results of design decisions on search optimization until it’s too late. What is the point of spending thousands of dollars for a well “designed” web site if nobody ever sees it? Consult a search engine specialist early in the design process. Even if your web site marketing strategy relies heavily on paid search advertising a consultation with a professional optimization expert may expose flaws in your site’s layout. Points in the flow of information that tend to cause users to lose interest or become confused may become apparent, better to address these issues early on.

5. Relying Too Heavily On Paid Search Advertising

This is a mistake made by Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike. The fact is that most businesses, small and large aren’t getting it right.

The rationale is that since search advertising can be purchased it isn’t necessary to focus on search optimization techniques. On the surface this might make some sense, you can buy certain keyword phrases that people are searching for, so why bother optimizing your site for the search engines? For a company with a huge internet advertising budget this means spending huge amounts of money to drive traffic to their sites, when, if their site had been properly optimized from the beginning, these costs might be half as much for the same amount of viewers. For many smaller businesses trying to compete in the internet marketplace simply becomes overwhelming. While paid search advertising is a highly effective means of targeting an audience, organic search optimization greatly increases the chances of success for any web site. Make sure that the site you are advertising is one that people can find easily without the assistance of a paid search campaign.

6. Not Supporting the Conversion Process

A few weeks ago my wife decided that she wanted to buy some Australian made baby clothes that we can’t find here in the states. So being the internet savvy father to be, I decided to have a look on the internet for the particular brand she was interested in. I surf to a search engine and type in the brand name. A few seconds later I’m greeted with a list of web sites that supposedly have what I’m looking for. I click on the first site in the list. I find myself at the site of a clothing importer based out of California. There are links to several categories of clothing, none of which seem to have anything to do with babies, eventually after a lot of searching I find a link on the children’s clothing page for infant garments. The infant garments page has a few images of clothing but not the brand I’m looking for. I look to see if there is way to search for clothing by brand name. There isn’t. I look to see if there is a list somewhere on the site of brand names carried by this distributor. There isn’t. I look to see if there is a toll free number to call. There isn’t. The internet optimization part of my brain is boiling by this point, so to add insult to injury I go back to the children’s garments section of the site. I click on a link to purchase a bright green jacket. I’m confronted with a page that is requiring me to fill in a bunch of personal details. Ok, so I fill in the details and click submit. Now I find myself back at the bright green jacket page. Apparently now I’m qualified to purchase something. I click the “check out” button. The web page goes blank. I know that this is the result of bad programming. I know what’s going to happen next. “Error 404 page not found”. Has this type of thing happened to you? If you have ever tried to purchase something on the internet, I’m sure it has. This is an illustration of a web site that is well ranked in the search engines but has not taken the time to create a site that is designed for its users. I was forced to hunt through the web site to try and find what I was looking for. The flow of information was counter-intuitive. There was no online support. All-in-all the whole site was a joke. I would be surprised to learn that the site in question made any sales at all, ever. There were several points in this online experience that I felt like giving up. In the industry this is known as ”abandonment”, This is a critical point in what is known as the “conversion process”, the act of turning web site viewers into online purchasers. This is an issue that should never be underestimated. In fact it is the number one factor that determines a web site’s success or failure. A web site with a million dollar marketing budget and millions of visitors will not succeed unless it serves to understand its user’s needs and anticipate its viewer’s questions.

7. Graphics Used For Text Links.

Web designers often use graphics to represent a link in a web site. There are many reasons for this choice. Unfortunately for web designers, the major internet browsers display web pages in different ways. Since fonts display differently on individual computers and in different browsers, it is a much simpler proposition for designers to create graphic links than it is to attempt to create cross-browser text links. The downside to this work-around is that search engines have no idea if a graphic link relates to a specific web page or a link to download the latest Britney Spears MP3. For search engines to understand what a link is truly representing, they need to find words in plain, good old fashioned text. If a web site must use graphics for navigation it is important to include a set of plain text links somewhere on the web page, usually at the bottom of the page.

8. Use of Frames.

Search engines have a hard time indexing sites that are created in frames. Framed sites use several html files to display one page. Search engines are often confused by the frames method of creating web sites, usually only indexing the first html file within the framPages that aren’t indexed will never show up in search engine results. Also, many people that use the internet regularly for research and purchases, so called “power users”, tend to avoid sites built with frames, especially those sites which require the user to scroll content in separate frames. Simply put, frames are bad.

9. Splash Pages.

Entry pages that instruct the user to “Enter”, usually decorated with a large graphic or a flash animation. The index page of a web site is the one that search engines read first. More often than not the only readable content on this type of page is a link that says, “skip intro” Splash pages lack indexable content, usually contain no links and often contain a “redirect” to the real home page. Search engines do not like redirects, they want the real thing. Avoid splash pages unless you aren’t serious about being found by search engines.

10. Submitting To 10,000 Search Engines

I sometimes have a difficult time believing that these services are still making money, more importantly that people still think that they work. The fact is that a handful of search engines account for about 90% of all the web traffic generated and the rest comes from people typing in a web site’s URL indirectly into their browser’s address bar. The amount of viewers generated from these Mega-Search Submittal services is so negligible that it’s hardly worth consideration. Don’t waste your time or your money.

11. Not Clearly Defining Action Points

Another mistake that is repeated quite is often is the failure to clearly define what the objectives of a web site are. What are the main goals of a site? Who will the primary audience be? What actions are desired of the site’s visitors? If these questions aren’t answered prior to designing a site they will reflect a poor user experience in the final result. Action points or calls to action are a terminology handed down from the traditional marketing world. They serve to define a desired action and are often supported by persuasive sales copy. Though the basic concepts are the same as traditional marketing, calls to action can take many different forms on the internet. Often they appear as links or as part of a shopping cart. The nature of a web site determines its type of action point. The most important thing to consider is that without them, viewers have little or no idea what the purpose of your site is. Imagine an infomercial running a half hour long advertisement on television, yet the commentator says nothing during the whole ad, just stands there holding a cardboard box, you are left trying to guess what’s inside, the advertisement offers no explanations or means of contacting the company involved. Pointless isn’t it? This is exactly what a web site without clearly defined points of action accomplishes; nothing. It’s an exercise in futility.

1 Comment »

Hostgator hosting is one of my favourite hosting company, and i been using hostgator since march 2007. Where i start to host this blog with hostgator.com. Using their service is full satisfaction and host gator server is very reliable and fast too. After months of using it, and months of intensive reviews, and also read through lost of user review. Now its time to review the hostgator affiliate program and hostgator referrals program.

Basically, hosting company uses affiliate program or referrals program as a marketing engines. Meaning, their users can sign up to the affiliate program, and start promoting . On each sales referred to hostgator, i mean success sales, the person who referring will get paid a certain amount of commission. If you refering 15 successful sales to hostgator, you will receiving $50 per sales. And this amount will increase up to $125 in sales commission.

Due to the nature that, hostgator hosting is offering hosting plan at monthly payment basis, and not forcing yearly contract. There will be quit some number of sales referred are lost, simply because they discontinue the following month etc. For this scenario, you won’t get paid. And for fraud prevention, each sales commission can be hold up to 60 days. Thes rules cut the sales success rate to even lower.

Fact is that, you would be thinking to use PPC network to refer sales to hostgator, for example yahoo marketing network or google adwords. Definately you need to think twice. Bidding for a keyword ‘hostgator’ would cost you $2 per click, and you will need to make a sales within 25 clicks. So that you commission can cover the cost. Even your ads are so well converting, and you made 20 sales this month, and cost you $1000 in ads. If the success rate after 60 days, is around 50%, which means you are making $1000 in sales commission, and just enough to cover the ads cost. This also means the 20 sales that you just got, is just enough to cover all the advertising cost, and left $0 in balance. You know math, you can recount what i just told you.

Well, don’t be so sad. Look at the bright side, if you are referring your clients or colleague or friends to signup, your success rate would be much better. And furthermore, it won’t cost you a dime in advertising cost. Right! So, sign up to hostgator today, and start referring friends as well.

No Comments Yet »

There are many ways for you to approach your internet marketing strategy. The benefits and long term online advertising advantages, if undertaken correctly, can be the single most effective advertising and marketing campaign hands down when compared to conventional advertising or marketing strategies. It is also a relatively even playing field, so even if you are small to medium business or company, you can still compete with national or international household names. You can search in Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine for companies or businesses offering internet marketing services.

You will be amazed at just how many online advertising agencies are out there offering different forms of online marketing or internet advertising ranging from banner advertising, through to pay per click and search engine optimisation seo for short), with or without link building, which is utilising reciprocal or one way links, commonly referred to as backward links to increase your natural search engine listings.

No Comments Yet »

Join the Forum HERE !