Posts Tagged ‘website content’

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Work On Your Web Content And Your Content Will Work For You

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Effective website content can generate targeted traffic, improve conversions, increase average sales value, and even increase customer retention levels.

It’s no secret that website content plays a pivotal role in generating traffic; virtually every marketing website and SEO newsletter extols the search ranking based benefit of keyword optimised content.

However, content that concentrates solely on keyword densities and extensive keyword lists is often benefit of character and may be doing more harm than good – you can generate as much website traffic as you like but if your content doesn’t effectively convert traffic into bottom line sales then your business will suffer.

You Can Improve Rankings With Good Quality Content

Website content CAN improve rankings, but improved search engine positions do not have to come at the expense of poor quality content.

Use your researched keywords but add inflexions as well as semantically, or topically, related keywords. Throw in a collection of Search Engine Presumed Synonyms (SEPS) and you have the ingredients to write high quality content that will perform in every way.

Convert Visitors To Customers

Writing good quality web page copy isn’t enough to ensure you get conversions. The copy needs to sell and it needs to sell to your target market.

If you don’t know or understand your target market then you should start researching and really get to know the people that will be visiting your website. Effective copy should also give visitors a reason to buy your products or pay for your services and to do so immediately.

Generate A Buzz

Word of mouth marketing has been one of the most effective forms of marketing for small businesses and service providers for generations.

Websites can benefit in a similar way but on a much grander scale. Offer something of genuine value that causes intrigue, answers a question, or offers credible and useful information. Not only will your visitors appreciate it and be more likely to trust what you say but they’ll also be inclined to tell others with similar interests. The end result could be the type of viral marketing you only dreamed of.

Enjoy Greater Average Sales Figures

If you’re adequately tracking your website’s performance then you should have a good knowledge of the average sales value your site generates. The greater the average figure, the more you can afford to spend on design, development, marketing, and other website and business improvements.

Your return on investment will be greatly improved if you can provide content that persuades visitors that they need to buy a handful of products rather than one. As well as offering discounts or offers such as free shipping for orders over a certain value, directed content can help towards this end.

Gain Greater Customer Retention Rates

The most successful businesses are those that retain their customer base. This is true whether you’re selling products or services, whether you’re promoting your own products or those of an affiliate program.

A returning customer costs you less in marketing, improves your website ROI, and increases your sales figure. What’s more, a returning customer that’s happy will already be sold on the service that you offer; they will trust you and believe your word.

Offer useful and insightful tips and articles on how to get the most from your products or services and always provide a high level of after sales customer service to enjoy the best possible customer retention rates.

Author: Matt Jackson>

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Posted in Site Promotion, Website Development | No Comments »

Website Templates Tips And Tricks

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

by John Dow

Web templates can save you time and money. If you want to get a jump start on your website design, there’s no fast way to get up and running quickly. Even experienced web designers use some kind of homemade web template to put the required web pages and layout in place.

If you are starting from scratch on your design, reviewing different colors, layouts, and navigation methods of several different web templates can give you some good ideas. You make like the colors from one, the layout from another, and some graphics from somewhere else.

When choosing any website templates, look and feel are important, but the technical aspects can impact both the user and search engine features. You often have to look behind most web templates designs to make sure that proper techniques for the user experience and ease of search engine review are also in place.

You only have 3-6 seconds to grab the visitor’s attention, so you better use every feature at your disposal. Lets start with the visitor’s possible reasons for sticking around and reading your message. Here are a few methods that will help you get the visitors attention and convince them to keep reading. These methods should be incorporated into any web template.

Give the visitor instant gratification on subject matter. The area above the fold (top 5 or 8 inches) is prime real estate and you need to have a powerful headline that reinforces the reason they came to your website. Applicable graphics (photos, illustrations, etc.) can help but the written word usually rules in grabbing attention.

Show them the information they want by using meaningful anchor text in menus. Demonstrate at first glance that you have additional information or easy to understand links that revolve around the subject matter with easy navigation. Fancy pull down menus don’t cut it for making any visual impact.

Don’t waste important real estate with a huge graphic that takes up half of the area above the fold. Many website templates waste valuable space with some large graphic. If you look at some of the most popular websites you see that none of them waste that first 6-8 inches of space with huge graphics. Look at Yahoo, Google, MSN, eBay, and others and you’ll see what I mean.

On the technical and search engine side, there are several methods that directly effect your ability to get high index rankings under your keywords or phrases. Although the search engines look at structure and content, they also need your help. You should always make sure that the search engine bots can easily navigate and interpret what your website content is all about.

OK, lets say you did your homework and have decided on the best keywords and phrases for your subject matter. Remember our headline form the above visitor attention example, make sure you include your keyword or phrase and code it with html H1 tag. That tells the search engines you think that is important.

On the graphics you use, especially the first visible one, use the alt text feature to name it using your keyword or phrase. It doesn’t really matter what the graphic is, although you should stick to ones that are related to subject matter anyway, but use the same keywords from the headline.

Create your title and description mega tag so that you use the same keywords that are in the headline, alt text, and best represent your subject matter. Many say that you should start the description and name with the keyword is the best way. Not sure it has to be the first word but it can’t hurt. Make sure that the description makes since to the possible audience too since that’s what they see when doing a search.

Many web templates come with one set of meta tags that are the same for each page. Something to always remember about any web page in your web templates or finished website, each web page should be unique to itself. Always make sure that the meta tags reflect the individual web page, don’t use one set for all web pages. Search engines rank web pages, not websites.

It’s always a good idea to customize any web templates to your particular subject matter, color preference, and layout. You don’t want to look like a twin to someone else’s website to users or search engines. Whenever you start your design, always remember that you are serving two masters. Both the visitors and the search engine bots need to be facilitated for good results.

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Posted in Website Design, Website Development | No Comments »

The truth about duplicate content and Google

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

by Brad Callen

So a concern of many webmasters out there is the idea of duplicate content. With all you read out there today I am sure this has crossed your mind from time to time as it has mine.

The idea of Google being the 800-lb gorilla is a long standing one and thinking that maybe some how and some way they have the ability to screen the internet for duplicate content on the fly sounds CRAZY but we always perpetuate the idea as paranoia is much easier to believe than fact in many cases.

I mean think about this for a second just in terms of computing power:

1. Google shows a cached version of your website and not the actual site listing in its results. This means that Google ACTUALLY STORES information about your sites pages and updates them on the fly.

2. Google’s index likely contains BILLIONS of webpages.

So what this means is that for Google to determine if your site is an exact copy of another persons website than it has to store your pages content and screen that content against its ENTIRE active index…sounds nearly impossible as far as I am concerned. To boot you have to consider this is happening simultaneous to the active crawling and indexing and re-indexing of new pages in Google.

I hope this is putting a little bit of perspective to the situation for you. Let’s further the concept. I will take an article from Ezinearticles.com:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Cocoa-Beans-and-the-Fierce-Competition-in-the-Chocolate-Industry&id=1674880

Now let’s make the assumption that there is a duplicate content filter. If that is the case Google will eliminate all duplications of this article from its index and a phrase match for this article title will only return 1 result, the one it considers to be the best right?

http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US304&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=”Cocoa+Beans+and+the+Fierce+Competition+in+the+Chocolate+Industry”

Yet somehow there are 162 results for that title. You can do this for every article title you test. Try it for yourself…it works and it is still the basis for article marketing and why article marketing still works.

Now this comes on the heels of an interesting article from Google which should further dispel any remaining myths you may have:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

As SEO experts have been telling us for years there is NO DUPLICATE CONTENT PENALTY!

Ok….that is a little bit of a lie.

There are 2 types of duplicate content: external and internal duplicate content. Let’s take the first of the two.

1. External duplicate content.

External duplicate content is very similar to the example I just posted above where you see multiple copies of the same content on DIFFERENT WEBSITES. That last part is very important there as it seperates what could be considered as a penalty but in reality it is just competition.

So how is it that 162 sites can list the exact same article in Google and they allow it?

The quick answer is that they really don’t care. Yeah it may be mudding up the index but if a site or page is still showing in the index it is because they have enough authority or link clout to be there. Pages will be removed from the index if they get stale or have no links pointing to them for example but not for duplicating content.

The real issue becomes how can you soar to the top with a site that has repurposed content? I am inclined to say its not easy and more importantly its just not a good idea. If you are using content to build your website AND to promote it be sure to do this:

1. Your sites content is unique to your website

2. Your promotional content (PR’s, articles, etc…) belong outside of your website

This makes your life a lot easier. IT IS NOT FOR DUPLICATE CONTENT THOUGH. It’s to avoid competition with those with the same content. If you must republish content from another website make sure you add some commentary or additional content around it. This can include images or other variations of media and your doing this for your visitors sake. You need to stand out, not repeat what others are doing.

Bottom line, with external content the site with the most links and authority in Google will always win. Same as with keyword competition.

2. Internal Duplicate Content.

Ok this is as real as it gets but for the same reason. Its a web filter to keep you from competing for yourself but its a lot simpler to handle than you think.

This is important for the following individuals:

a. If your running a CMS out of the box

b. If you are running an eCommerce platform

c. If you are pulling pages and having them autogenerated

These are just a few examples of people who have had issues with internal duplication.

When Google does index your pages it will look at your title tags and meta descriptions and one of the evaluating factors it uses to determine to actually list your pages are the uniqueness of those tags. If my shopping cart system has 10 products which are all “shoes” and that is what I use as my page title for all of them and the meta description for all of them is “tennis shoes” Google will look at all 10 and simply choose the best 1 to list.

This is a big and easy fix and something I would advise for both usability and for regular old good SEO.

Every page NEEDS a unique title tag

Every page SHOULD HAVE a unique description
(or at the vesy least enough unique content to differentiate it from the others pages on your site)

So rest easy. There is NOT a duplicate content penalty from Google. If you site is not ranking I can assure you its because of the lack of links targeting your core keywords so go out and start link building!

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Posted in Google SEO & PageRank, SEO, Site Promotion, Website Design, Website Development | No Comments »

Some Steps to Increase Your Website Traffic With Rss Feeds

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Follow along and learn the simple secrets to increase website traffic with a few clicks of your mouse. RSS stands for “really simple syndication” and it serves as a tool to keep visitors updated to a websites changes without the person having to go back to the website.

Generating Your RSS Feed

If you have a wordpress blog (the most common blogging platform) then you already have an RSS feed built in to your blog. You can find your feed at your domain.

If you have another type of blog check the user guide of your blogging platform to find out where your RSS feed is located or how to generate one. For more details visit to www.inside-the-minds-of-winner.com .Unfortunately most internet marketers don’t know the first thing about using their RSS feed to increase website traffic. There are some very simple steps that you can take to dynamically increase your traffic absolutely free with your RSS feed.

The first thing that you should consider doing is setting up a Feedburner account so that they can manage your feed. Feedburner is a free service that gives some basic traffic stats, keeps track of how many people have subscribed to your RSS feed and best of all makes it really easy for visitors to subscribe to your feed.

After you have setup Feedburner to manage your feed they will give you a URL for your feed. Take that URL and put it on every page of your blog so that anytime someone clicks on the link they will have the option to subscribe to your feed.

Two More Steps and You’re Done

Once your feed is setup and the URL is on every page of your blog the only thing left to do is to submit your feed to some feed directories. For more information logon to www.ultimate-internet-marketing-tricks.com .A feed directory is a site that lists several feeds from all over the web on one website. Feed directories can not only bring in tons of new visitors to your website but they also provide good backlinks to your website. Backlinks are needed for any website to rank well in the search engines.

There are two feed directories that stand head and shoulders above the rest in the online world. Often time’s just submitting links from these two directories can rocket your site to the top of the engines which will obviously help you to increase website traffic.

The first of these two is Feedage. Feedage requires you to setup a free account but once you do you can submit as many feeds to them as you want. It’s very simple and only takes a few minutes to setup a free account and submit your feed.

The second directory is Feedagg and they don’t even require you to setup an account. You simply click on the “add feed” link and input your information. It’s really that easy.

That’s all there is to making the most of your RSS feeds to bring in extra free website traffic to your website. Follow the simple steps laid out and watch your traffic numbers steadily increase.

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Posted in Blogging, RSS, Website Development | No Comments »

Seven Tips for Effective Blogging

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Tip #1: Write about what you know

Visitors to your blog are only interested in your blog if your blog has interesting content. Do you stay intrigued in a website if the content is boring? And what better way to make content more exciting than to add content about a topic you know? If you know a lot about motorcycles, start a block about it. Topics can include changing the carburetor or redoing the chrome on the headlights. If the topic is something you know, you’re writing will flow more naturally and hence read more naturally to visitors. 

Tip #2 – Stay on topic

Using the motorcycles, your blog should not stray from motorcycle related issues. Do not start talking about the latest real estate news or golf carts. Talk strictly about motorcycle topics. Google AdSense parses the keywords in your blog and uses those keywords to place ads on your blog that are relevant to the content.  

Tip #3: Quantity over quality?

This may seem counterintuitive. You want visitors to be interested in your site because the content is great. So quality is important, right? But, in order to get visitors, the quantity of content should be large meaning more keywords detected by search engines, which translates to higher spots in search results, right? Well, yes, they are both right. The ideal situation is a lot of high quality content. 

Tip #4: Recycle

No news is good news. No news really means anything new to post on your blog. You do not necessarily need to keep posting new content. That is the perfect circumstance, but there is also a lot of information available on almost every topic ever written on the Internet. Taking that content, rewording it and posting it on your blog is recycling. 

Tip #5: Post on a regular schedule.

Our posts have a schedule written on them, usually an “updated every week” bulletin. And guess what? We stick to it. There may not always be new content for such a posting schedule, so you can use the recycling idea. While a weekly schedule is hard to keep (everyone has a family), for more detail visit www.atoz-about-rss.com when you stick to a schedule, visitors can really on updated blog content, and they will return more frequently to your blog, increasing the likelihood of an AdSense click.

Tip #6: Be clear and simple

If talking about motorcycles, using motorcycle jargon is okay. Make your content understandable. Use easy to understand words, for more detail visit www.your-own-blog.com and make the format user friendly. You are talking to a large and varied audience, and it should not require an advanced engineering degree from MIT to read a blog.

Tip #7: Keywords, keywords, keywords

Google parses through the blog’s content to not only find relevant ads to put on the blog but also to rank the blog in its search results. Google will see the density of those keywords and associate your blog with motorcycle repair sites and include the blog with other motorcycle repair sites or blog when returning search results. This will drive traffic to your blog.

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Posted in Blogging, Website Development | No Comments »

Good Website Content

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

Reading a website is not similar to reading a book or a newspaper, therefore before you start spilling money on campaigns be sure your site is built in accordance with internet writing standards. Let’s talk about few simple rules you don’t want to break when building a website.

 

Make a clear statement.If the visitor does not understands what is your website about, most chances he won’t be there for a long time. The main issue of creating a good content is to be sharp and clear about your goal.

Don’t waste your visitor’s time. Time is money. Most people decide whether they are interested in what the website has to offer in just two seconds. Therefore make sure your landing page provides the most crucial and appealing information about your business. 

Number one time waster is a heavy loading page with lots of flash animations and pictures. Make sure your web pages are not too heavy otherwise you might lose your visitors before they entered your website.

Most of the visitors need to find what they are looking for fast; otherwise they look for it elsewhere. As a webmaster you must make sure your data is well categorizes and divided to relevant pages, categories, headlines and sub-titles. A visitor must be able to navigate your website easily and successfully. 

Avoid too much “Special affects”. By this I mean don’t include too much flash movies and avoid using music if you don’t have to. As we mentioned earlier, Flash has a large loading time which damages viewer experience, besides too much flash may be annoying and search engines can’t read it.

Music is a great thing, but somehow music and websites do not fit too well. If you want to put some background tune anyway, make sure a user can silence it quickly and easily. Or in contrary , let the user click “Play” and begin the music when he decides. 

Pop-ups and new pages. If you have links in your site, I strongly advise you not to use the pop-up option and not to open these links in new window. Seemingly pop-ups and new windows are a very good idea if we don’t want the visitor to navigate from our website but many years of experience shows that users prefer to click “Back” buttons. As to pop-ups, most of browsers tend to block them, and you don’t want to waste your viewer time on enabling pop-ups.

Use standard fonts which are supported by all browsers, like Arial and Times New Roman. You don’t want your viewers to get gibberish and go away from your website. Don’t use very small or very large fonts. You don’t want your pages to smear for miles and you don’t want to scare away people with poor vision.

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Posted in Website Development | 1 Comment »

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