Author : Karen ScharfI get tons of questions on how to improve Google and other search engine rankings Here are the three easiest things you can do today:

1 Improve Your Page Title Tags
One of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your search engine rankings is to create unique, keyword rich title tags for each of your pages

Be sure your keyword is as close to the beginning of the tag as possible Here’s a little trick that I like to use:

Let’s say your keyword is “dog grooming” and your web page article is “7 Tips for Grooming Your Dog on a Rainy Day” Rather than using “7 Tips For Grooming ” as your page title, move your keyword to the front So your new page title would be “Dog Grooming: 7 Tips For Rainy Day Grooming” or something similar

Now please note that when I’m referring to your page Title tag, I’m not talking about your page headline (we’ll discuss that next) Your title tag is what appears in your web page header You’ll find it in the (title)BLAH BLAH BLAH(/title) section at the top of your HTML code

This text is not actually visible anywhere on the actual web page, so it’s easy to miss this step Whatever you place in this tag is what will appear in the title bar of your web browser

If you’re creating your page with a WYSIWYG editor, like Dreamweaver, FrontPage or Expression Web, your title tag is often created automatically, which means every page could end up with the same tag Fortunately, it’s an easy fix

If you’re using Dreamweaver, look for a field with the title toward the top of your page Then simply enter a unique title in that field

If you’re using a straight HTML editor, just replace the text that appears between the (title) and the (/title) tags Remember, put your keywords as close to the beginning as possible

If you’re using Wordpress as your content management system, chances are your title tags will be created automatically based on the headline of the article

Many wordpress templates come pre-configured to add the website name at the beginning of the title tag That’s very much a waste of space and it’s doing nothing for your search engine rankings (except maybe hurting them!)

Unfortunately, unless you’re familiar with php coding, you probably don’t want to tackle the job of fixing this Simply ask your webmaster to adjust your template so your article title appears first in your title tag

2 Optimize Your Headline Tags
The next (and probably the easiest) step you can take to improve your search engine rankings is to optimize your Headline Tags

First thing you want to do is make sure each page has only one h1 tag! Many new webmasters don’t understand that the headline tag actually serves a purpose other than simple formatting So they use lots and lots of h1 tags throughout their web pages because they like the big, bold text

Unfortunately, this technique is a killer on search engine rankings Google looks for the h1 tag to decide the main topic of the page Unfortunately, when it sees multiple h1 tags, chances are, it will discount them all

If you’re using Wordpress as your content management system, make sure your template is configured so that the article title will be placed inside h1 tags (Again, you’ll probably want to check with your webmaster on this )

Then, do not use the h1 tag as you’re creating posts and pages since your h1 tag will be created automatically

The next thing you want to keep in mind with your h1 tag is to place your keyword as close to the beginning as possible, just like you did for your title tag As the search engine spiders crawl your page, words that appear close to the beginning of the tags receive higher precedence

Now that you have only one, keyword rich h1 tag, you want to do the same with your h2 and h3 tags Make sure you have only one of each and that your keywords appear close to the beginning

As of now, it doesn’t appear that Google is placing much relevance on h4 or h5 tags, but you never know when or if that might change Also, if you’ve been using your h tags for text formatting, try using p tags with CSS styling instead

3 Take Advantage of Latent Semantic Indexing
According to search engine expert Mike Grehan:

“Using statistical analysis, LSI can discover that documents have words which are often used in the same context For example, “apple” and “computer” will also have “Mac OS” and are therefore also relevant The same thing applies with “windows” as an operating system as opposed to an invention for looking through walls

It’s all about trying to understand more about the nature and intent of the user query and returning information in context with the user’s search, even when they give little clue as to the actual nature of the search Incidentally, LSI is used by other search engines besides Google ”

In other words, the search engines are smart enough to analyze your web copy to determine if your page really is about what your keywords claim it’s about

So, if your title tag, meta keywords, h1 and h2 tags all refer to “dog grooming” but the rest of your web page is actually a pornography page, the search engines will know this and will not rank your page for dog grooming

The way to take advantage of latent semantic indexing is to include other related keywords in your text as naturally as possible You don’t want to force the insertion of these complementary keywords; it’s important that your text flows easily and naturally and sounds like it’s written for humans, not search engines Karen Scharf is an Indianapolis marketing consultant who works with small business owners and entrepreneurs. She offers several whitepapers, free reports and checklists, including her FREE Can-Spam checklist and FREE email pre-flight checklist to ensure your emails get delivered, get opened and get read. Download your copies at http://www.ModernImage.com.

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Author : Corinne BridgewaterHaving a professional looking web design to your website is important When you are doing business online, the people that you want to come to your site, cannot physically see walls and shelves and products So instead they do see the design of your website You website then becomes the hub of your business life online And as it is true in the real world it is true online People judge a book by hits cover

It is important to show your visitors that you are professional and care about the quality of your design, i e your business In a real store on some street you would not let your sales people run around in cut offs and t-shirts with holes in them, would
you? No, of course you would not; you would want to show that you were professional and dressed for business First impressions are vital in all aspects of our life, business life included

It is the same online If you throw up a five minute shabbily done website, you are literally telling everyone that comes, that you are not a professional and that you do not really care about quality

Now if on the other side, you have a wonderfully done professional looking website with great web design, you are telling your visitors that you cared enough to do it right and that you think details are important You show a great sense of professionalism and that you are going to be around to do business

Good Web Design Practices

You website is where you customers will go to purchase something from you Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion

Reduce the number of images on your website They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary If you think any image is
essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size

Keep the text on your website in readable chunks If the paragraphs are too long, then shorten them or make two paragraphs, as people are more likely to read it Use bullets to point out important concepts

Make sure your website is cross-browser compatible If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors

Rules to make sure your website performs well:

Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website They normally have very beautiful pictures with welcoming words or enter website here They are empty and worthless as they really have no purpose Do not give your visitors any reason to click the leave or back button!Give them the immediate value of your site upfront

Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Too many banners and people do not see them So it is a waste of your website space Instead provide more valuable content and use affiliate links or adsense and let your customers want to buy something from you

Have a simple and clear navigation

This is a critical step You should have a well thought out simple way to navigate around on your site It should be easy enough for a child to use Do not have complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus If they can not find the buy button or are having a hard time going where they want to go on your site, they will leave Do not give them that chance

Avoid using audio on your site

Have you ever been to a site that has that annoying audio feed of the same 30 second speech over and over again? Well do not put one on your site Your customer while reading your site is not going to want to hear it If you just have to have audio, then give the option of closing it or turning the volume down by the customer I invite you to get your free Report
‘Quick Start Guide To Online Home-Based Profits’ by visiting my blog at http://www.corinnebridgewater.com/blog

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Author : Obinna HecheDefinitely, as good a web designer, you should be able to design your sites to give your web visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impressions needed and most important of all a great welcoming experience It actually does not matter if you had the greatest or the most needed product in the whole universe, if your website is poorly built you will not be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven away from your site by the poor and lousy design which is your own fault

For sure, am talking about a good design, I’m not only talking about a good graphical design but a professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components which constitute to a good website design Such are, accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most needed, which is graphic design All these components make up a good design

Now, i am going to point out some features of the worst web designs i have ever seen Maybe, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it is high time to take serious action and do some redesign

Be informed that, unless you are running a website which promotes a band or anything related to music, i strongly advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site Actually, it might sound pleasant and good to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of different pages and every time a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts to play again If i were to be your visitor, i will just turn off my PC speakers or leave your site entirely Well, maybe you don’t know, those things just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site Again, most users on a dial up connections will wait much longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed

As i said before, there is more to a good web design than purely graphics The ease of accessibility is one big part of it too Therefore, you should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes In fact, no matter how good the content of your site or your sales copy is, if it’s unreadable you will not be selling any stuff

The fact is that pop up windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that to me, 90% of those pop up windows are not worth my attention and therefore, i just close them on instinct every time each one manages to pass through my pop up blocker This type of advertisement is very annoying But then, imagine if you have a very important message to convey and you put it up in form of a pop up window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitors screen Your website loses its function immediately No visitor, no sales

Finally, let me quickly remind you that as a webmaster, your primary job is to make sure your site does what its meant to do effectively Do not let some minor mistakes or should call it over design, stop your site from functioning properly for better traffic and profits as well Obinna Heche: Los Angeles - California

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Author : Jason BacotFlash design is a great way to jazz up your site and to draw the attention of the visitor A well made flash site will ensure that a visitor remembers your site in the future, and will possibly refer to it again Examples of great flash sites are miniclip which has thousands of popular flash games, and is coded in flash itself

Flash design seems easy, what with umpteen tutorials on the internet but the truth is, a hastily made flash design can break your site There are a lot of factors you have to keep in mind before you are on your way to a good flash design I explain some of the following below:

1 Ensure scalability and compatibility with different screen resolutions In an age when bigger and better screens are released every week, you need to ensure that your flash design doesn’t get stretched on a bigger screen It should be able to resize itself according to a smaller or higher screen resolution than on what it was designed on Larger screens can cause distortion of the template and smaller screens can cause wrapping It makes life very difficult for the viewer as the content lands up in weird positions

2 Ensure compatibility with all browsers This aspect of flash design is very important if you want to come up with the best flash design Earlier, only Internet Explorer was prevalent in the market, but these days you have browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome competing for market space This results in people using different browsers accessing your site and if it doesn’t display uniformly on all of them, it will give a highly negative impression about the design

3 Make your site fast! Yes, this is really important No one likes to wait for hours for a site to load And I am not just talking of file sizes; there are a couple of other measures you can take to make your site load faster, especially for repeated visitors Firstly though, you must keep the file size small anyway Opt for a medium frame rate, nothing too high, and nothing so low as to seem like bad quality

Secondly, go for Server Side Include (SSI) files These are files stored in the machine cache so they are retrieved almost instantaneously when the person visits the site again Also, remove unwanted and repeated code to clean up the code and make it easier to read and execute

4 Make use of material on the internet It’s free, why not use it? You’ll find tutorials on basically each and every Flash design technique ever invented, and you can keep playing video’s again and again till you finally get it right The web is the best resource for designing and you can find hundreds of forums frequented by thousands of people who have the same bent of mind as you Not only will you find like minded people there, you’ll get answers to your problems from people who have faced such problems and have found solutions to them!There is no other better place to find the Flash Design you need for your website. Look no further.

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Author : seomul EvansIf you’re a small business owner, you probably can’t imagine running your business without a website And if you want to be a successful business owner, you need to have a really great website This means that before you do anything else, you need to determine your target audience, the website’s purpose, your budget, your design, your navigation, and your content

Just making all of this up as you go along will result in a mediocre website that doesn’t work effectively for you Follow these 8 keys as you create a great website that becomes the difference between success and failure for your business

1 Know Your Purpose Before you do anything else, you must determine the purpose of your website The purpose is the basis of everything else, including content, navigation, and design Is the purpose of your website to educate? To generate leads? To entertain? To make sales? If you neglect to define your purpose at the very beginning, then the rest of your effort is wasted

2 Know Your Budget Be clear about exactly what you can do with the budget you have and then make the most of exactly what you can afford

3 Know How to Design Pretty pictures are wonderful, but most search engines give preferential treatment to websites that go easy on graphics and focus instead on text Minimalism is the way to go when creating your website

4 Know Your Audience Who are you hoping to attract to your site? Take this information and design a website that will be attractive to that audience

5 Know How to Create Good Navigation If your website is difficult to navigate or is cluttered with irrelevant graphics and text, your visitors will leave as quickly as they arrived If your website doesn’t make sense to a visitor, if there are too many or too few links, or if it’s just too hard to get around your site, you will lost visitors right and left A great rule of thumb is that is shouldn’t take a visitor any more than three clicks to get anywhere on your website

6 Know Your Content Your website must contain a good deal of keyword-rich text in order to get high search engine rankings But your content mustn’t give the impression that you’ve been sitting in front of your computer all day trying to figure out how to cram in just a few more keywords It must still be relevant, clear, and well-written in order to appeal to the humans who visit your site

7 Know How to Build It Who’s going to build your website? Are you going to do it yourself or are you going to hire a professional to do it for you? Your budget will go a long way towards answering this question, but remember that you get what you pay for Find a happy medium between what you can afford and what you really need in a website

8 Know How to Market Believe it or not, people aren’t just going to show up at your website once it’s up In fact, your website should be just one part of your overall marketing strategy that includes print information about your company (be sure to include your web address on all of your print material), television ads, and radio spots If you’re not sure how to go about marketing your business, call upon the expertise of an internet marketing professional who can help you figure out where to go once your website is up and running

A well-designed, relevant website is key to a successful business, but unless you’ve put a lot of thought, energy, creativity into creating your website, you won’t see any results Follow these 8 keys as you prepare your website and you’ll see what an enormous difference a little planning can make Seomul Evans is a senior Search Engine Marketing Services specializing in Meta Search Engines and SEO marketing articles.

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