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Web Sites – What Do You Need To Do And More Importantly Not Do?

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Article Overview: You’ve finally decided to get yourself a web site, you’ve got some products ready and you are all set to go. So here are some "rules" for a good site.

Web Sites – What Do You Need To Do And More Importantly Not Do?

You’ve finally decided to get yourself a web site, you’ve got some products ready and you are all set to go. So here are some "rules" for a good site.

1) Decide on the subject of your web site, make a single subject and ensure that it is very clear to your visitors.
2) Have a constant theme, color scheme, fonts etc.
3) Make the site easy on the eye and don’t use moving and uncomfortable to view graphics.
4) Make it easy to navigate. - use a logical navigation system, including "home" button. Navigation is usually found at the top or left hand side. Links to minor pages are usually found at the bottom of the page.
5) Include such standard pages such as "about us", "contact us", "legal", "terms and conditions", "privacy", "links"
6) Keep your pages to about 1 screen depth – people rarely like to keep scrolling down.
7) Make your graphics of good quality and quick to load.
8) If you wish to sell from the site - use a recognizable and trusted payment processor.
9) Make it easy for people to purchase from you by using a clear payment path and reassuring instructions.
9) Web logs and visitor buttons should be invisible to the viewer. Counters on the front page are for show offs and amateurs.
10) Keep advertising to a minimum and appropriate to the web site.
11) Have interesting and changing information
13) SEO your site
14) Market your site intelligently
15) Lastly have fun with your site.

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Article Tags: amateurs, button navigation, color scheme, front page, home button, left hand side, legal terms, logical navigation, navigation system, payment processor, show offs, view graphics, web logs



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Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategy - Sites don't become leaders in their field because of advanced SEO tactics, hey become leaders because they serve their audience the best. A great product (i.e a great site) is a very powerful marketing tool and makes all your other marketing efforts a lot more effective.
Re: To Recruit the Best - [quote="ideasuniversity":11silpgi]I don't recruit anymore,since i discovered outsourcing.[/quote:11silpgi] Haha, it's true. Good point Yinka. Outsourcing can solve your low-level problems, however, what about top management, vision, and leadership? Sites like elance.com can hardly help you there. Cheers, Ringo.
Re: How can I promote my site? - There are various useful techniques for promoting a website. In SEO the techniques could be "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. White hat techniques includes following techniques to promote website as per the search engine rules. - Search Engine Friendly Tags - Website submission to Search Engines - Website Submission to Social Sites (Like twitter, Facebook) - Articles Promotion & Press Release Promotion - Quality Directories promotion - Contribution to Blogs, Forums Black hat techniques can reduce website strength in the search engine and can treat site as spam that could be following. - Keywords Stuffing. - Hidden Links - Maximum Links of unknown sites.
Advantages with Social Media Sites - I just want to share my article about social media sites. Local Google Traffic - Social Media Sites There are other important ways to connect with your customers beyond Google Places, however. Some we already mentioned – other Google properties – which we will cover in more detail shortly. But first, let’s look at a relatively new way to reach your customers to promote your mortgage brokers marketing business – social media. One of the fastest growing segments of the internet over the last few years is what's known as Social Media. Facebook and Twitter are the two most well-known examples of social media sites that are gaining popularity these days as worthy means to promote online businesses. Having a Facebook page is becoming more and more important and now can function as a marketing tool for mortgage broker, because people have come to expect it. There are over 600 million users on Facebook, and if you don't have a presence there you're missing out on a lot of potential business. Plus, for many people Facebook has become synonymous with the internet. A lot of people spend most of their time online using Facebook, so if you aren't reaching them there, you may not have a chance to reach them at all. Facebook started out as a way to connect on a personal level, but over the last couple of years they have added a lot of features that are targeted at businesses. You’ve probably already started to notice a lot of big companies adding “Find us on Facebook” to their websites, advertising and other places. It can work just as well for local businesses; in fact it can work even better. Because Facebook is by nature a place to be “social” a local business fits in much better than a big, faceless corporation. Setting up a Facebook Page for your business gives you a way to connect with your customers “virtually” and it can help to create a real sense of community particularly in marketing your mortgage business. Twitter is another social media site where you should definitely have a presence. It’s a little different beast, because the whole point is to post short updates (up to 140 characters at a time) so you can only share so much information. It can be useful for sending out messages about special offers and other news, but more importantly it’s another way for your customers and potential customers to contact you. Your customers can send you messages, called “Tweets”, via Twitter so it is similar to email in some ways. But because the messages are so short, it can be an effective way for them to ask quick questions or give you quick feedback, without having to invest a lot of time to do it. Aside from reaching potential customers, there's another reason you should have a presence in these places - managing your brand. People will talk about their experiences with your company on the internet whether you're part of it or not. It's important that you are aware and updated.
Re: A Tip to Increase Traffic - I do believe that Link Referral is also a powerful way to increase your traffic, however, here are some tips that I have came across with the other day from Webblogs: Write Well and Write Often Frequently updating your blog with useful content is the first step to building your blog's audience. The content you write is what will keep readers coming back for more. Make sure you have something meaningful to say to them and say it often to maintain their interest and keep them loyal. Furthermore, post frequently to increase the number of chances you have for your blog's content to be noticed by search engines such as Google or Technorati. 2. Submit Your Blog to Search Engines Get on the radar screen for the popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo! by submitting your blog's URL to them. Most search engines provide a 'Submit' link (or something similar) to notify the search engine of your new blog, so those search engines will crawl it and include your pages in their results. It's important to understand that simply submitting your blog to search engines doesn't mean your pages will appear at the top of a Google search results screen, but at least your blog will be included and will have the chance of being picked up by a search engine. 3. Use and Update Your Blogroll By adding links to sites you like in your blogroll, the owners of those blogs will find your blog and will be likely to add a reciprocal link in their blogrolls. It's an easy way to get the link to your blog in front of many readers on other blogs. The hope is that some of those readers will click on the link to your blog on the other blogs' blogrolls and find your content interesting and enjoyable turning them into loyal readers. 4. Harness the Power of Comments Commenting is a simple and essential tool to increase your blog's traffic. First, respond to comments left on your blog to show your readers that you value their opinions and draw them into a two-way conversation. This will increase reader loyalty. Second, leave comments on other blogs to drive new traffic. Make sure you leave your blog's URL in your comment, so you create a link back to your own blog. Many people will read the comments left on a blog post. If they read a particularly interesting comment, they are highly likely to click on the link to visit the commentor's website. It's important to make sure you leave meaningful comments that are likely to invite people to click on your link to read more. 5. Syndicate Your Blog's Content with an RSS Feed Setting up an RSS feed button on your blog makes it easy for your loyal readers to not just read your blog but also know when you publish new content. 6. Use Links and Trackbacks Links are one of the most powerful parts of your blog. Not only are links noticed by search engines, but they also act as a tap on the shoulder to other bloggers who can easily identify who is linking to their sites. Linking helps to get you noticed by other bloggers who are likely to investigate the sites that are linking to them. This may lead them to become new readers of your blog or to add links to your blog from theirs. You can take links to other blogs a step further by leaving a trackback on the other blog to let them know you've linked to them. Blogs that allow trackbacks will include a link back to your blog in the comments section of the post that you originally linked to. People do click on trackback links! 7. Tag Your Posts It takes a few extra seconds to add tags to each of your blog posts, but it's worth the time in terms of the additional traffic tags can drive to your blog. Tags (like links) are easily noticed by search engines. They're also key to helping readers find your blog when they perform searches on popular blog search engines such as Technorati. 8. Submit Your Posts to Social Bookmarking Sites Taking the time to submit your best posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and more can be a simple way to quickly boost traffic to your blog. 9. Remember Search Engine Optimization When you write your blog posts and pages, remember to optimize your pages for search engines to find them. Include relevant keywords and links but don't overload your posts with too many relevant keywords or completely irrelevant keywords. Doing so can be considered spamming and could have negative results such as your blog being removed from Google's search entirely. 10. Don't Forget Images Images don't just make your blog look pretty, they also help people find you in search engine listings. People often use the image search options offered by Google, Yahoo! and other search engines, and naming your images with search engine optimization in mind can easily boost your traffic.


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