Important On Page SEO Strategies For Marketing Your Websites
The world of online marketing is very vast and sounds very interesting as well. An effective marketing strategy can give an amazing boost to your business. One major part of digital marketing is SEO. It is an acronym for Search engine optimization. This process enhances your website visibility in major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Better results give more visitors. All search engines like unique content which one beneficial for the users. We will give you some cutting-edge tips for mastering on page SEO mechanism.
Know Your Competitors
After you select your clone script, the next step is to find your competitors and analyze them to the core. Start your analysis from viewing the source of the website. It will give various details like meta description, meta keywords and meta title.
Some websites have their meta keywords hidden, do not worry about it. Visit all their pages and collect these details. Also, have a look at their designs, they way they make the users navigate have all this information handy.
Comfort Your Users With Friendly Web Designs
A clear and crisp web designs welcome the user everyday. Major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo always look forward for content and designs which adds user friendliness to the website. It is a fantastic strategy for SEO. Your designs should not affect the loading time of the website. The faster it loads the more the users love it. A good design allows the user to navigate the website easily.Attract Search Engine By Optimizing Keywords
All the searches in the search engines rely on keywords. This makes it very important to optimize the keywords. The first to do is to assume that you are a user and write down the keywords you would search to discover a website. This step will give you many keywords. Remember, we had asked you to make a proper competitor analysis and make a list of keywords used by them. Just compare your keywords with competitor keywords. Check all the keywords in Google keyword tool and filter the highest search keywords. You will get a set of keywords to target for your web page from the filtered list. Get cutting-edge results by using this trick Use the keyword stemming technique to focus on one keyword and get results from two. Target the plural form of the keyword and promote the same. Both singular and plural forms of the keyword will provide better results.Introduce Your Web Page Through Meta Data
Meta Title: Meta title represents the title of your web page. It is displayed in the title bar of the browser. Write the Meta title in such a way that it should make sense to the user and has the keywords that you are targeting. Google concentrates more on Meta title.
Meta Keywords: These are the important keywords that you are focusing to promote a web page. Search engines like Bing and Yahoo gives more importance to it. Add about 15 keywords which will help you in promoting the web page.
Meta Description: Describe the contents of your web page and summarize it for the user. Try adding the keywords focused on Meta title and Meta keywords. Limit the description to 160 characters.
Utilize the Power of Micro Data for Getting Better Search Results
Micro data is a collection of minute data, which provides more information about a web page. For example, if we are targeting to sell a product, micro data will collect details like product availability, price, review stars and displays it in search results. This technique provides lots of information to the users in the search page, thus it boost the search results. Schema dot org is a vocabulary of micro data. They offer you predefined HTML codes, which can be edited and updated. All these data are shown in the results of the search engine. This concept is known as rich snippets. Once the code is updated major search engines update the details in SERP.
Famous personalities like Bill Gates, Masan Cooley and Thomas Mann agree that the pen mightier than the sword. They consider “content as a king” so, does various search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo thinks about it.The search engines look for an original content meant for users and not for robots or machine or search engine crawlers. Follow the guidelines given below.Use simple English.
- Use simple English
- Keep it short and sweet
- Avoid duplicate content
- Use readable fonts
- Don’t stuff keywords in our content
- Maintain the keyword density within 2% – 5%
Use H1 Tag
Major search engines provide search results based the content of the web pages, so it is extremely important to maintain the web page structure. H1 tags can be used to provide a proper structure as well as promote readability. These tags are scanned by search engines and thus they have a higher impact on SEO strategies. Every web page should have content related H1 tags. It is wise to use keywords here, but it should naturally flow with the content and should not look like it is crafted for the search engines.Optimize your Images
Images can add value to your content, relate to the users and connect them to the content. So use images on your web page. Major search engines can’t read images so we have to use various mechanisms to let the search engines know that we are using content specific images.Add an Alternate Text
Search engines do not crawl the images, so add up an ALT text with the necessary keywords, so it is visible to the search engines in every instance and also attract traffic from various image based search engines.Give Appropriate File Name
When an image is added to your content it may have an inappropriate file name. Edit it and give a good file name which can describe the image and be useful for SEO. Use “-” while giving a file name.Link the Image Through Various Sources
If any web page has a relevant content to the image, then link it. This will promote the image and the alt text.Circulate Your Users using Rich Anchor Text/ Links
When a group of words is linked to a web page, it is known as Anchor text. These links should naturally flow with the content and have relevant web pages linked to them. These web pages can be internal or external. If your content is good and useful, you may also get back links from other websites. If it is used properly it will attract more traffic to the web page.For example
We are a professional development company, to know more about our services click hereCan be written as
We are a professional web development company and we offer various web development servicesAttract the Search Engine by Amazing URL Optimization
A URL is the most important aspect of SEO. If your URL is optimized in an SEO friendly way, it will help the search engine to locate your web page easily. Let’s see various forms of URL’s. Sometimes URL looks like this http://website.LD/1236561385464x, they are very unappealing to the user instead use a URL format like this http://website.tld/2013/post-name/. This URL makes it easy for the user to relate to the content.Navigate the Users and Search Engine Through Sitemap
Make a site, user and SEO friendly by adding a site map. It acts like an index of your website and list all the web pages. A user can freely navigate on the site and search engines can read the same. There are two major types of Sitemaps.
HTML Site Map: All the web pages in your website are listed on a page and they are linked as well. This lets the users know about the contents of the site and he can also navigate through them. This adds user-friendliness to your website.
XML Site Map: Some pages from your website might not be indexed by search engines. To make them list and provide the structure of the website it is advised to include a XML site map. This makes the search engines aware of all our web pages and they index them.
Command the Search Engines
You can decide which pages you want the search engine to crawl and avoid the rest by uploading a text file called as Robots.txt in your website root directory.Avoid Self Duplication by Using the Canonical URL tag
Major search engines read www.website.com and website.com separately. They both will have the same content. It considers one of them as a duplicate content. In order to avoid self duplication of content use a canonical tag.
Final Word
Just write content for your users without stuffing keywords and give provide them various opportunities to navigate your site. Also, focus on key mechanisms like Image optimization, URL optimization and keyword optimization and relate them with links.Allow the search engines to crawl the web pages you desire and use the power of meta-data and micro data to promote your website in a fantastic way.
Benefits of PHP
If you are wondering whether to choose PHP to develop your next website in and want to know what benefits PHP has over other languages, then this article is for you. I’ve compiled a list of reasons why PHP is so great and the benefits using PHP can bring. Most of them can be boiled down to a time / cost saving theme.
So here you have it, 15 unbeatable benefits of PHP…
Free – Like Totally Free
You can’t get a better price tag for the language. PHP is completely free to use, free to download, free to distribute. The actual language has zero upfront costs and zero ongoing costs
Royalty Free
PHP is a royalty free license. This means that you don’t have to pay anyone to use it and no one can demand a fee to use it later on. Infact, using the language has no direct costs at all.
Free From Restrictive Licenses
There are no restrictive licenses detailing what you can and can’t do with the language, anything goes, you can even fork the language yourself and create your own version of PHP. You can let others download it from your site, you can use it for personal or commercial purposes, it can be used in any country and for any application you want. That’s some serious flexibility when you compare it to proprietary languages like Java and ASP.NET!
Massively Reduces Your Server Bills
While PHP can run on your Windows based server, it’s mostly designed to run on Linux and Apache, which are both open source software which have zero upfront costs and zero ongoing costs – you even get future updates free of charge. This can cut your server maintenance bills to a fraction of what you might be paying for your Windows servers (which will include on going maintenance and upgrade costs).
Mature Code
PHP has been actively developed for over 15 years, which makes it the same age as many languages seen as ‘commercial’ like Java, ColdFusion and ASP.NET. Just like these other languages, PHP is a proven technology but without the costs.
Consistently Updated
The PHP language is kept up to date by a team of global experts who ensure that the language is always relevant to the requirements of todays websites. In 2009 alone there were 3 major updates to the language and there have been 2 major updates so far in 2010. If you choose to develop your next site using PHP you can sleep well knowing that you’re not going to be left with an abandoned language.
Works With A Number of Databases
While most people know that PHP can work with mySQL (another open source language which keeps your costs down), it can also work with a number of ‘enterprise’ databases like Oracle OCI8, MSSQL and IBM DB2 so even if you want to migrate just the programming language to PHP to reduce your costs, you don’t need to spend any more money transferring your database to another platform.
Very Easy To Learn
The basics of PHP are very easy to learn. Agriya can take a college fresher and with no prior experience in coding we can get them up to speed on client projects within 3 months. There are not many other languages that have that kind of pickup time!
Huge Amounts of Free Professional Integrated Developer Environments
An Integrated Developer Environment (or IDE for short) is a piece of desktop software that gives a developer all the tools they require to develop a project. An IDE can be anything that is as simple as Notepad all the way up to Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010. PHP has dozens of fantastic open source IDE’s to help make your job as a programmer much easier. Even if you are a business, this can benefit you because you don’t have to spend money on expensive software just to let your programmers do their work! This is also true if you outsource your development to a company like Agriya, we don’t have to spend money on IDE’s or keep spending money to upgrade to the latest version.
Runs On Over 90% of Web Servers
To be honest, we’d say that PHP runs on more than 99% of Web Servers since it works on just about every operating system available, but we like to err on the side of caution
Proven Technology
PHP is a 15 year old language built specifically for the Internet. It is a proven technology and used by the number one visited website in the world: Facebook. In the top 20 websites ranked by traffic, four websites use PHP. Other notable sites include Wikipedia, Yahoo, Digg, Flickr and WordPress. All of these are proof that PHP isn’t a language for the small business or for businesses looking to save money.
Thousands of Support Businesses
All around the world there are tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of web development companies who can provide support, training and maintenance for your PHP driven website. These companies are experts in PHP can help with all your support requirements. Agriya is one of these companies with over 200 PHP developers and 10 years of experience, many companies rely on Agriya to keep their websites up and functioning correctly.
Hundreds of Thousands of PHP Developers
Since PHP is so easy to learn there are hundreds of thousands of PHP Developers who can work with you to build, maintain and improve your PHP driven website. While you could hire a freelancer to help you on as and when required, many businesses choose to have a higher level of support by taking out a retainer contract with Agriya which guarantees a developer can work on any issue at a moments notice. If you choose PHP you know that you can get professional backup and support whenever you need it.
Huge Database of Ready Made, Royalty Free Classes
PHP is an open language and it inspires many other people to be just as generous with their time. There are now thousands of code snippets freely available on the Internet that help do certain functions or provide a more optimized way of doing things. With so much help, advice and code examples available for free (and even free for commercial use), even if a developer gets stuck, a quick Google search is likely to give dozens of solutions to a problem. Reusable code also makes for faster development – cutting your costs if you are outsourcing your web development to a company like Agriya.
Ready Made Frameworks
Keeping with the spirit of open source and free unrestricted distribution, there are many PHP frameworks available that take care of many of the regular functions like member management, admin back end, search function, content management etc. which allows the php developer to focus on building the site your requirements rather than re-creating code over and over again. Just like all the code libraries, these PHP frameworks like Cake PHP, Code Igniter and Symphony reduce the amount of time it takes to build your website, hence reducing your costs even further.
15 Fantastic Benefits of PHP
So there you have it. Conclusive evidence that PHP beats just about everything else out there. Or am I wrong? Or maybe I’ve missed some blindingly obvious PHP benefits. If so, tell me in the comments and I’ll be sure to reply.
If you’re convinced enough that you want to do your next project in PHP, then Agriya has a number of very talented PHP web developers who I’m sure would love to work on your project!
Oh, and by the way, incase you are wondering what PHP stands for, when Rasmus Lerdorf first developed the language back in the 90′s, he said it stood for Personal Home-Page. However, since then the language has grown up and it is now referred to as PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it!
How To Redesign Your Site
So your website is looking a little bit dated, your company focus has changed, it’s not as easy to update as you might have liked, the branding consultant is recommending an overhaul of the way you present your business.
In short, your website needs to be redesigned. Not touched up, not modified slightly, but totally revamped.
This was the case with the old Agriya website. Over time the site grew and we added more and more elements to the page that caused it to slow down considerably, the front page was made up of a large Flash element and the bounce rates were getting higher and higher.
Bouncing Around
If this sounds familiar to you, you need to take action and not ignore what your analytics are telling you. The bounce rate is one of the most important metrics because it tells you how many visitors you are losing before you really get a chance to sell to them. Although site speed isn’t the only factor, it does have a major impact.
Consider this, if your site has a bounce rate of 65% then for every 100 visitors coming to your site, you are losing 65 of them straight away – you are then trying to convert the remaining 35 in to leads and customers.
Our website had quite a high bounce rate and some customers also complained that it was slow to navigate, so this was a major factor when we decided to do a redesign.
Remove The Bloat
Another area that we felt was of some concern was the amount of ‘bloat’ that was occuring to the site. We were steadily adding more and more pages – before we redesigned the site I believe that there were over 500 pages of content, a lot of which were not focused around selling our services.
While some people say that a large site is a good thing because it captures a lot of long tail visitors from the search engines, feedback from the customers was that they often found it difficult to find the information they wanted.
For this reason we decided that a much leaner site was required, something that focused on selling our services rather than providing too much background information.
Don’t Forget The Blog
A company blog can be considered an essential tool for marketing your business online and shouldn’t be overlooked in your site revamp. It should form an integral part of your site and should have a design continuation from your main site.
Your company blog serves as a platform to announce news and information about the company, its products and services. It is far more effective than having a ‘News’ page on your site because it becomes more sociable where people can comment on the blog post, share it with friends and subscribe to the RSS feed so they get the latest updates.
It also serves as a repository to put all the content aimed at long tail searches and ‘informative’ content rather than sales content.
For example, we used to have a page about the Benefits of PHP, it brought in a lot of traffic, but the conversions from visitors to leads was fairly low and it may have served as a distraction to some visitors.
Instead of putting content like this on our website, we’ve decided to put it on our blog. Not only that, but we intend to expand upon this content to the point where it encourages people to naturally link to it because it is so useful.
Be Very Available
As a business the worse thing you can do is make it difficult for your visitors to contact you if they have any questions. If you simply list an email address, the visitor has to copy the email from your site, open up their webmail or email client, paste the email address and then write their question – too much effort!
As part of our redesign, we wanted to make the contact options very clear and visible no matter what page or what part of the page they were on.
We decided to put our phone number and live chat details at the top of the website as many other corporate sites are doing this by convention. We also located the search bar in the top right as our research showed that virtually all corporate sites with a search fuction had the search box located in this position.
However, since some of the pages are quite long, we decided to create a static CSS bar which ‘sticks’ to the bottom of the page. This concept was first popularized by the CNET website, but is yet to become a feature of many corporate sites. However, we decided to use it because it means our contact details are visible no matter where on the page a visitor is.
Although we have a contact form on each page and a full quotation form available, the vast majority of people prefer to use the Live Chat function to make enquiries about our products and services due to the instant response that they can get, not to mention the feeling that they are being personally dealt with.
In our research we found that so many other companies fail to offer any kind of Live Chat or if they do have the function it’s perpetually offline. In the case of Agriya, we find that for every one person that uses our contact forms, up to eight people will contact us on Live Chat. So if 100 people fill out our contact form, up to 800 people will contact us on Live Chat to make an enquiry.
We also offer phone numbers for visitors to call, since most of our customers come from US and Europe we simply buy a telephone number in these countries and it is routed to our number in the office. Although not many people call us, you often find that the bigger clients still prefer to use the phone as a method of communication.
Finally you can’t discount social media in this day and age. For this reason we have set up a Twitter account and Facebook page for current and prospective clients to get in touch. However, make sure you monitor these accounts as it can look very unprofessional if customer questions are going unanswered!
Choose Your CMS Carefully
There are so many content management systems available, from commercial to open source, it makes sense to check out everything on offer before you start to build your site – and you definitely need to research ready made solutions before you embark on creating your own custom CMS!
Agriya has tried a number of CMS’s over the years, from Drupal to WordPress, each had their advantages and disadvantages. For our last site we were using SilverStripe, but after further research we decided to build our new site using an up and coming open source CMS called ModX.
Obviously you shouldn’t be choosing your CMS on who’s got the best marketing message so we spent some time “playing around” with ModX and comparing it to SilverStripe in a number of different ways. In the end we decided to go with ModX because:
– Lighter CMS
– Easier templating system and easier to customize
– Built with SEO as a major design feature
– Our non-technical content writers and data entry operators were able to learn the back end system very fast and create new pages easily
– Our SEO analysts were able to tweak the site content very easily
– Our tests found that a ModX site loaded slightly faster than SilverStripeTest, test, test and then test again
There’s nothing worse than going live with a website that has broken links or worse, links still pointing to your ‘development’ site. Use automated tools if necessary – there are plenty of free website spiders on the net that will check for broken links. Also try and get as many of your staff to go through the site while it is on the development server because 10 pairs of eyes are always going to be better than one!
When we were ready to take Agriya’s new website live, nearly every person that checked the site found some small issues – even things as small as missing punctuation. Try and make sure the last person to check the site is the boss because who knows what they might think about your capabilities if they find any problems!
301 Redirects For Dummies
If you are completely revamping your site like we have done then it’s likely that you are going to lose or move many pages, sometimes a few, in our case over 300 pages! Now if we are going to go by the book, then we should leave all those pages where they are, but there are so many times when it just needs to be removed. In our case the old CMS we used, SilverStripe, had a problem using slashes ‘/’ in the URL so we couldn’t create a nice looking hierarchy in the URLs. ModX can handle this, but it meant changing all the URL’s.
A 301 redirect tells the search engines that an old page has moved to a new location and it should look in the new location from now on. It also redirects any visitors to the new page. If you don’t include the 301 redirects, search engines start to find lots of missing pages which seriously affects your search engine rankings and visitors could become annoyed by finding lots of errors.
There are several ways to do 301 redirects, the most common is to put them in the .htaccess file if you are on a Linux server.
Flipping the Switch
When it comes to switching your site from the old site to the new one there are several ways you can approach it. If you have a particularly strong site that gets indexed very frequently you need to be ultra-cautious on how you do the change over as the IT guys at Disney found out once.
While they were uploading the new website, they put a “Disney is down for maintenance, please try again later” notice on their website. This was on a Friday. Now although the message was up for a couple of hours at the most before the new website was fully uploaded, Google came along, indexed their website and moments later, anyone searching for ‘disney’ in Google saw the message “Disney is down for maintenance”. Needless to say traffic plummeted over the weekend and the IT guys were offering prayers to the Google Gods to re-crawl their site and replace the maintenance message!
To stop this happening to your site, you can try using a 503 status message. This tells Google that your site is temporarily down for planned maintenance and it will be back up shortly. Google knows not to index anything and comes back later.
The way Agriya switched to the new site was we actually uploaded the site to a different IP address. We then updated the domain DNS (sounds a bit technical!) so slowly the new site went live throughout the Internet and Google didn’t notice a moment of downtime.
Analytics and Tracking
The aim of your new website should be to increase the number of leads you get from the people visiting your site. Ideally you should be tracking the number of people that contact you (and how they found your site) using something like the Goals function in Google Analytics. You should know what conversion you are currently getting so that when you change over your website to the new version you can see what effect it is having on your conversion.
Hopefully your planning and research means that the conversions increases, but if you find that your conversions and leads are down, even several weeks after launching the new site, you may have to consider changing back to your old site. After all, you can have the best looking website in the world, but unless it’s driving business then it’s not much use.
Well, I think that’s about all there is to it, relaunching a website is a huge task, even a small site can take many weeks of planning and development. It’s not uncommon for a new site design to take months and months. However, follow the steps I’ve outlined above and you should see a smooth transition from the old to the new.
Do Web Designers and Web Developers Need To Be Enemies?
It’s a confrontation that pre-dates the dawn of time (that would be 00:00 GMT on 1st Jan 1970 to you and me), the constant struggle and battle of wills between the web designer and the web developer. As the web designer creates beautiful sites, the web developer bangs her head against the wall as the designer has told the client that they can easily include some function that is stupidly complex to create.
Or maybe it’s the other way round? The web designer declares he is giving up because once again the web developer has failed to create a certain function in the way it was intended or has ignored part of the design and created their own layout to fit around the programming that they are doing.
Sound familiar? Depending on whether you are a web developer or web designer reading this you are probably agreeing to one of the scenarios! All around the world, right this very moment, you can be sure that web designers and web developers are tearing their hair out and blaming the other person for “putting that stupid design feature in” or “ruining a perfectly good design”.
But does it have to be like that? Can web designers and web developers work together in eternal bliss? Or at least amicably co-exist until the clients have left the office?
At Agriya, we try as hard as possible to make web designers and web developers get along, and here are some of the things we have learned…
1. Familiarity is key
Our programming teams are made up of designers, developers, CSS coders and QA testers. In as so far as is possible, we ensure that the same teams stick together and are all located together. This not only builds the team bond but also allows each team member to quickly learn the limitations and potentials of web design and web development.
For example, one area that our designers are learning about is the role and capability of AJAX. We don’t need to take up much space for a login form when a simple bit of CSS and / or AJAX will allow a person to click a button and make the login box appear. However, the web developers need to know what the login box will look like or they’ll come up with something themselves!
2. To walk a mile in your shoes
Although we don’t expect our designers to be able create layouts in Photoshop or for web designers to start messing around with lines of computer code, we do ensure that there are regular knowledge transfers between the designers and programmers. Every few months the entire company is formed in to teams and asked to create a fictitious project with various other team members acting as the clients. The most recent project was for an eCommerce store selling women’s fashion.
The ‘clients’ (other members of staff) would have to explain what they wanted and how they wanted it and the rest of the team have to work together to build it. By doing this everyone gets to understand not just what each person can and can’t do, but also get to experience how it is to work as a client.
3. Education, education, education
We have an internal system a bit like Digg (using our MarkIt software actually) where designers and developers alike are encouraged to share interesting new trends in web design and web development. The staff can then add comments and discuss how new trends and techniques will affect future web design and web development.
With the onset of HTML5 and CSS3, both web designers and web developers in our company are actively discussing how the new technology will change the way they do things. For example recently an article was published on SixRevisions about how to make a gradiented call to action button entirely from CSS3 code. This new way of doing things means that a web designer may have to change the way they do things and provide colour references, or maybe the web developer needs to learn how to find out what HEX colour the designer has used in the Photoshop file.
4. No contracted, freelance or outside designers
As far as possible we try to handle the design requirements inhouse as we have some highly skilled designers who all understand what can and can’t be done functionality wise. However, occasionally a client will submit a design that they got an outsider to do, which is fine, but we work with the client to understand if functionality should over ride any design or vice versa.
I remember where we worked on one website and the designer had created a title header using some Photoshop blending effects on the text. When our web developers created the website, the title headers were done in plain text which made them look slightly different to the original Photoshop image (they weren’t as smooth and didn’t have a drop shadow). The designer the client used was very upset that we had ‘changed’ the look of his design, but since the text was dynamically generated from the database there was no way the web developers could use an image instead of plain text!
In this case, the outside designer the client used wasn’t aware of the limitations of what you can do with programming.
So in conclusion, we think it is possible for web designers and web developers to get along. But don’t get us started on what happens if you throw a usability expert in to the mix
Making Money with Affiliate Marketing: A Beginners Guide
The Internet is big business and every day, stories pour in of how people can make a killing off the Net. One way you can cash is through Affiliate Marketing. Affiliate Marketing is a marketing practice in which a business pays for each visitor or customer referred by the affiliate. Affiliate Marketing has four core players: the Merchant, the Network, the Affiliate and the Customer. As affiliate marketing has become more and more dominant as a marketing strategy many companies find it too complex to manage their own affiliate programs and sign up with third parties to manage their program for them. The company that manages an affiliate program is called a Network. An Affiliate Network manages the relationship between businesses and affiliates. Since a Network manages several businesses an affiliate who signs up with a Network gets access to all those businesses.
Affiliate Networks offer various strategies to their affiliates to make money. CPA Networks offers information gathering and lead generation strategies to businesses where the affiliate gets people to fill out forms or complete surveys and gets paid for it. It costs companies much less to get data through these means than hiring staff to go out and get data and the selection of customers is also much wider and often of better quality.
Clickbank gives affiliates generated links which pay the affiliate per click. The affiliate can try many strategies to promote the affiliate program. An easy way is through online classified ad websites. Unfortunately, because most of these ads are free, there are hordes of other affiliates also doing the same thing so unless you can find a way to stand out your conversion percentage is likely to be low. You must also ensure that you track each ad. so that when you get sales you know where they come from and where you should focus your efforts.
If you are can write, then article marketing can supercharge your affiliate program. Well written articles that attract attention and have useful content always get good click through rates (estimated at 7% on an average). Good content alone is no use. The content must be read in the first place which means it must be widely distributed. You should use blogging and social networking tools to help you disseminate content to targeted users.
Points to remember while selecting a webhosting company
A webhosting company offers space for your web site on their web server to let people all over the world to view your site on the Internet. We have compiled some of the importance points that you should keep in mind while selecting a web hosting company.1. The storage space and data transfer rate plays a major role in the selection of web hosting company. It depends on the type and size of your site. If your site is expected to grow, go for a company that offers the option to increase your basic package.
2. Go for a company that offers 99.9% of uptime, only then can you make your site available for user access all the time.
3. Most hosting companies offer 24/7 technical support without additional cost. Make sure you check this by sending mails at various times, and checking the response time. A good company should reply within 24 hours.
4. You should get email accounts and FTP access for your domain, for uploading files to your server in future.
5. Check whether a hosting company offers all the software and features that are the prerequisites for your sites.
6. Don’t settle for company that offers services at lowest costs. Many times, they may not be up to the mark. It doesn’t mean however, that you should choose only the costliest service available. Select a company that offers required service at reasonable rates.
7. Once you select a company, make sure you do your research on it and go through various user reviews based on experience.
Some things you need to keep in mind when designing your site
The Web is a foam of ever-popping bubbles, ever-changing shopwindows, a fascinating world where reality is compressed and presented in a browser – basically a window for looking sequentially at a very large parallel structure. It is therefore very important how content is put forward to the user. We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web design.Web design is not book design, it is not poster design, it is not illustration, and the highest achievements of those disciplines are not what web design aims for.
So what is web design?Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity. Great web designs are like great buildings. All office buildings, however distinctive, have lobbies and bathrooms and staircases. Websites too share commonalities.
Although a great site design is completely individual, it is also a great deal like other site designs that perform similar functions. The same is true of great magazine and newspaper layouts. Understanding this, and yet making your website stand out amongst the million similar pages is our objective.
One of the first things that one needs to decide, long before the analysis, design and implementation, is the target audience. With whom are you trying to communicate? It is important define the audience before you even get into any details about what the web site is to do – the “to do” will actually be made a lot clearer once you understand your audience.
The next phase involves figuring out what you are trying to communicate. This is probably one of the most important parts of the design process, and is often compromised on when more focus is on how it’s being communicated; the visual appeal of the website. If done right at the beginning, you will find the website coming together by itself, and the design will not require endless changes and maintenance.
The final phase involves the overall design on the page. Most times, an effort is made to provide as much information as possible, which is good. But at times, this leads to a very cluttered web page that will not be able to hold a viewer’s attention. Keep it simple. Providing links could be a solution to the problem of having to display lots of content. Making navigation within the site easy and distributing content over the entire window also adds to the appeal of a webpage.
A balanced approach that takes into account the content and the need for an aesthetic visual appeal will give you a great way to express yourself and make your content reach a wider audience.
Ocarda is a digital marketplace where you can get everything from website templates to WordPress themes and plugins to design your dream site.
Bloggers on the go!
Blogs are certainly an important facet of an individual’s personality since they reflect one’s thoughts, actions, reactions, plans, anecdotes and experiences. Altogether blog form a platform for every individual to express themselves freely. With very evident advents in technology, it’s now possible to connect blogs with any networking site using a plug in.Plug-ins perform the function of connecting your wordpress blogs on to sites like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and so on, and your blogs can be viewed on Facebook by any reader and any comments can also be viewed directly. Also if one reader clicks on the “share” option present at the base of the page, the content can directly be viewed on Facebook thereby enabling other followers to also view the blog pages. This is a very simple and smart tool which can be used to display details about your blog.
When it comes to other sites like FriendFeed which is a very interesting site to have discussions, all the users need to do is type in their FriendFeed username and change a few of the settings. Once this is done all the comments about the user’s blog can be viewed on the site and threads of conversations along with the comments in line can be viewed on the blog pages also. Plug ins also come with tons of other features one of them being “instant highlighter”. In short, this feature helps users highlight certain parts of your blog and this can be viewed in social networking sites. Social bookmarking is another feature that is becoming increasingly popular. Activating social bookmarks will result in a few icons appearing at the base of the page and the readers can specify which icon they would prefer. Once that is clicked, the blog pages can be added to sites like Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Buzz, and Digg, on to the profile pages.
Plug ins have very easily revolutionized the ideas behind establishing links between social networking and blogging and will definitely prove to be very useful for every avid blogger.
Redemption of New Age music:
Showing tremendous growth over the past few years surprisingly in the phase of recession has been the industry of music and entertainment. Logically or rather psychologically speaking, this makes sense as people from all possible industries turn to music and entertainment as a relaxing outlet in times of excessive stress. And recession has definitely one stressful phase hitting wave after wave.Now we have established WHY the industry is experiencing growth. How are they achieving these numbers? The figures which represent this growth are even more staggering. While this industry can no longer rely on sales of physical formats, they have established that CDs account for 55 percent of the 60.7 billion revenue. Digital music alone is supposed to achieve a revenue of 14.8 billion in the year 2011 and the rate calculated for annual growth is also quite high given the performance of the industry over the years.
Simultaneously the media related branch of the industry has not been affected and has in fact flourished. Advertisements, television related promotion, films and video games from the entertainment industry have been growing steadily with increasing demands. Threats from piracy have in no way affected live concerts and music shows and for this reason artists from all over the globe have been involved with direct promotion, and this initiative has been a great asset to the industry.
Also with recent brand development strategies, large bands have been promoted along with large brands! U2 has been advertised with Apple while Bob Dylan and Victoria’s secret are being promoted together and lots of other musicians are being advertised along with corporates, to provide mutual growth to both the entities.
It is with regard to this growth displayed that Agriya released its product – Volume. Volume in essence is a software that focuses entirely on the music and the artists. It functions as a music portal that contains details of artists, tracks where users can listen to their favourite tracks and even buy them if they like them a lot. Volume is the perfect platform for new artists to feature and showcase their talent and all the music lovers looking for the ideal software that contains every possible feature integrated in one, its the perfect solution.
With the advancements the music industry has seen, you will possess the ultimate need of the hour where users can access your site for free or paid downloads. This will definitely satisfy millions of users worldwide who have been looking for a niche site that delivers on all their music requirements which simultaneously acts as a platform for new artists to touch base from. Interested in starting your own music site? Then what you are waiting for? Get it right away from the store at just $ 147. If you are still uncertain about the site, you can watch the volume demo.
A day in a webmasters life:
A lot of people mistake the webmaster’s job role to centre around reading and updating content for the website and posting articles. After analyzing what exactly webmasters need to cover we were provided with surprising results which indicated that a webmasters job is not so simple after all.
Comment moderation and spam are one of the hardest things a webmaster has to handle. There are thousands of spam mails stored away in a folder and webmasters find it very hard to locate it even using an anti spam software. Another aspect of the webmasters job is e mail support. E mails consist of tech support mails, requests, suggestions and sometimes even rude remarks and webmasters need to answer the flood of mails without much ado which in most cases is very cumbersome.
Security in a website is extremely important. Even though webmasters are not directly responsible for this, some security add-ons and features can be installed by them as well. Updating a script with all the new features decreases chances of it being hit by a virus or a bug of sorts as it will remove all the holes and modify the technology for it to function effectively. Webmasters also keep an eye on the development of new plug-ins and features. WordPress webmasters have thousands of plug-ins at their disposal that gets constantly updated and additions are posted on a regular basis. There also may be certain plug-ins that adds features increasing the efficiency of the system but webmasters prefer one content management system.
The next hurdle webmasters need to handle is to ensure that scripts to do not take much time to load. The delay in loading time can be caused due to external scripts or additional plug-ins and also by large multimedia contents and un-optimized images. In short webmasters need to eliminate all the problems that cause a delay in the loading of pages.
Not all websites contain advertisements and webmasters need to identify the ones that do. Not only have that, the effectiveness of the ads, quality of images, colours and even the type of the advertisers needed to be evaluated. Running a regular check on all these aspects and updating blogs and advertisements on the websites is very essential.
Finally the most important part is networking. Not all forms of networking are profitable but it is absolutely essential that the webmaster networks and gets in touch with niche webmasters in the similar field. This will enable them to exchange information and in an ideal situation the webmasters can join together and start a profitable business. Webmasters in general cover a lot of other responsibilities and the job role covers vast areas to increase the quality and performance of the website in a wholesome manner.
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