5 easy-to-follow link building strategies
A search engine considers the quality of backlinks of websites while determining site rankings. Due to the time consumption and the endurance to carry-out a genuine link building campaign, many webmasters go for shortcuts to increasing backlinks. Though these shortcuts can bring desired rankings, you can’t retain it for long periods.Here are the link building strategies that you can follow easily to promote your site in an effective manner.
1. In link building, the general practice is to submit sites in web directories. What people do is search for web directories on the web through search engines, and submit their sites on all the web directories. But it is not really the best idea; a better way of link building is to find directories related to your niche and submitting sites in those web directories.
2. First prepare a list of do-follow blogs and start commenting on those blogs with high page rank. Dealing with high page ranking site will fetch you good results.
3. Actively participate on do-follow signature allowed forums.
4. Another simple way is to participate actively in popular social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc. You may feel that this process will take much time. Yes it will, but only at the starting stage where you need to build a network with people related to your niche. After that you can just spend 10 – 15 minutes daily to comment on others’ post and answer queries.
5. Place your products/services ads on free classified sites under relevant categories.
This tip comes as a bonus to you- hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building to someone experienced and get your job done. Outsourcing will help you save money and time which can be utilized to enhance your current products/services or build a new one. Just happens, that this bonus tip is the most followed strategy by online business experts.
Effects of web templates in a web site
Web templates are a life saver for people starting a business or wanting to interact with others in the virtual world. It helps them to start a website through which they can interact with the world. The web site design plays a major role in attracting customers and making them interested.Web templates are a boon for web developers. One can make use of it as a layout to build a site. Templates with schematic layouts are used to generating massive numbers of web pages. An effective web template provides a user the capability to start the design process quickly, thereby helping him save time and cost in building a web site.
It is best to go for optimized and nicely designed templates for developing sites with lots of pages and navigation links. If your site needs frequent updates, using a web template is the ideal choice. While building a site using a template, a web developer can prepare a basic template by editing it according to the requirement.
If site templates are optimized properly, then the sites developed will be search engine friendly. While selecting a template, make sure that the template design is appropriate for your business. Use web site design software like Dream Weaver to customize your website. While selecting colors, fonts and sizes, keep in mind that your site should be visually appealing.
While designing your site, use images only when they are needed and limit the usage of flash animations as images and flash animations will raise your site loading time. Your site should load within 10 to 15 seconds, or the viewer is likely to go to other sites.
Using a text menu with necessary navigation links is the best practice, as pull down, graphics or pop-ups will confuse users and are invisible to search engine bots.
Templates are perfect for both beginners and professionals to build a site. www.ocarda.com is a good place to get high quality templates at reasonable costs.
7 Golden rules to designing a high quality web site
Your website is your identity in the net world, through which you can promote your products or ideas. It may be a personal or a commercial website, but whatever it is, it should be effective enough to reach the right kind of people so you can achieve your purpose.Here we have listed seven golden rules that are to be kept in mind while designing your website. These will help you build a good quality website.
Content
“Content is the King”. Visitors will land on your page either through search engines or back links. Once they visit your page, they will look for information. If they don’t find what they are looking for, they will simply leave your site. A high quality website must be informative, and help visitors obtain the information they are looking for. So make sure the content on your site is accurate and adequate.User-friendly Navigation
Offer menus and sitemap to help visitors browse relevant information and navigate to desired sections of the site easily. Also provide breadcrumb which lists the path of screens that a user has visited, at the top frame of a page to help them find out where they are now and navigate to previous pages easily.Appearance
Use a professional, appealing and relevant style in your site throughout, to show consistency. Choose appropriate colors for your site that don’t clash. Also make sure you pick colours based on your intended audience. If the intended audience is that of children, use bright, attractive colors. If it is for professionals, use mild, pastel colors. Make sure that the text and background colors contrast and that the text is readable.Quick download
Studies have revealed that site download time should be less than 15 seconds, or you will lose visitors. So avoid large images and animations on your site, as they take too much time to download. It would be best to use photos of .JPEG format and graphics of .GIF format.To be avoided
Avoid using Pop-ups they annoy users and some browsers might block pop-ups. Do not use splash page which is a special entrance page to a site. Splash page are often filled with graphics and little text content, so they are not beneficial to search engine rankings and internet users.Test your site
Ask a third person to check for spelling and grammatical errors on your site. After building your site, test it in different browsers as people may use different browsers. Also check for broken links and missing images on your site, and correct them before launching.Visibility
Just building a site is not enough, you have to promote it both online and offline to divert people to it.
No more worries for site owners with duplicate content
When offering vastly similar contents in web pages, Google will consider them as duplicate content and index only the web page that best suits the search query. Due to this procedure, the webpage which has to be indexed is missed by Google.
For instance, http://www.example.com/products?trackingid=car
and http://www.example.com/products?categoryid=blackcar are duplicates of http://www.example.com/products. When the query is for black color, the http://www.example.com/products?categoryid=blackcar is indexed instead of http://www.example.com/products.To overcome this issue, Google has introduced a new HTML called “link”. By adding a
element to the site code, webmasters can suggest identical pages to Google.Copy this link into the section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.example.com/products?trackingid=car and http://www.example.com/products?categoryid=blackcar.
The result of this approach is that the crawler does not need to crawl the duplicate pages to identify the canonical relationships.
Remember, you can suggest canonicalization only across sub-domains and within a domain, and not across domains.
Five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top
Webmasters need to take care of websites, and feed them regularly to help them grow steadily. Here are five essential tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site at the top of search engine.
1. Content
Search engines are willing to offer only fresh content to their users. So it has become a must for you to post fresh content on your website. It is best to change the site’s content regularly. You need not change the whole page, just reframe the existing content or update existing content with additional data. Try to add more articles and information to your site on a regular basis.2. Links
Check whether all links on your site are live and direct to the correct page. The links’ label should be relevant to the page that they link to. Don’t overload your site with links; have control over all links on your site. Make sure that all features in your site work well.3. Advertising
Advertising is an effective marketing strategy followed by marketers right from a very early stage, to bring brand awareness among people. So advertise your site on the net, by placing links to your site in relevant pages for free, or for a minimal amount, and exchanging links as well. The commonly followed web advertising techniques are Pay per Click (PPC), Cost per Action (CPA), article marketing and email marketing.4. Social Bookmarking
Bookmark your site in popular social bookmarking sites like digg.com, Yahoo! Buzz, Technorati.com, StumbleUpon.com etc, and tag/categorize it with relevant keywords.5. Promote it
Actively participate in blogs and forums relevant to your site by raising questions, giving suggestions, rating answers etc, and leave your site link in the signature section. Build a friends list by adding users who have replied to your post. Leave your site link in the signature of all emails you send out. Write articles on any subject relevant to your site, and post them on article directories like Ezine articles. Don’t forget to add your site link in the author’s biography box.
Promote your online business
You had a brilliant idea, you launched a business and you’ve started your website. But what do you to promote it? How do you get people to come to your website? And then how do you get them to buy your products? Here are a few tips to market your business online:One of the easiest and smartest ways to get more traffic to your site is by getting a high rank in popular search engines. To get listed with search engines like Yahoo, Google or Inktomi, you have to submit your site to them. Make sure that the keywords under which you want your article to be found are effectively used and are placed at the top of your articles/pages.
Ensure that the titles on all your pages are relevant and linked to what your business is about. Try to get yourself a domain name that goes well with your business, or if you are a well known, well established company, then try to use your company’s name.
Use your website address on everything you print for your business purposes – letter heads, visiting cards, etc. to promote your business offline as well. Since most people now turn to the web to obtain details and read reviews, it’s good to direct them to your website in every way possible. Try to let the local, national and global press know of your website. Make use of press releases both online and offline.
Advertise online. Both free and paid ads work well. Place classified ads on the net and provide crisp details of what your business offers. Web banners are another effective technique to let people know of what you provide and guide them back to your website through links.
The content on your site needs to be precise, of good language and detailed. Once you’ve managed to direct traffic to your site, you need to keep your visitors from just browsing through and moving on. They need to be convinced into buying something.
Use a good design, with appropriate colours and placement, use good pictures or flash, provide videos on your site, and keep all your text well written. One of the main reasons people are going to keep coming back to your site is because of good comprehendible content. Use a site map for better navigation. Nobody really has the time, and a well constructed site map will definitely be appreciated.
Publish articles about your business, write blog posts and welcome suggestions. Interacting with potential customers using chats, forums and blogs will be of definite help; provide a platform for people to interact with each other as well on your site.
A study on decline in Paid search traffic
Hitwise, an Internet traffic monitor, reports “In the four-week period ending in April 2008, nearly 10% (9.84%) of registered search engine traffic came from paid clicks. But in the four weeks preceding May 9, 2009, this figure declined from 26%, to 7.25%.” Experts say that the main reason for this decline is the economic downturn which led most companies to slim down their marketing budget.
Hitwise also stated that the trend is noticeable across all categories except education. In education sites, paid search results have increased from 1.39% to 1.45%, whereas in major retail sites and travel agencies paid search traffic was down to 20% and 25% respectively. Amazon has declared that it will not pay referral fees to its affiliates.
The search giant Google has noted only 3 % rise in the paid clicks across all of its Adsense partners in the last quarter of 2008. Some of the large brands like Orbitz have skipped this paid link marketing strategy stating that they have already got first place for their respective brands.
Another reason for the decline may be due to the availability of other effective marketing strategies like email marketing which is available at low cost. Also some companies have moved to social networking which is the most effective way to reach the intended audience at zero cost.
Companies are getting smarter about searches and have moved to organic search engine optimization techniques like social networking, forum discussion, article submission, directory submission etc. This might be the major reason for the reduction of paid search traffic.
Beta version of WordPress 2.8 is available for screening
WordPress has released the Beta version of WordPress 2.8 and called the public to test it and file bugs. A lead developer of the WordPress development team has stated that they have implemented a lot of high-rated features listed in the WordPress Ideas Forum.
The lead developers have given top priority to widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades for the 2.8 version. Apart from this, they have tried to fix some bugs.
I have listed some of the new features that caught my attention:
1. New Theme Installer routines
2. Add Documentation (function) lookup to Theme and Plug-in editors
3. Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
4. Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
5. Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
6. Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
7. Don’t notify post author of own comments
8. Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab.
9. Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
10. Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
11. Improved Widget user interface
12. Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
13. Support more than one gallery on the same page
14. Improved database performance
15. Improved performance for script loading
16. Timezone enhancements for PHP 5
17. Add a function to output a generic widget anywhere in a template
18. Make login more pluggable
19. Add support for blocking all outbound HTTP requests
20. HTTP API updates and fixes
21. Add filters so AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber IM labels in user profiles can be changed.
Optimize your site to offer richer snippets in Google search results
At Searchology 2009, Google unveiled Rich Snippets that enhance search results by highlighting structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets provide users convenient summary information, including important page-specific attributes like review and price range, to help surfers quickly identify the relevance of their results.
When people search for products or services, they can get reviews and ratings which will help them come to a conclusion. When searching for a person, the search results will offer additional information to help them distinguish between people with the same name. This is the welcome change in the SERP.
Rich Snippets is enabled for Google Custom Search with which webmasters can harness the power of Google to create a customized search experience for their own website. Webmasters can annotate their web pages with structured data in a standard format so as to make Google index custom attributes to offer richer snippets for their site.
Just use the two open standards, namely microformats and RDFa, to annotate structured data on your site. Without any prior knowledge in these standards, you can use them easily just with a basic knowledge of XHTML.
Actually, with microformats or RDFa, you have to label each piece of important text in your web content like product name, rate or review. In order to make computers understand this important text, just provide additional HTML tags. Google or any other search engine software will find the important section of web content easily and display it in useful way.
Annotate your site to offer enhanced search results for your site and make your site visible to your intended audience.
Monetize your site by reducing bounce rate
A website is the main gateway to sell your ideas, services and products online. Webmaster tools like Google analytics help in analyzing how well you have reached the public and where you have to improve.Check your bounce rate, which indicates the number of visitors who have come to your home page and left your site without moving to other pages on your site. The lower your bounce rate, the higher your page views. If your bounce rate is high, then it means that you are not sailing down the right path.
How do you reduce the bounce rate on your site? It is not a difficult task; you can reduce it by studying and improving certain features of your site. As you go through this article, you will see how easy it is.
Relevant Content
“Content is the king of a website”. People come to your site in search of answer for their questions. If the content on your site doesn’t answer them well, visitors are not going to stay on your site and search for something that does answer their questions. While optimizing a web page, consider your audience. Spend some time in understanding your target audience and use the terminology they use. This will decline your bounce rate significantly.
Navigation
Once visitors land on your page, they will look for specific content (like product price). If they cannot find it within a minute, they will leave your site immediately to find details of other similar products. Help your visitors in finding out their desired content by offering clear navigation, to make them stay on your site. Place menu bars in the top or side frames and offer sitemap, so that people can move throughout the site with ease.
Interact with visitors
Visitors will stay longer on your site when you interact with them through polls or surveys. It is quite natural for people to reply, vote or stick around an interesting question. You can also ask visitors to comment and provide suggestions on your site.
To be avoided
Avoid external links on the first page, this diverts users to other sites. Avoid pop ups as they can annoy visitors. Most users block pop-ups, so any content in a pop-up on your site may be missed by users completely.
It is important to optimize every single page of your site to reduce bounce rate.
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