Web Design Discussion

One of my best marketing strategies is Article
Marketing because it enables you to add content
to your site plus receive incoming links that both help to
improve your site’s search engine rankings.

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Read Web Site Content Guidelines - Part 1 No. 1-4

5. Don’t use hidden text or links

Some site owners try to trick the search engines by hiding links in the text so visitors inadvertently get taken to another site or create hidden text to get more keywords in their html code. This will be seen by Google as spamming the search engines and your site may get penalized. If penalized your site may disappear from Google and will take a long time to get it back. Therefore stay within the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

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Whenever you optimize a web site to improve your rankings in the search engines, it’s a good idea to be familiar with the Webmaster Guidelines from Google. If you don’t follow them you may suddenly find your site penalized for using incorrect techniques. Some of these may include hidden text or links, repeating your keywords too often in your web pages or using link schemes to artificially inflate your rankings. If your site gets penalized, it may no longer appear in Google or any of Google’s partner sites.

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Although I hardly ever implement flash files on my web sites, there are times when a flash slide will do a better job than using javascript. In this case I liked the fade effect plus the ease with which the slide show can be created without much knowledge of flash.

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Themed Search Engine Directories are directories related to your niche web site or specific topic of interest. They get you highly targeted incoming links. The quality and quantity of incoming links will determine the page rank of your site. The higher the page rank the more visitors you attract to your site.

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Paid inclusion means a search engine company will charge a fee to include your web site in its search index. Most search engine companies these days now charge a fee except for Open Directory Project and Google.

Benefits of Paid Inclusion to Search Engine Directories

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A potential client of mine wanted to create a multi-blog web site for childcare providers. They would first register for a small fee then have the ability to create a web page for their school that contains pertinent information for parents.

The web page must have the ability to add images, text, etc for their school, and allow comments from interested parents.
Each site could either have its own template design or the same template for each site.

Here are the 3 ideas of thought of:

1.Create a multi blog web site using WordPress MU (http://mu.wordpress.org/)
WordPress Mu allows you to create hundreds of blogs from a single install of WordPress.

I’d suggest getting my master hosting plan at http://www.isitebuild.com/hostingplans.htm. It would have enough space and bandwidth to host all the blogs. It’ll cost a little extra to add a number of databases to the hosting plan as each blog requires a database (they would all be database driven).

2. Create separate blogs for each provider using WordPress Blog software.
I could set up a hosting plan in which you could create your own blog site template then create separate blogs as subdomains of this blog site. My hosting plans allow for a one click installation for each blog although you would still have have to tweak each blog a little to accomodate each provider. You could also use different templates for each site.

3. RV Site Site Builder. Set-up a hosting plan in which you create separate sites using RV Site Builder (http://www.rvsitebuilder.com). This site builder allows you to create separate sites (or separate domains) for each provider. It’s fairly easy to use, has lots of ready made templates and you can update it anytime with the online editor. The RV Site Builder would be included in your hosting plan.

Recommendation

I’d suggest going with WordPress MU because it would be the easiest to set-up, run and allows expansion since it has the capacity to run thousands of separate blogs from one site.

Page Rank is primarily defined as the number of links that point to your site. The number and quality of links determine how quickly your page rank increases. A higher page rank will attract more visitors and potentially increase sales provided you have optimized your site design and have well written web copy.

The best links to get are one way links. These are web sites that link to your site without requiring a link to theirs. Often when you try to exchange links with another site they do not reciprocate immediately or you need to send numerous reminders before they actually do it. This is very time consuming. A better method is to submit to major and specialized search engine directories.

Types of search engine directories

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One of the main sources of marketing my web sites I’ve used throughout the years is writing articles, then submitting them to an article directory, ezine publishers, blogs, plus including them on my own web site. One of the main article directory sites is ezinearticles.com which in my opinion has become the gold standard for all other article directories. This is because they are constantly trying to improve the standards for publishers to submit their articles.

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What if you want links on a web page that require different font sizes or colors?

The solution is to create multiple link styles with CSS.

To accomplish this you must use css classes:

Example 1

The text on this wedding videography page are colored white on a black background however I want the links to have a font size of 12 pixels (same as the body text) and to hover to yellow when I pass my mouse over them.

CSS


.link1 a {
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 12px;
text-decoration: underline;
}
.link1 a:visited {
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 12px;
}
.link1 a:hover {
color: #FFFF66;
font-size: 12px;
text-decoration: underline;
}


HTML


<span class="link2"><a href="#1">When will our wedding day videos be ready?</a></span>


Example 2

On this FAQ page I wanted the links for the questions to have a font size of 10 pixels and hover to yellow when I pass my mouse over them.

CSS


.link2 a {
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 10px;
text-decoration: underline;
}
.link2 a:visited {
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 10px;
}
.link2 a:hover {
color: #FFFF66;
font-size: 10px;
text-decoration: underline;
}


HTML


<span class="link2"><a href="#1">When will our wedding day videos be ready?</a></span>


Tip 1

If you have several links that are grouped together you can place the span class at the beginning of the group and the span class end tag at the end of the group ie


<span class="link2"><a href="#1">When will our wedding day videos be ready?</a><br />
    <br />
    <a href=”#2″>Why is Always & Forever Video willing to provide uncut footage copies when other prospective videographers we’ve talked with are unwilling?</a><br />
    <br />
    <a href=”#3″>Could we try to make some money providing our tape to a show like America’s Funniest Videos?</a></span


Tip 2

You can also use the div tag instead of the span tag in the example above.

Notice the link in the footer on the same page is styled differently to the other links. The font size is 10 pixels and hovers to blue which is underlined

Conclusion

Creating multiple link styles offers a lot of flexibility for the design of your web site because you can vary the type of links on one page or for several pages.