Web Design Discussion

If you’re serious about marketing your online business consider accepting the challenge of writing 100 articles in 100 days. Ezinearticles is offering this challenge to anyone between Friday, January 1st 12:01AM CST-USA and Saturday, April 10th 11:59PM CST-USA. Each article must be at least 400 words in length.

They ran a similar challenge from August-November in 2009 where I received a prize for being within the first 100 people to complete the challenge. It wasn’t easy because it required the discipline to write one article every day (or several articles in one day when I fell behind) however the benefits were tremendous.

Benefits of Writing 100 Articles in 100 days

1. Increase web traffic

Traffic from article writing comes from a number of different sources. ie

• ezinearticles web site, RSS feeds and email alerts
• ezine publishers selecting your article for publication
• adding the article to your blog boosts the number of readers

2. Build backlinks

Including 2 links in the resource box at the end of your article builds backlinks to your own web site. Make sure one link uses anchor text (textual link) that includes your main keyword and the other should be your full web site address. Writing and submitting 100 articles will produce lots of backlinks in a short time.

3. Boost search engine rankings

Creating content that targets your main keywords will steadily increase the rankings of your web site. Weave your keywords into the title, article body and anchor text of each article you submit. At the end of 100 days your website will have moved to the top of the search engines depending on the competitiveness of your keywords.

4. Increase ezine subscribers

Traffic generated by submitting articles to ezinearticles and my web design discussion blog indirectly resulted in boosting newsletter subscribers. If I had sent visitors to directly to a squeeze page where people sign up for my newsletter, the number of subscribers would have been greater.

5. Business branding

When readers visit your web site many times through reading your articles they quickly become familiar with what services or products you’re offering. You are building your brand within their minds.

6. Produce quality content your customers love

A high quality article is far more effective than an ad because you help your customer make an informed decision by reading its content. Your article will also keep working for you as long as it remains on the Net. An ad is short-lived unless you pay keep paying to have it displayed. An article only costs you the time to write and submit it.

7. Become a better writer

The quality and speed of your writing improves as you create more content on a regular basis. As you develop your own writing style you attract and retain more readers.

I recommend taking up the challenge of writing 100 articles in 100 days so you can reap all the 7 benefits mentioned above.

Also read 7 Steps for Writing 100 Articles in 100 Days

Leave a comment below if you decide to take up the challenge.

To read about the article writing challenge visit:
http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2009/12/3rd-hahd-begins.html#more-3641

Website speed may soon become a ranking factor in Google. This makes sense because you want search results to appear real fast. Often you have to wait over 30 secs on a high speed connection for a page to load. Most internet users don’t have the patience to wait that long and will quickly move to another site.

How to check website or page speed

Firefox/Firebug Add Ons

Page Speed from Google
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Yahoo! YSlow
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Causes of slow website speed and how to improve it.

Flash
Have you ever waited while a flash file is being loaded? Many sites use flash as a splash page that appears first to impress you before you get to the real content. The problem is that flash slows page load times and doesn’t get indexed by the search engines.

Images
Having many images or several large images on your web page will slow it down considerably. Try to compress the images and reduce the size and number on the page.

Videos
Video files are usually very large and require a lot of bandwidth load. Servers often crash when too many visitors try to play the video at the same time. Instead of using your own server make use of fast servers by hosting your files on YouTube or Amazon.

Javascript
Many sites forget to place the javascript code in an external file thus all the code appears before the actual content. Sometimes multiple javascript files are embedded in the html. To speed up load times place all your javascript files in an external file.

Navigation menus
Sites that use javascript or flash for navigation do themselves a disservice because search engines don’t spider javascript or flash code. Use a CSS menu to make it accessible to the search engines.

Cascading Style Sheets
Instead of placing all your CSS code in the html code place it in an external file to reduce the code clutter. It will help the page to load faster.

Server Side Includes (SSI)
If you have a static site that contains 100s of pages SSI is a great way to update all the pages from one file instead of updating each page separately. It also reduces page load times.

HTML Code
HTML code errors will slow page load times. Clean code enables search engines spiders to easily crawl your web pages. Use the W3C HTML Validation Service at http://validator.w3.org/ to check your html code for errors.

Web Hosting Service
Most websites these days share the same server. If one website suddenly receives a surge in server resources it will affect all the other sites on that server. Therefore beware of web hostng companies that offer unlimited space and/or bandwidth. Check the uptime of the server your site is hosted on.

Database-driven vs Static websites
Database driven sites such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and online stores contain 100s or 1000s of files whereas static sites only have a few html files (sometimes over 100 files). This means the server has to work harder to load all the database files. Before you design or redesign your web site using database-driven software check the typical load times of example sites using the software.

Tip
If you’re planning to design or redesign your website with software make sure you test the speed of several websites using the software before investing your hard earned money. Doing a little planning ahead of time benefits you later on.

Resources
How to Calculate and Speed-Up the Download Time of Your Web Site

How to Update Your Web Site Using Server Side Includes (SSI)

http://www.isitebuild.com/serversideincludes.htm

Web Performance Best Practices (Google)

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Before you make plans to redesign your website there are some seo secrets you need to know about that generate long term benefits. Many site owners SEO their websites after they’ve been redesigned because they didn’t receive any extra traffic or their traffic disappeared. Follow the SEO secrets below so your web site will easily be found by the search engines.

6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.

Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.

Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your own peril!

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) questions, and that it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It’s critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you’ll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you’re sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You’ll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don’t force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it’s critical that your new website’s content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It’s best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.

You’ll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive some of these “secrets.” He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it’s your website that you’re paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!

While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ve successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there’s great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you offer will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

Source
6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know

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Web Design, SEO, Hosting

Article marketing has been my main traffic source for generating new leads for my online businesses in 2009. It’s helped me achieve top rankings for my web site design company web site, the web design discussion blog and many of the articles contained within them. The articles also help propel my article marketing strategies ebook sales page to the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing.

I participated in a 100 day article writing challenge from August – November. That’s why you see the graph suddenly increase in the image above. It boosted the traffic to all my web sites and was the most profitable months for my business.

Each year I review how effective my article marketing strategies were. Here are some of the detailed statistics provided by the 2009 reports at Ezinearticles.

1. Most viewed articles

• Screen Display Resolution – What Screen Size Should You Test Your Web Site For? – 543 visits
• Article Rewriting – How to Rewrite Articles to Multiply Your Traffic – 191 visits
• Content Management System – Top 7 Disadvantages – 161 visits
• Web Site Evaluation – 16 Point Checklist – 131 visits

2. Highest click through rate (CTR)
(CTR = percentage of visitors who clicked through to my websites)

• Starting an Online Business – How to Have the Correct Mind Set – 21.7%
• Article Marketing Strategies – Top 7 – 12.5%
• Online Writing – How to Easily Profit Online Writing Short Reports – 11.8%
• Article Rewriting – How to Rewrite Articles to Multiply Your Traffic – 11.5%

3. Most URL Clicks from the resource box

• Screen Display Resolution – What Screen Size Should You Test Your Web Site For? – 12 clicks
• Article Rewriting – How to Rewrite Articles to Multiply Your Traffic – 11 clicks
• Article Writing Template – 7 Steps For Writing a Highly Effective Article – 9 clicks
• Article Writing Templates – Top 7 Benefits – 8 clicks

4. Articles selected by Ezine Publishers

• How to Create an Autoresponder Ecourse From Your Articles
• Article Writing – How to Write Article Titles That Get Clicked
• Article Submission – Top 7 Tips For Submitting Your Articles
• Video Marketing Benefits – Top 10 Reasons to Repurpose Your Articles Into Videos

Conclusions

• Writing and submitting more articles generates more traffic.
• Creating a good title and writing quality content improves CTR.
• Long articles (400-800 words) do better than short articles (250-350 words).
• Giving publishers what they want helps them select your article for publication.

Also read Article Marketing Predictions for 2010

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Learn how to write & publish articles by picking up a copy of
Article Writing Strategies.

Article marketing has been a proven strategy for many years to build traffic, backlinks and search engine rankings. In the beginning one article could easily generate a lot of traffic however as article marketing went main stream you had to write and publish lots more articles to stand out from the crowd.

My predictions for 2010

1. Big companies submitting to article directories

Large companies will be hiring thousands of writers to write millions of articles that will get added to article directories.

2. Article writing software increases

There are software programs that spin your article into 1000 variations. They are then submitted to the article directories. Often the content doesn’t make sense and clutter the search engines with article spam. Because of the demand, more of this type of software will get produced.

3. Search engines filtering out spam articles

When web site owners tried to build 1000s of backlinks with link farms the search engines eventually penalized these sites by removing them from the search engines. The same may happen with article spam because search engines want to return the highest quality results to their consumers.

How to prepare for 2010

1. Increase the amount of unique articles you write and publish.

If you wrote and submitted 120 articles this year, make a goal of doubling your output. Outsource the writing if you don’t have the time to do it yourself. It’s going to take more articles to generate a steady stream of traffic.

2. Write longer quality articles

Longer articles of 400-800 words receive more clicks than shorter ones (250-300 words). Ezine publishers prefer high quality articles over poorly written ones so make sure you research the material thoroughly before writing about it.

3. Be consistent

Make a plan to write and submit several articles each week instead of when you feel like it. If you can’t do this commit to one article per week. The key is to do it consistently. Think of article marketing as your advertising agent. If you stop marketing your business you’ll stop attracting business.

4. Repurpose your content

Search engines prefer to see links coming from multiple sources instead of just one source. Convert your article into audio and video content then submit it podcast directories and video sharing sites. You will reach a wider audience.

5. Monitor article statistics

Ezinearticles is the most popular article directory because it provides article reports that track click through rate, views and the keywords used to find your article. It continually provides more ways to maximize the traffic to your articles. By monitoring your statistics you can work on improving your content to you get more visitors reading it and clicking the URL in the resource box.

By making preparations based on these article marketing predictions for 2010 you’ll stay ahead of your competitors and reap the benefits in your online business.

Also read Article Marketing: Year in Review 2009
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Learn how to write & publish articles by picking up a copy of
Article Writing Strategies.

Ezinearticles now includes the CTR statistic in your article reports. It measures the effectiveness of your articles by viewing the percentage of people that clicked on the links within your article or resource box. The more clicks you receive the higher your percentage.

Example

One of my articles titled 7 Ways to Get Backlinks to Your Website received 85 views and 3 clicks with a CTR of 3.5%. This metric will change over time as more people read the article.

Comparison of Per Per Click CTR with Article CTR

With Pay Per Click (PPC) ads 1% is considered a good CTR. This means you receive 1 click for every 100 people viewing your ad (impressions). If your articles get higher CTRs than 1% it means your articles are more effective than PPC ads.

You should aim for a CTR of 2-12% or more. If it’s higher your articles are being more effective.

3 Ways to Improve the Click Through Rate (CTR) of Your Articles

1. Create an attention grabbing headline

Your headline is what visitors read first. If they find it interesting enough they’ll read the rest of the article. It should include what the article is about and how will it benefit them. That’s why the title “How to win friends and influence people.” is one of the most famous. It tells you what the article is about (how to win friends) and the benefit it brings (influence people).

2. Write what you promised in the headline

Create several bullet points in the article body that expands upon your headline so it keeps the visitor’s interest. Split up your content into short paragraphs to make it easy to read.

3. Create a compelling resource box

Your resource box is where you offer your product or service. To receive the most clicks offer a sample of one of your products. It could be a free report or software. Make sure it contains a lot of value so your visitor will want to receive more of what you have to offer.

4. Include anchor text

You’re allowed 2 links in the resource box. One should be the full web site address and the other hyperlinked text (anchor text). Both should link to the same location. If your article gets placed in an ezine the full URL will be seen whereas the anchor text won’t. Including the anchor text in your original article helps get it ranked in the search engines.

Tips
Test different resource boxes to see which one receives the highest CTR. By improving your CTR you’ll have a greater potential of making more sales from your website.

Proofread your article before submitting it for publication. Grammar and spelling mistakes will turn off your readers.

Also read Article Marketing Metrics

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Learn how to write & publish articles by picking up a copy of
Article Writing Strategies.

Writing and publishing articles is a highly effective method to attract a constant stream of traffic to your web site. Approximately 85% of people never go beyond 10 articles. This means that most people give up because they don’t see the fruits of their labors.

Receiving traffic from your articles occurs over time as they appear in article directories, search engines, web sites and ezines. Your web traffic may start with a trickle of visitors then increases as more articles get published.

My Article Marketing Formula

1. Create well written content

Place yourself in your customers shoes so you can think from their perspective instead of your own. Ask yourself what are their wants, needs and desires? Don’t worry about your article having perfect grammar and sentence structure. Just make sure it reads well and has no spelling mistakes then submit it for publication. It’s better to write more articles than to spend hours trying to perfect your article.

2. Make a plan

Without following a clear article marketing plan you are bound to fail. Decide how many articles you will write and submit each week then stick to it. If you can only commit to one article per week do that however it will take a long time to build substantial traffic. Try to commit or build up to 3 articles per week. This will generate over 150 articles per year. The beauty of this strategy is that they’ll keep working for you for years to come without touching them. It’s like getting free advertising.

3. Generate continuous traffic

One article is like having an employee that works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week throughout the year without getting tired or complaining. The more articles you write the more employees you will have working for you. As your articles get published all over the Web your traffic will continue to increase and it won’t stop even if you take a break.

Instead of spending time and money on discovering the magic formula for generating traffic, focus on article marketing. It will cost you time but it will give a great return on your investment.

Also read Article Marketing Metrics

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Learn how to write & publish articles by picking up a copy of
Article Writing Strategies.

If you want to increase the effectiveness of your articles you need to know how many visitors your articles are receiving, where the they are coming from and what keywords are being used to find your articles. Once you identify these parameters you’ll have a clearer idea where to focus your article marketing efforts.

3 Ways to Monitor Article Visitors

1. Ezinearticle statistics

This top article directory provides reports within your membership panel for:

• Number of views
• Number of URL clicks
• Number of EzinePublishers that chose your article
• Number of people that emailed your article to others
• No of comments
• No of votes
• Rating (number of stars)

Every month they send you an email showing which articles performed the best and what keywords were used to find your content.

At the bottom of each article in this directory are displayed the 14 most viewed articles and the 14 most published articles in your category for the last 60 days.

2. Web Site Statistics

Every web hosting account usually includes a statistics program like AWStats. This is a gold mine of information that shows you where your traffic is coming from. Some of the metrics it includes are:

• number of unique visits, hits, pages per day, week, month, year
• top countries
• top search engines
• number of referral URLS
• operating systems
• browsers
• number of links from external sites
• keyword phrases people used to find your site

3. Google Analytics

If your web hosting account doesn’t have a statistics program sign up for a Google Analytics account. It will give you similar data.

• Top search queries
• Crawl errors
• Number of links to your site

Tips

Identify the topics that received the most visits then write more articles related to this topic because there’s clear evidence your visitors are interested.

Identify the keyword phrases that are not receiving many visits then write articles focused on these keywords to raise your rankings and improve traffic.

By analyzing your article marketing metrics you can monitor and improve the effectiveness of your content.

Also read Article Click Through Rate (CTR) – How to measure the effectiveness of your articles

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Learn how to write & publish articles by picking up a copy of
Article Writing and Marketing Strategies.