Web Design Discussion

Most website owners spend their link building efforts on their home page because that’s what most visitors see first. This is a big mistake as often visitors also enter your site from other pages. If these pages don’t rank well you are leaving a lot of traffic on the table. You need to build links to all internal pages to multiply your traffic potential.

Importance of building links

Read the rest of this entry »

Need more web traffic?
Want to improve your Google rankings?
Want to make more sales?

If your website can’t be found in the search engines you’re not going to receive much traffic unless you try other methods. If your website appears on the first page of Google it will receive much more traffic than the second page. The top 3 listings on the first page get far more traffic than listings 4-10. This is because it’s the first screen visitors see without having to scroll down to view listings 4-10. The number of listings displayed will also depend on the size of your computer monitor.

How does adding links to your site improve Google Rankings?

Read the rest of this entry »

How do your competitors achieve high rankings?
How many incoming links do your competitors have?
What types of backlinks do they have?
How can you get the same backlinks to your own site?

Creating a website for your online business is useless if no one sees it. You need to constantly drive traffic to it so visitors can read the valuable information you have to offer. One of the greatest problems new and old website owners face every day is how to generate web site traffic. Building incoming links to your website is a strategy that must be done consistently and frequently for your website to be recognized by the search engines. The quality, quantity and age of the links affect how high your rankings will go..

How to analyze links from competing websites

Read the rest of this entry »

Link building is one of the most effective methods for increasing the ranking of your website in the search engines. The quality and quantity of links pointing to your site determine how well your site will rank. The problem is many site owners expect to see immediate results. They think if they get 100 backlinks their site will immediately rank on the first page of the search engines within a few weeks.

Why link building takes time to increase search engine rankings

Read the rest of this entry »

Link popularity refers to the number of links pointing to your website from other websites. It’s one of the most important factors for increasing your search engine rankings. The quantity quality and age of the links will determine how well your site will rank.

How to Build Link Popularity

Read the rest of this entry »

Should you use relative or absolute links for building a website?
What is a server path?
What types of paths are there?
How to use the correct file path?
Which is best…relative or absolute links?
When should you use absolute links?

When designing a website in an html editor such as Dreamweaver it automatically creates relative links rather than absolute links. If you use the wrong server paths in your website structure your site may contain lots of broken links when it’s uploaded to your server. This will result in losing lots of visitors.

What is a server path?

This refers to the directory structure on the server. For instance I upload all my files to the public_html folder (directory) on the server. This is the root folder. If I create a sub-directory (another folder) within the public_html folder it will have a different file path. The key to maintaining the correct file paths is to use the same directory structure for your website files as on the directory structure on your server ( e.g. public_html directory).

What are relative links?

A relative link or path links to the file within your website. For example if you’re linking to a page within the same directory then you would code it like this:


<a href="http://www.about.html">About</a>


If you create a sub-directory for your images the file path for the image to link to would be:


<a href="images/pic.gif"></a>


If the folder is one level up from the current directory the relative file path would be:


<a href="../images/pic.gif"></a>


If the folder is two levels up from the current directory the relative file path would be:


<a href="../../images/pic.gif"></a>


Whenever you move a file one level up from the main directory use ../
So if your images folder is 3 levels up from the root folder (e.g. public_html) you would use this code to link to the image contained in the folder.


<a href="../../../images/pic.gif"></a>


What are absolute links?

An absolute link or path is where you use the full URL of the page you are linking to. e.g.


<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/about.html">About</a>


Absolute links come in handy especially if you don’t know the correct file path. It prevents making errors that cause broken links to appear on your website. For instance if you don’t know how to create the correct relative path for an image 3 levels from the root directory create this absolute file path:


<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/level1/level2/level3/images/pic.gif"></a>


Which is best…relative or absolute links?

Using relative links throughout your website file structure helps your web pages to load faster because all the files and folders are contained within the root directory (public_html folder) on the server.

If you use absolute links in your website file structure browsers need to search the internet first before finding the files on your server. This slows the loading of your website which is not good as search engines use site speed as one of their ranking factors. Web pages should load within a few seconds.

When should you use absolute links?

When you want other websites to link to content on your web page provide the html code that includes the absolute URL to the page. Do the same for the resource box at the end of your articles.

Use an absolute URL for your anchor text (hyperlinked text). Using a relative link will generate a 404 error page which means the link is broken.

Here’s an example using anchor text that includes the absolute URL to the website:


<a href="http://www.articlerewards.com/">Article Marketing Strategies</a>


Displays as:

Article Marketing Strategies

Tip
Before uploading your website to the server check all your file paths. Once uploaded to the server run the site through a link checker.

****************
Get a free evaluation of your website by visiting:
Free Web Site Evaluation

So you have a product or products to sell, have registered your domain name and purchased a hosting plan. One of the ways to quickly and easily create your ecommerce site is with WordPress software.

It enables you to create a dynamic site that you’re able to maintain yourself.

Benefits of WordPress

Read the rest of this entry »

* Why hire a web designer when there are 100s of template designs on the Net?
* Why invest money in a web designer when you can download a free template?
* Why wait weeks or months to have a site designed when you can get a ready-made template?

These are some of the frequently asked questions business owners have when deciding on building a website to sell their products and/or services.

7 top reasons to hire a web designer

1. Professional knowledge

A professional web designer who has been designing websites for 10 years has accumulated a ton of knowledge about what works well on the Net. He will be familiar with the common mistakes new site owners make when establishing an online presence and will know how to design a profitable website.

2. Customized design

If you want your site to stand out from your competitors you should not use a template. Chances are many other online users will have the same design. A customized website enables you to have a unique design that matches what you’re selling.

3. Less costs in the long term

A professional design can be less expensive in the long run because it was built with a solid foundation. This means it contains clean code, the web pages load quickly and are search engine friendly. Templates often contain proprietary code that contains html errors, loads slowly and are not optimized for the search engines.

4. Search engine optimization

A professional web designer will make sure your web pages are optimized for the search engines. This means the pages will validate for correct html, css, contain appropriate meta tags, heading tags, descriptive file names, clear navigational structure and image descriptions. Even though you may find a pretty template you won’t understand what’s in the code underneath the design unless you’re a web designer.

5. Familiar with marketing strategies

A beautiful website will not attract visitors on its own. It needs to be marketed frequently and consistently to generate a continuous stream of traffic. A professional web designer can help you implement powerful traffic generation strategies.

6. Website maintenance

Business owners often don’t have the time, knowledge or desire to update their websites. They prefer to have a webmaster who knows what they are doing and can quickly and easily add new content whether it’s text, videos, audios or images. The web designer can also install scripts to capture email addresses, add a forum, blog, RSS feeds or social media tools. He or she can track the progress of the website by monitoring site statistics.

7. Cross browser compatibility

If your website doesn’t display correctly in all the major browsers you’ll miss out on lots of visitors. A web designer will make sure your site appears correctly in Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari and Chrome.

When you buy a template you may save time and money in the short term however it may cost you dearly in the long term. Hiring a professional web designer will guarantee a top notch design that will help brand your business and give you peace of mind knowing that it’s been built correctly.

****************
Get a professional website designed for your business by visiting:
Professional Website Design

If you want to generate traffic to your website from the search engines you need optimize your web pages and build links to them. The more incoming links you get to those pages the higher your rankings will be. Many site owners fail to put a regular link building plan in place. They may have achieved good rankings initially with a a few incoming links however over time their rankings dropped (and so did their traffic) as competing websites outranked them.

One of the easiest and fastest ways to build links is through writing and publishing articles. The more articles you write and distribute over the Net the more links you’ll acquire.

7 ways to use articles for link building

1. Create unique content

Every person has their own unique style of writing that will appeal to a segment of readers. Ezine publishers and site owners are constantly looking for unique content to place in their ezines or on their websites. Submit your content to the top article directories to make it easy for publishers and site owners to find your articles. For example one article could potentially generate 100s of links to your website if it was used in an ezine of 10,000 subscribers or bookmarked by readers using bookmarking sites such as stumbleupon, digg, delicious, etc.

2. Include links in the article resource box

Most article directories allow 2 links in the resource box at the end of the article. One should be anchor text (hyperlinked text), the other your full website address. The anchor text should contain your main keyword as search engines give more weight to links that include keywords related to your site. The full URL should also be included in case someone copies and pastes your article (from the article directory) into their ezine or web page. The anchor text won’t appear but the full URL will remain intact.

3. Practice Internal linking

When publishing the article on your website or blog find related articles or blog posts (within your site) then link them to your article using the article title as your anchor text. The best internal links are ones contained within your content (where the surrounding content relates to the link) .

4. Make it easy for others to link to your article

Encourage your readers to refer your article to others by providing the html code (containing your link text) to place in their web pages. You also use javascript code to syndicate your articles. Include bookmarking icons at the end of your article for easy bookmarking.

5. Create an RSS feed

RSS (really simple syndication) allows your readers to easily be notified when a new article is added to your website. If your blog or website was built with WordPress software then it already has RSS built into it. Every time you add new content the software automatically alerts the search engines.

6. Optimize your content

Search engines spider and index your content based on keywords. Before writing each article research the keywords people use to find information on the Web. Make sure these keywords receive a good number of searches each month. Weave these keywords into the title, article body and resource box of each article. This increases the chances of your article receiving good rankings in the search engines.

7. Write guest articles

Blog owners are constantly looking for new content to maintain their visitor’s interest. Offer a to be a guest writer for a blog that compliments your own site and receives lots of traffic. This will generate powerful incoming links to your own website.

If you implement these link building strategies on a regular basis you’ll see your rankings and traffic steadily increase.

Related articles
How to Syndicate Web Content With JavaScript
Syndicate Web Content Using An iFrame
How to Syndicate Your Articles Online

*************************
Improve your link popularity by learning the correct methods
for writing, optimizing and publishing your articles.
Visit Article Marketing Strategies

Most webmasters focus exclusively on getting good rankings in Google because it’s what most people use when doing a search. By ignoring the other major search engines you lose the visitors that don’t use Google. Bing and Yahoo also attract a great number of people. Recently Bing improved it’s market share so it’s worthwhile pursuing link building strategies for this search engine.

Link Building Strategies for Bing

Be careful how you acquire links to your web site. If Bing detects a sudden massive increase in links it may trigger a spam filter and handicap your ranking potential. Don’t link to sites that are unrelated to your own. Bing rewards you for relevancy. For example if your site is about camping seek out blogs, forums, etc that relate to camping.

Here are some link building tips recommended by the Bing community

• Develop your site as a business brand and be consistent about that branding in your content
• Identify relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media people and let them know about your site and its content

• Write and publish concise, informative press releases online as developments warrant

• Publish expert articles to online article directories

• Participate in relevant blogs and forums and refer back to your site’s content when applicable (Note that some blogs and forums add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to links created in user-generated content (UGC). While creating links to your content in these locations won’t automatically create backlinks for search engines, readers who click through and like what they find may create outbound links to your site, and those are good.)

• Use social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect to industry influencers to establish contacts, some of whom may connect back to you (be sure you have your profiles set up with links back to your website first)

• Create an online newsletter on your site with e-mail subscription notifications

• Launch a blog or interactive user forum on your site

• Join and participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums

• Ultimately, strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry and let people know that your website contains your published wit and wisdom

Source
Link building for smart webmasters

Link building must be done consistently and frequently to be effective. Make a goal of acquiring new incoming links each week while constantly adding new content.

Also read SEO Marketing Tactics to Generate Web Site Traffic

************************
Boost your backlinks, traffic and sales
with my SEO Services