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Learn to Build Websites

Editor — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:35:56 +0000

Let’s face it. This is the technology age and few businesses are going to get anywhere if they don’t take the time to learn to build a web site.

Fortunately, there are a lot of tools available, such as Dreamweaver and Site Build It that can help any beginner build and market a website. However, before doing anything you will need to answer questions such as:

Why do you want a website?
Will it be to sell products and attract new customers or will it just be a brochure for your company?
Will the website publish a newsletter?
How much are you prepared to pay to build and maintain the site, and will it be something you do yourself or outsource?

These questions are important because they help you to determine the purpose of your website and a site must have a purpose, otherwise it can do your business more harm than good.

Once you have a good understanding of your website’s purpose, you are going to need to decide where you will host the site and its domain name. When choosing a web hosting company, don’t go for the cheapest or the one with the most features. Go for what you need at the time, and always go for a provider that will allow you to upgrade your package seamlessly. Most providers bundle basic web hosting with a variety of web services like email, newsletters, databases and combine them into packages or hosting plans.

Choose your domain name very carefully. It’s your company’s identity on the web so make it relevant to your company, product, or project. Keep the name short and simple, and if possible keep to about five characters. Also include keywords; keywords are what people enter when searching the net. The Internet is global so choose a name that has positive connotations in all languages.

As a business, it’s best to have your own domain name, which you will have to pay for. Most ISP connection packages along with web hosting space, offer free personal websites. The problem is, your domain name shares their name. For example, you have probably seen websites with an address like, mysite.yahoo.com . This kind of domain name is common for personal or hobby sites, but not ideal for a business.

The credibility that having your own domain name, such as mysite.com, brings to your site is worth the extra cost.

Now you have your domain name and where your site will be hosted. The next step is designing and building the site. A complicated, hard to navigate design will only turn visitors away. Here is where the less is more concept works well.

Watch your choice of background colors. Make sure your background/text color combination is readable. You don’t want readers to squint to see the words on the page, and use black text, or very dark colored text on a white or very light colored background. Save the white on black backgrounds for pages that don’t have a lot of text on them.

Another thing to consider is setting the tone of your website by using mood colors.

It’s believed that certain colors invoke a certain mood so take advantage of that. For example, green is usually referred to as a “concentration” color. You can use color to make your visitors feel energized, relaxed and focused. Here again remember, simplicity is the best.

Ok, now your website is designed and up, it’s time to start promoting it. This is where answering the questions about the purpose of your website comes in handy.

If the purpose of your website is to serve as a brochure, then your best bet is to advertise offline and just refer your clients to the website for more details instead of sending them a brochure

However, if the purpose of the website is to bring in new clients and sell more products, then you need to actively promote your website. At the very least, submit your website to the three major search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. These are free.

Other promotional options include banner advertising, feeder sites – using other sites that you own and link them to your website – and RSS feeds — “Really Simple Syndication.” It is a new way for content publishers to distribute content.

The idea behind promoting your website is to monetize, which means using the site to make money.

Contextual advertising, such as Yahoo! Publisher Network is by far the easiest way to monetize a website. It’s because you just need to paste code provided by Yahoo! into your web page.

Contextual advertising, not only generates revenue, but provides valuable resources for the website visitor, as the adverts are target adverts that relate to the web page content.

Another option is affiliate programs. It can be very lucrative, but they are not the easiest method to use for beginners. Affiliate programs are an arrangement in which a company pays you a percentage of the sale for every online customer they get through a link from your website to theirs.

With all these tools set up and working, you just need to maintain and monitor your site from now on.

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Reach for the Top of Search Engine Rankings

Editor — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:28:26 +0000

Rosa wants to learn about dogs – Cocker Spaniels in particular. She goes online, visits Google and types in Cocker Spaniels, and in return Google spits back a list of sites on her subject. This is done by millions of people every day using a variety of search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.. But what factors determine which sites rise to the top of search engine rankings?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is about making sure your site is listed on the top of the search engine’s results. Search engines are compiled of databases put together by computer programs called spiders. These spiders crawl all over the web, going from site to site, indexing each site they visit.

Some search engines list the results of a user search according to link popularity – which site has the most links from other sites. Others organize data according to information contained in the sites meta tag, while others base their results on common themes. Usually a site will use a combination of these and other methods to sort the results, so it’s to your benefit to also use a combination of factors. Just a word of caution about overusing anyone of these methods, it will only work against you.

Link popularity is like a kid in school. The more people who hang around you the more popular you are. In this case the more other sites link to your site, the more popular you are and the higher your rankings on search engines.

Like in school, you can improve your popularity by developing a campaign asking other kids to be your friends/ other websites to link to you. Unfortunately, if you remember from your school days, this is not always successful; it’s the same on the World Wide Web. Link popularity campaigns can be time-consuming and complicated if you don’t have a clear plan of action.

Try instead to make “friends” with those sites that are relevant to your web site. Think of it as making friends with people that like the same things you do. Do a search and look at what the search engines rank as experts in that field. Contact the owners of these sites and ask to link to them and maybe in return they will link to you. Also check out your competitor site and see who links to them.

For those who aren’t familiar with HTML this may just be gibberish, but it has a name. It’s called a Meta Tag, and having it in your HTML coding helps search engines immediately get an idea of what your site is about, and incorporate the tags in their algorithms. Some search engines also list a summary on their results pages, so readers can see what the site is about and what keywords apply to it. For this reason choose your words carefully, make sure it’s something that will entice the reader to read more.

When describing the site in a meta tag, place the keywords at the beginning of your description and close to each other to achieve the best possible ranking, and try limiting the number of characters you use between 150 and 250. Limit the number of keywords you repeat in a meta description to three to seven times. Anything over that could be viewed as spam by the search engines, and the site will be banned from most of the major search engines.

Finally there are themes, which are actually important keywords used consistently throughout the site. These keywords can be placed in Meta Tags, the website’s title or in the body. Search engines look for these keywords to get information about the site’s themes, which also plays a part in the ranking process.

As with meta tags, avoid spamming. The general suggestion is to repeat keywords in the title or meta tag three to seven times, and in the body, keywords should make up three to seven percent of all the words in text.

For those who would like more information on SEO and how to make it work for them Search Engine Optimization for Dummies can serve as a good starting point.

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Marketing Your Website for Increased Traffic

Editor — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:25:33 +0000

You have spent months preparing your website. You’ve got the text, the wording, the images just right. Finally your small business has an online presence. Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for the visitors to come in. This seems to be the common belief people have about a website. They think once they build it; the traffic, and the money will automatically follow.

Not true.

To really be successful on the web, a small business owner is going to have to go out there and promote his/her website both online and offline. Fortunately, they are a number of popular marketing tools that make it easy to increase traffic. A lot of theses strategies are discussed in Justin Michie’s Street Smart Internet Marketing.

One of the best things you can do for yourself is to make sure your website has content. Many businesses use the web as a billboard ad, which in the end can be annoying and a waste of time to visitors. You need specific information to generate traffic. For example, if your website is about a pizza place, then list the company’s menu, background information about the owner, and directions to the store. This is the sort of information visitors will find useful.

There are also a number of simple and inexpensive things you can do to make your website rank high on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Basically, you want to give the search engines an abundance of clues about your webpage, so it easily pops up in a search.

First write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words, and remove any filler words such as “the” and “and” if possible. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found, and the more people see that which interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link. Also make sure that the title is in the text of your website, not just within a graphics file.
The same text rule applies for keywords which is the second way to give search engines clues. Write a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using main keywords and key phrases. Also make sure to use keywords in the first paragraph of the body text because search engines look for and expect this, and make sure these keywords are hyperlinked. Hyperlinks in the body text is usually viewed as being important and is emphasized by the search engine. Finally, develop several webpages on your site, each of them focused on a different keyword or key phrase. These pages will rank higher for their keywords since they contain targeted rather than general content.

Once you’ve done all this, don’t forget to submit your URL to search engines that automatically index the web such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search, and Ask.com.

Other ways to use the web to market your website is by linking to key directories using online discussion groups that you are actively a part of. Look for other sites with the same key interest or in the same industries and ask the webmaster that specific page(s) of theirs be linked.

By participating regularly in online groups, you will help to build a reputation for your website as a valuable resource. As a word of caution, don’t just use the board to make announcements about your website, be a member of the community. It will only benefit you in the long run.

Also don’t underestimate the power of your email, so establish a signature. Most e-mail programs such as AOL, Netscape, and Outlook allow you to designate a “signature” at the end of every mail you send out. Limit this signature to company name, address, phone number, URL, e-mail address, and a one-phrase description about the company.

This same principle works offline. Make sure to list your website on all literature and publications — business cards, letter head, newsletters, fax cover sheets. Even add the website address to the company’s voicemail message.

Basically, use any way you can to get your website address out, blogging, podcast, taking out ads in your local newspaper. It will all work with some patience and persistence.

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