SEO and Website Design.

WEBSITE DESIGN OF PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE IN SEO?

These days I have come upon a lot of websites which might not have an aesthetically appealing look but still manage to draw enough traffic. So the most important question is whether ‘Design of Websites is all that important’.

From SEO view and Search Engine point of view, web design is not all that important. After all Google bots and spiders that crawl through your websites will not have any appreciation of the aesthetic elements of Website design. They are looking for content and all that FLASH stuff in your websites including the cool pictures that you have put is not going to have any impact in search engine ranking.

But that leaves out the most important factor for traffic generation – The Human Element. A poorly designed site might not catch the retentivity of your viewers. So repeat visits and the social viral form of advertising will come down drastically. How many of your visitors are going to StumbleUpon or Digg or Socially book mark your site , if it doesn’t capture their imagination. So you might tend to lose a lot of traffic that way.

Because a poorly designed site doesn’t capture the viewers interest, your Ads (Google Adsense , Bidvertiser) could tend to stand out. The viewer in frustration could click the ads to see something relevant. That way you could generate some revenue. Let us call it the disinterested viewer adsense revenue.

So where do I stand. Let me summarize my perspectives on the subject briefly.

1). A poorly designed site but optimized for Search engines will bring a lot of First Time traffic. These first time viewers would in frustration click the ads to get something relevant. Since the ads would be context based, the clicking of the ads would lead to some viewer satisfaction and hence all is not lost.

2). A poorly designed site will rate very poorly in Brand value. Hence no viewer will take the trouble to socially bookmark the site. A very important form of viral traffic, which otherwise would have come to the site, had it been properly designed, is lost.

So what are the lessons that one can learn from here.

1). Don’t spend a fortune in designing your website. Make it decent enough to hold the attention span of your viewer. Content is King. Remember that always.

2). Try not to make your website cool. A cool website is good to look at. But many of your first time visitors will not have the patience to wait for the whole page to load. They will leave in disgust probably never to return again.

Make your website content worthy and Search Engine Friendly.

FREE WEB ANALYTICS TOOLS

Crazy Egg : Crazy Egg will help you improve the design and conversion funnel of your website by showing you where people are clicking and where they are not through heatmaps and click patterns.

Website Conversion Rate Calculator: The website conversion calculator evaluates the conversion rate for your website using a number of variables. Features a downloadable file to use on your desktop.

SiteSkan by EpikOne: SiteScan provides a free audit of your website to ensure that your Google Analytics tracking code is configured properly. Simply enter your website URL.

Google Analytics URL Builder: For those of you using Google Analytics, use this analytics URL Builder to help track Yahoo and MSN paid search ads.

Google Analytics: The new Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

Vendor Discovery Tool: You can utilize Free Analytics Tool to search a specified URL for the presence of different hosted analytics vendors both paid and free.

WASP - Firefox Extension: This Web Analytics Solution Profiler is a specialized Firefox extension targeted toward web analysts and web analytics implementation specialists.

Ethnio: Ethnio is a friendly new way to recruit people from your website for usability studies, marketing studies, surveys and focus groups.

Google Adwords CTR Validator: This validation tool allows you to determine whether or not you have enough campaign history and impressions to eliminate a lower performing ad copy.

Google Website Optimizer Duration Calculator: Utilize this handy calculator to estimate the potential duration of your website optimizer experiment. Try out various numbers of combinations and see how they affect the length of the experiment.

Importance Of Linking Building For SEO

Importance Of Linking Building For SEO
by: Paul J Coulter



The easiest way of improving your ranking in the search engines is to let them know that your site is important. How do you do that? Well, the best way is through the process of link building. Link building is the practice of encouraging other websites to link to your own website. If other websites are linking to your website, your “link popularity” will increase, search engines will deem your website important, and in turn, you should receive more traffic. Link building is a time consuming task, and it is for this reason that most all websites rank so poorly in the search engines. Many website owners are unaware that link popularity can have such an effect on their search engine rankings. This is good new for you. Start building your links now and establish your “web cred”.

Importance of Page Rank

Google, the Internet’s most popular search engine, measures a website’s link popularity through the use of Page Rank. To view a website’s Page Rank, just download the Google Toolbar. The toolbar will display the Page Rank of every website you visit, measured as a little green bar. A website’s Page Rank can vary from a low of zero to a high of 10. Don’t worry if your website has a low, or no Page Rank. Many websites only have a Page Rank of 1 or 2, but the Internet’s most popular websites possess a Page Rank of 8 or 9.

Quality Counts

Search engines are not just looking for the number of links that point to a website. The most important aspect of the process is obtaining quality links. Quality links are links from website that possess a high Page Rank. Obtaining a link from a website with a high Page Rank is best, although any site with 1 or above is beneficial. Search engines also consider the theme of a website which links to you. It is best to get links from websites that are associated with the industry in which you do business. For example, my trade is website design; therefore, I work to obtain the majority of my links from other web design related websites.

Getting Links

One of the best ways to advance your link popularity is to offer quality and informative content to your visitors and hope for natural links. If they find the information interesting enough, they will naturally link their website to your own.

Directory submissions are probably the fastest and easiest way to obtain some inbound links. But, because Internet directories link to thousands of other websites, the value that they can add to your Page Rank gets diluted by all the other links. The one must-submit-to directory is The Open Project Directory (http://www.dmoz.org). After this, it is best to search for smaller niche or local directories. Submitting your website to Canadian, Ontario, and even Windsor web directories will help let the search engines know which region(s) you are servicing. Then, you should submit to industry related directories to indicate to the search engines your line of business. A Google search can help you find these types of directories.

If you feel that you have a knack for writing, a good way to generate inbound links to your website is to write articles. These articles can then be submitted to article syndication websites, where other webmasters are free to use your article on their website. But, there’s a catch – they must provide a link back to your website in return for using the article. If you don’t have the time or drive to write an article, but you participate in an industry related discussion forum, you’re in luck. Just remember to include a link to your website in your signature.

The last way to generate quality inbound links is through reciprocal linking. This type of strategy involves contacting other webmasters and proposing a link exchange. Find some non-competitive, but related websites and simply e-mail them to see if they are interested. It’s best to already have their link on a page in your website before the proposition.

Linking Text Is Important

When employing any of the above linking approaches, it is imperative that you try to use targeted key words as part your link. The search engines read this text to determine what your website is all about. If your website involves “Red Widgets”, try to use this as part of your link text.

Conclusion

Link popularity is very important when attempting to rank well in the search engines. Link analysis is only going to get more important to search engines, not less.

This type of strategy is resistant to manipulation and justifiable way to measure a website’s importance. Therefore, the link building process must be given high priority in your Internet marketing efforts, and since it takes time, the sooner you begin the better.


About The Author
Paul Coulter owns and operates a Toronto Website Design company that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO). http://www.ekonline.com/.

The Easiest Way to Create Articles? Use Public Domain!

The Easiest Way to Create Articles? Use Public Domain!
Author: Tom Ambrozewicz Author Ranking Bronze

There are many webmasters that find writing articles for their site to be a very tedious task. Many people who need to write articles also procrastinate as much as they can to delay the amount of writing they need to do. Many people dread writing articles because they find researching for the topic and writing down original materials will be too taxing on them.

You need to have your creative juices flowing and simply downloading an article would be plagiarism or tantamount to stealing, not exactly. Have you ever heard about public domain? These are articles written down by many authors that have declared their works to be public domain, which means anybody can use it for whatever purpose they want.

While most authors would prefer to copyright their work for their rights, there are also a number who does not mind sharing their work. Public domain articles are not owned by anybody and can be used and abused by anyone. The writers have waived their rights to their works and it is out there for the public to make use of.

You can use public domain articles in helping you write your articles. With the public domain articles you can simply edit them to your own style and rewrite them as you please to make it suitable for your needs. All the ideas are there already and its just a matter of finding the write article with the topic or subject you need.

This is probably the easiest way to write articles. You do not need to scour around the library or the internet for hours for information and start an article from scratch. For webmasters who are looking for articles to fill their site and to generate a high ranking for their website in search engine results, they can just modify the article by infusing keywords and keyword phrases related to their site.

A webmaster or website operator do not risk any chance of getting sued for copyright infringement because they are public domain, once again meaning that anybody can use it. Writing articles by using public domain wont require as much work as writing one from scratch would. You save a lot of time also.

One good factor in using public domain articles for your site or for any project is that you save a lot of money. You dismiss the need to hire experienced and seasoned writers that some website operators use to write their articles. While a single five hundred worded article would only set you down 10 to 15 dollars, this cost will drastically increase when you need hundreds of articles to fill the needs of your site.

For those who needs articles to generate newsletters or ane-zine, public domain articles will be very beneficial. You do not need to count on your contributors or pay writers to write down articles for your newsletter or e-zine. You can fill all the pages without any cost or the worry of being sued and sought after by the writers. You can simply copy the articles and place them on your newsletter and e-zine.

Public domain articles are a virtual untapped resource that many people fail to realize the true value. The power of articles, keywords and keyword phrases have been deemed invaluable these past few years for many internet based businesses and sites that want to rank high in search engine results.

The number of article and content writers have grown significantly due to the rise in the demand for articles. As newer and newer topics and subjects have arisen, there are many demands for new articles to be written. An industry has been formed and this is a worldwide demand.

Public domain articles have given a great alternative for those who are cash strapped as well as do not have the time nor the skills to do their articles for themselves.

Searching for public domain articles is as easy as 1 2 3. You can search for them in search engines and do searches in many directories for the topic or subject that you need. Read them and simpy copy paste them to a word processing program and simply edit them to suit your needs.

About the Author:
Tom Ambrozewicz is CEO/President of http://www.AffiliateMarketingScript.com and developer of unique "Cascade-Funel" approach for affiliate market products. Check out the public domain software he is using: Public Domain Prowler

5 Crucial Things You Need to Check Before Choosing a Web Host

5 Crucial Things You Need to Check Before Choosing a Web Host
By Nate Atkins

Choosing a web host can get to be pretty hard, especially because there are so many web hosting companies fighting for your business. Choosing a web host is a big responsibility and making the right decision is crucial to both your business' and websites' success. When choosing a web host there are a few things you should be looking at before making your decision.

Disk space is the amount of space allocated on the server hard drive for you. When looking at disk space you will want to keep in mind the size of the website files stored on your backup drive or computer drive. This will give you a rough estimate of how much disk space you will need.

Keep in mind also about future expansions or additions to your web site. If you have things like forums or other user input features on your site you will have to allow for the expansion and growth of this added material as well. For the most part web hosting companies offer at least 250gb which is quite a bit if your talking about data and text, however if your website deals with images and videos this may run out very quickly.

Bandwidth is how much data usually expressed in gigabytes can be transferred over the web hosting network in any given month. This feature is very important, and can get fairly costly if you under estimate your average monthly bandwidth needs. A good way to get a fairly good estimate on your monthly bandwidth needs is to get your average page size and then multiply that by the average number of page views per month.

EX. Average Page Size = 150kb, Average Monthly Page Views = 50,000. This would mean that each month you are using about 7.3GB of transfer a month It is also very important to note that if you have any include files or dynamically generated pages you will need to add the size of every piece of data that appears on that page when it has been loaded in the web browser.

Supported Scripts are going to be a key feature when choosing the type of web hosting (Linux or Windows). Web development languages used to create your website are based on the goals you are trying to accomplish as well as the programmer who is creating the site. Some languages and scripts are not supported on Linux and others on Windows.

If your website uses a lot of windows based scripts and programs, you will have to choose a Windows based platform. These scripts and languages include CGI, ASP, MSSQL, MS Access etc. If your website is based on open source scripts and tools such as PHP, MySql, Python you will have to go with a Windows platform.

Customer Service is in my opinion one of the most important features to look at when choosing a web host. The reason I say this is because there is nothing more frustrating and potentially damaging to a business than when a problem occurs that affects your website and you have to wait an hour to talk to tech support, and when they answer they are unprofessional and it takes technical support days to fix the problem. The second biggest frustration with poor customer support is talking to a representative that is not knowledgeable, and is very rude. Customer support is a deal breaker for me when it comes to choosing a web host. If you have great services but poor customer support, then I'm sorry but you won't get my business.

Price for pretty much all of us is one of the most important parts of finding and selecting a web host. We are always looking for a great deal but you do have to remember that if a deal is too good to be true than it more than likely is. Some of these web hosting companies offering hosting for $3/mo are more than likely able to do this because they have skimped somewhere else like customer support, added features, not up to date equipment or whatever. I'm not saying by any means that they are all like that but you really just have to do your homework and make sure they are following proper business practices.

Selecting an appropriate web host can be very difficult however; it will definitely pay off in the end. Websites offering web host reviews are another good way to review what the company offers and to see what the reviewer rated the hosting company.

My name is Nate, I have been working in web development for over 5 years and also have a diploma in computer programming. One of the most important parts of web development is making your website "LIVE". I have created the website webhostlowdown.com in order to bring to you full reviews on web hosting companies, and supply you with articles to help you make more money online, increase traffic to your website, and much more. If you are looking at starting your own website or need help establishing your website on the net I would encourage you to visit my website

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nate_Atkins

How to Choose the Best Hosting Provider For Your Blog By Tinh Tran

Nowadays, there are a lot of hosting providers that can offer you a lot of benefits if you use their services but you will never know whether their offers are what they have promised or not. Further, your requirements and your expected hosting providers' availability sometimes do not meet. That is why you need to know it before you make any purchase by any sources like reading web hosting articles for example or hosting reviews.

I myself have experienced with several hosting companies even free hosting providers. They offer a huge amount of space and unlimited bandwidth with 99,99% uptime and free domains for life. You can also host unlimited accounts on this package but they tell a lie. The server is down many times a week with no reason or over allocated bandwidth while it is supposed to be unlimited. It is so funny. Therefore, you should refer to different sources and read web hosting tutorials or ratings about all hosting providers and choose the best one.

Last week, I have read several useful web hosting articles about some hosting providers and I found out that no hosting companies are perfect to some extent. They all have limitations either capacity or space or even allowed scripts that users can upload to server. Fortunately, I got one from those services that can fit my purpose of my blog. It does not offer huge space or bandwidth but many bloggers rated it as the top one.

Just a bit experiences on how to choose the best hosting provider for my blog and I think you should think of what you need and what the hosting companies can offer. Good luck to you all and do not hesitate to recommend any hosting providers that I can think of. Further, when you recommend me any hosting providers, please kindly send me the sources of the web hosting ratings related to that provider so I can take it into account for future reference.

See my detailed article here

Tran Van Tinh
http://vietblogviet.blogspot.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tinh_Tran

First Steps in Dealing With a Stolen Credit Card By Joe Farinaccio

If you're faced with handling the issue of a stolen credit card then you have to assume somebody is going to try and use the account. Call up the creditor immediately. You'll probably be advised to close that account number and replace it with a new one.

But doing only this may not be enough. Why? Because the thief may try and use your account number with other personal information of yours to tap, or alter, other accounts you have with them.

You can place a fraud alert on all accounts with that credit institution. If you have usernames and passwords for these accounts then update them. (Avoid using common usernames and passwords that include things such as your social security number, mother's maiden name, child's name or other family member's name.

As a general rule, establishing a password for your bank & financial accounts is a good thing. It's often possible to formally request that a password be required in for any action to take place with your accounts -- such as a withdrawals, name/address changes, billing information disclosures, etc.

Request that the institution call you whenever anyone tries to apply for credit in your name. This credit alert might say something like, "Please contact me immediately at this phone number before issuing any new credit. All credit applications must be validated and personally authorized by me."

You want to monitor the activity in all your financial accounts, especially withdrawals. Report any unauthorized transactions or suspicious activity to the security department of your financial institution immediately if any issues arise.

Go ahead and file a police report too. You may not want to do this. After all, it's just one credit card, right?

Wrong.

If you do find yourself having to purge your credit profile of fraudulent accounts then you're going to have to "prove" these accounts weren't really yours to begin with. This is where a police report comes in handy.

Just know that when it comes to identity theft, both creditors and credit reporting agencies want to see accounts you identify as being fraudulent on a police report.

Vigilance must be maintained. And unfortunately, one can never rest assured they're 100% in the clear when it comes to preventing identity theft. Many gaps and holes exist in the system allowing people to be victimized. But doing your part may prevent a stolen credit card situation from becoming a full-blown identity theft nightmare.

Joe Farinaccio is the author of "ID Theft 911: Step-By-Step Instructions for Stopping Identity Fraud, Cleaning Up Your Credit Profile, and Getting Other Records Fixed" ... available at http://www.IdTheftHelp911.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Joe_Farinaccio

Web Hosting in India

There is a dearth of web page hosting and domain registration for Indians who want to host their own web pages. So, I thought I will do a little bit of surfing to see what Indian Web Host have to offer for Indians who want to host their own web pages.
I came across a few web hosting sites with yearly charges ranging from Rs 399 to Rs 5000 and even more. The reliability of their web servers is questionable. However lets see what we have got:-

a). http://www.webcomindia.net :-Webcom Systems is a premium Web Hosting company in India Delhi, providing quality managed web hosting in India, reseller hosting india and domain registration India. They specialise in low cost linux web hosting, windows website hosting india & cheap domain registration services all over india.They offer cpanel, helm or plesk control panels with quality support (whatever that means).

Linux Hosting (1 Gb Web Page) -Rs 999/-
Windows Hosting (1 Gb Web Page)- Rs 1499/-

b). http://www.znetindia.com:- They seem to have everything from domain registration , web page hosting to web page designing. Costs are from Rs 189/- per month upwards.

Do a Google search. You will come up with a host of companies offering the above mentioned services.

Google Cash Cows for Indians

Guys from India, there is a tremendous opportunity for all of you there, who are idling at home- especially students, house wives and dropouts from the Indian Educational System, to make grand bucks through Google's Mega Money making Advertising Pill "Google Adsense". People from abroad are making upto a thousand dollars a day, with nothing but a computer and basic writing skills. However the basic writing skills can also be given a nod. These days there are websites offering free articles, which can be posted in your website as long as the credit goes to the orginal author. I have started this blog for all the beginners in Google Adsense/referral programs to start earning money while surfing. The information that I am presenting here, might not be original content, but gleamed from the web pages of WWW.com.
Happy milking the Google Cash Cow or nee I Say Milking the WWW.com