The Role of a News Section in Increasing Online Visibility

New, fresh, and updated news is what people are hungry for. If you can feed their hungry minds with good, relevant, and latest news about your industry, you have increased the possibilities of your website's online visibility. And there is hardly any industry that would be devoid of latest or newest things happening in it. But very few people know how to encash upon the advantages of these latest happenings in different industries. The truth is that having an industry news section in your website can really improve your rankings. Companies and firms sign deals, get new contracts, accomplish unbelievable targets, innovate, and announce mergers, changes.

All you need to do is first create and name a subdirectory in the root of your site called "news" or "industry-news". Doing this, you make the search engines aware of tha fact that your site has good, updated content as news take place on a daily basis. When the search robots will come to your site, and find updated content everytime, they will definitely come back for more information as they love new and fresh content. In an online marketing world gone beserk with PPC and other paid strategies, this simple yet effective seo strategy will positively bring about more targeted traffic to your site and not costing even a fraction of what you might be paying for PPC and other paid campaigns.

Now you must be wondering how to get fresh and updated content everyday for your news section. Well, the answer lies in the question itself. What do your clients or customers do? They search manually on Google or other search engines. So you do the same. Find the news stories related to your industry, pick up the gist and crux of the story with a new title heading and place the link to the original story.

Also putting some of the latest news headlines of your news stories on the homepage, will make it easier for the search engines to find them faster. This means faster indexing and that further means faster traffic generation. Don't forget to leave all the headlines intact in your homepage because they will become a part of your news archive. Sites with new and updated content and news section get refreshed more frequently than the others without a news section. This can be ensured by checking your server log files. If you see a Googlebot or a 'crawler' with an IP address like 64.68.xxx.xx or something similar in them, you are doing well.

Basically, an industry news section that is cleansed, refreshed and updated regularly and daily does wonders to increase your sites' visibility and popularity.This will not only increase your link popularity in major search engines, but also people will like to visit your site more often to find out about the products or services you offer. In a way, you become an authority in your industry and people start respecting your views and verdict. You will be providing valuable news to your visitors and clients and become a sort of a news hub for them. And that is great thing to achieve!
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Business Blogs and Search Engines-In Love with Each Other

Hey readers blogs are 'in' these days. Today every business person-whether having a small, medium, or large business-is either writing or thinking of writing blogs for wider coverage and fetching more targeted traffic for his/her web site. As such search engines love blogs and business blogs complement search engines a lot. One of the benefits of business blogs is creating keyword-rich content of hundreds of pages having its own unique URL and title. Plus through these blogs you are also creating, updating, and adding new as well as fresh content to your site. In other words, you are providing change to the search engines everytime you create a blog. And the search engines are always on the look out for new content. Search engines like visiting sites with updated content. So whenever your site has something updated, you can invite blog directories to come and visit your site because it has been updated. This is called pinging. There is a site called Ping-O-Matic that sends messages or pings to multiple services which you can use too for inviting blog directories to your updated content. Another amazing feature or method of widely distributing your blogs is RSS. With RSS, you can syndicate your content to the subscribed audiences. In this way, you not only get to communicate directly with the subscribers, but also get your site noticed and indexed in major search engines. Another important aspect of blogging is linking. Links from other high quality blogs will send traffic and get your blog as well as web site noticed. So set up a blog, start posting, and and ping each time you make a new entry. Now submit your blog to the major blog and RSS directories and start looking for partners. Repeat this whole cycle.
Make the most out of this love affair of blogs with search engines before the affair goes sour or gets terminated. As they say,"Make hay while the sun shines", stands true for blogging also. If you want to ride high on the wings of popularity and higher rankings, learn the blog promoting techniques and start applying them. Because the blogs are here to stay for quite some time.

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How Important is Employing the Services of SEO Experts?

Well, if you ask me, I would say quite important. It's not that you cannot explore and apply the workings of SEO yourself. But keeping in mind the fact that an SEO firm exclusively dedicates itself to the cause of website optimization, it makes more sense to delegata the task of optimizing your website for keywords and phrase related to your site to an efficient SEO firm. Search engines have their own way of working, algorithms, policies, etc., and it will be very difficult for you to keep up with all these and manage your business at the same time. An seo expert is well versed with the nuances of search engines, their likings, dislikings, and the things that they are specifically looking for in web pages. In fact a good SEO company knows what different search engines want and how to give them that.

Not only this, an SEO expert knows the search engine market trends very well and they will update or make the changes in your web pages according to these changes taking place in the industry. It is a full time job for them to keep up with all the changes taking place that you with your busy schedule might not be able to do.

A professional SEO firm will do its homework first before submitting your site to search engines. It will research and analyse all possible angles and prepare ranking reports showing you exactly where you are positioned and whether that positioning is good or not.Even the resubmittions will be done after careful study and analysis.

Not only ranking reports, professional SEO firms also provide the clients with web site traffic analysis reports that shows you the kind of traffic you are getting and from where. This kind of information is important for you to measure the return on investment(ROI).

Besides the technical expertise extended to you, the seo experts also make the whole process of optimization hassle free, easy to understand, and convenient for you. They will explain everything in simple and uncomplicated way and provide you with important feedback, tips, suggestions and advice time and again.

To reiterate my opinion once again, though it is not impossible to do SEO on your own, but it requires a full time occupation. If you think you have the time and leisure to get involved in it full-fledged, just go ahead and do it. Otherwise, it is highly recommended to employ the services of an seo expert to top the Google results. In the long run, this investment would reap amazing benefits for you in terms of increased exposure and traffic on net and that could very well translate into better profits and revenue.

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Web Design Principles To Convert Visitors Into Customers: Part IV

Creating Relevant and Powerful Text

As we discussed the benefits of a well organized and constructed site as well as navigation structure in the last blog , in today's blog, we shift our attention towards text and its importance in web designing. If you think that people read each and every word of your website, you are living in a fool's paradise. It is one of the biggest misconceptions. People just scan information on the net.They are basically looking for some specific information and if they don't get it within the first two three paragraphs, they leave your site. Even if they have come to the right website, if they cannot find specific information regarding your company, products,services, pricing, special offers, discounts, or how to contact you, they will no longer go through the whole site.

Your message and conveying that message clearly and well can transform a visitor into a customer. Don't forget to include search options in order to make it convenient for the visitors to find what they are looking for easily. Also your contact information should be very easy to find and locate for the visitors, and also ensure that somebody is available to answer visitor queries and questions regularly. Keeping a likely customer waiting for information is something that you should never do. If nothing else, this surely will put an end to your business.

You should also grab the opportunity of emphasizing certain important aspects of your site. Decide which text needs emphasis so that it instantly catches the attention of your visitors. Don't give them a chance to look or search for information. Give them all important information first. This will help visitors to reach the pages on your site that you want visitors to see and thus increase chances of sales.

Another very significant principle of good web designing is speed. More the minimum download time for your site, more the visitors on your site. Time is everything in business; therefore, faster download speed is always better.

This marks the end of our continuing web designing principles' series. Happy Reading!

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Web Design Principles to Convert Visitors Into Customers: Part III

Right structuring of the site and Navigation Path

The last blog concentrated on the important interplay of graphics and text in the designing of a good website. But that's not all to good web designing. There are many such small, but significant areas, making changes in which can enhance the visibility of your website. Today, we will talk about site and navigation structures and how they play a very important role in website designing.

The structure of your site should not divert the visitors' attention in too many directions. It should lead the visitors to their desired destination. Imagine a story that has too many loose ends. What happens in such a scenario is that after some time people lose interest in the story as they cannot figure out the goal or crux of the story. Similarly, if the site structure is losely designed or is very complicated, the visitors will leave your site as quickly as they entered it.

The structure of your site should follow simple and logical steps that take the visitors to different connected sections in a very organized and easy manner.

The home page should be the starting point giving the visitors some basic information about your products or services. It should lead to the page that gives a detailed description of your products or services and explains the benefits of those products or services to the visitors.

This detailed information page should lead to a contact us or shopping cart page allowing the visitors to buy your products or services online or contact you for more information.

Just like the site structure, navigation structure of the site is also a very important aspect of good web designing that is neglected by many webmasters. In fact, good navigation structure can really make your business flourish online. The only thing you need to keep in mind is to make the navigation simple and easy to use.

Long pages may cause problem for the visitors, so it is advisable to put a menu at the bottom of the page so that the users don't have to scroll each time to reach the top of the menu.

Applying these really simple and cool strategies will definitely help convert the visitors to your site into customers. At least try them to see the difference.

Keep checking this space. There's still more to come in the next part of this web principles' series.

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Web Design Principles to Convert Visitors Into Customers:Part II

In the previous blog, we discussed how a well designed home page can make all the difference to your website's presence on search engines. Today, we will discuss about another important principle of web designing, i.e, Graphics. Internet is one medium where graphics and text play an equal role in conveying the message. On net, both content and graphics co-exist and complement each other to convince the web surfers. So it becomes pretty important to create graphics that gel with your products and services, and at the same time, don't overpower the web page. You need to strike a balance between content and graphics.

1 Make it a point to show clear, attractive, and interesting pictures of your product. You have to keep in mind the load time taken by the graphics. So, keep the graphic file size neither too large, nor too small. The idea is to present well balanced graphics to the users that best describe your product or service without taking too much time.

2 Select the correct format to store your graphics. In case your graphic has less number of colors, use GIF format. But then ensure that you are using reduced palette size too. So, if you are using 15 or less colors, your palette size should be 32 or less colors.

3. In case your image also has text, you should always use GIF format as JPEG uses loose compression method, thus making text and images blurred.

4 While saving the photographs, always save them as JPEG as this format can contain over 32 million different colors.

5 If you think that you need to add a large amount of text into the photographic image, then using JPEG format would be more sensible because that ways, the text will be atleast readable, though the edges may be a little blurred.

Keep in mind these simple graphics related suggestions, and make your website to be a well balanced combination of both graphics and text. What matters in a wesite is the logical flow of information that builds up visitor interest to know more about you and your products and services.

Keep reading the principles of good web designing. There's more to come in the next blog.

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Web Design Principles To Convert Visitors Into Customers:Part I

A good website is the need of the hour today. Internet has taken over our lives like never before. Name a thing, and you can find loads of information about it on the net. Today no business enterprise can think of offline presence only, having a website has become an inevitable part of building your business. Infact website today is synonmous with business. Let's discuss about the advanced web designing principles, one at a time, that can give an altogether new dimension to your business. Today, we will talk about the first principle of good web designing, i.e, the importance of Home Page in making a huge contribution to improving your business prospects.

Treat Your home page with respect

It is very rightly said that, "the first impression is the last impression". You try a new dish, if you don't like the first bite, you don't eat the rest of it. You start reading a book, but if the first chapter doesn't excite you enough, you leave it there and then. Then why not see the same principle working on the net also? It is simple and clear that if the home page of your site is too cluttered,unprofessional, and taking ages to load, nobody will stay there, leave aside read it.

1 Design a home page that pre-sells your likely customers the benefits of your products and services. Add the links to detailed information on the home page only.

2 If you are into selling too many things, you need to put the most important product or service on the home page and keep the rest for other pages. Otherwise the visitors will feel bombarded with too much information. Let the information float slowly yet spontaneously in the minds of the visitors. Otherwise they may forget half of the things that you mentioned on the home page.

3 Flash Intros. on the home page are a big no no. People just don't have the time or patience to see your creative work on the home page. They want information, and they want it fast. If you can't do away with the Flash, then allow the visitors to skip through it quickly. It shouldn't take a long time to load. People are not interested in elaborate, decorative visual movies on the home page, they need real stuff, i.e, information.

Try adhering to these simple yet effective pointers while designing your home page and see the results almost instantaneously in the conversion of your visitors into buyers.

We will discuss the second principle of good web designing in the next blog.

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Doorway Pages: Are They Really Worth It?

Imagine watching the trailer of a movie. It is very appealing and shows all the stuff that a hit movie is made of. But when you actually watch the movie, sometimes the story turns out to be quite different from what you saw in the trailer. Doorway pages may be considered somewhat similar to a movie trailer. The only difference in this comparison is that a trailor is meant for the public, and a doorway page is meant for a search engine and its spiders. It can be defined as any HTML page that is designed specifically to attract search engines to get higher rankings. These pages are invisible to the visitors and are meant for the vigilant eyes of the search engines only.

The question that arises now is whether these pages are worth the effort and time spent on creating them. Well, the answer is both yes and no. If, we look at the positive side of these pages' construction, we will realize that the whole concept of SEO is revolving around higher rankings and more traffic. There is no harm in optimizing your pages with rich content and arranging them in such a way that they are liked by search engines.

But if we turn to the horrible side of this story, creating doorway pages deliberately or accidently by filling it up with keywords, sentences and paragraphs that have nothing to do with the website just for the purpose of higher rankings is absolutely wrong. And sadly, many of the web sites that rank well today are banking upon the creation of such doorway pages that are full of useless jargon, keywords, phrases, meta tags etc. that have nothing to do with the websites' purpose, services , and products.

The important thing to understand here is that if you have a site with more than one pages, having efficient navigation system for easy access by the visitors, a naturally content rich site, good meta tags, an impressively written copy, and well placed keywords, you have already created ethical doorway pages for your site without wracking your brains for the creation of artificial, over attractive, and unreal doorway pages to trick search engines. Concentrate more on the meta tags and quality content in the body of all the pages in your site, and find your site reaching the pinnacle of high rankings.

Though webmasters still create doorway pages, remember the success from such pages is short lived and also you may be banned forever by the angry search engines, if they find out about your dirty 'doorway' into higher rankings.

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How to Optimize Dynamic Sites

Search Engines don't have good experience spidering and indexing dynamic websites that cause a lot of trouble to the search engines. Following the solutions given below in order to optimize the dynamic sites can make things easier for you:

1 Static URL for dynamic content- It is always preferable to use a static URL in order to reference dynamic content. The reason being that the search engines index the content of a static URL more readily than the same content on a dynamic URL.This URL rewriting not only helps in SEO, but also benefits in terms of usability and marketing. It is common sense that people remember, pass on and recollect a shorter and logical-appearing URL better than a long winding, dynamic URL.

2 Using Static URL for linking to dynamic URLs-This is specially helpful in case of smaller websites. So, if your site is not too big and elaborate, you can build a static site map page that contains links to dynamic URLs. This ways, the search engines will crawl those links, but may not move further. Better still, you can get other sites to link to your dynamic pages. Depending upon the pagerank of those sites, your dynamic pages will get indexed and ranked well.

3 Using PPC- You can also indulge in PPC (pay-per-click) campaign, if your budget allows. This will ensure that your pages are spidered frequently. But don't over indulge in this startegy as the costs can rise beyond your resources as the competition for keywords gets stiffer and narrower.

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