Sunday, July 30, 2006

Have You Human Tested Your Newly Designed Website?

Creating an amazing looking site is not enough. You may feel your work is done once you have designed a website with all the right ingredients like good, relevant and fully optimized content as well as graphics and keywords. But is that all? No, there is still something left to be done and that is testing your website to ensure that all the hardwork and efforts you have put in creating it have attained you goal-getting visitors.

One of the most important things to be done after initial creation of the content is the proof reading of it so that you may check the document for any grammatical, spelling or spacing mistakes. And the best way to do it is to pass the work created by you to someone else who has never read that content before. The reason behind this is that when you try to proof read your own document, you already expect what you are going to see and do not read it objectively as a total stranger in its entirety.

Similarly the visual appeal of the website also needs to be shown to someone else to see whether the graphics, images are appealing, distracting, too loud, or too subtle. Others will be able to tell you objectively whether the layout is too busy or confusing or not very impressive.

The benefit of human testing you site is that it gives you a clear picture as to how easily or with difficulty your navigation works for others. It is these other average, normal people who can tell you exactly what they felt when they were having a tour of your site. If they easily and comfortably find your website without any problem, you can feel happy and satisfied on having passed the navigation test. But if people had a lot of difficulty reaching the desired pages, then you need to sit and rework on the navigation structure right away before moving ahead.


The idea is to place the navigation links and buttons in such a way that the visitors can easily come back to the home page or products/services page easily and without wasting much time.

Next comes the testing of the content because that is one of the single most important factors in website creation . You are trying to sell some services or products through your website. But if the offer is not made clearly and in an easy to understand manner, you will not be able to generate any targeted traffic, leave aside selling your products or services. You need to see how average visitors view a website, how their eyes scan and follow the information, which are the best advertising positions, etc.

The importance of having a human tester test your website is paramount because it gets you feedback that is genuine and real. When you view or test your own site, you can't help being biased as you have created it yourself. A stranger will give you insight and tips that might help you understand the dynamics of how visitors view your site a little better. Having a feedback form in your contact page will be a professional
and effective way to know what the visitors like or dislike about your site and any suggestions they have for improving your site.

http://www.segnant.com/

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Reciprocal Link Building- How Much Beneficial Is It?

Everything in life has its advantages and disadvantages. It depends upon you whether you tap the beneficial aspect of a thing or not. Reciprocal link building is also one of the web marketing strategies that has its pros and cons. And to be honest, to some extent, it does help. Anyone who creates a new website is showered all the attention by people to link to their websites in exchange of their linking to your website. It is for you to see whether the websites requesting you to link to them are really worth it or not. No doubt, reciprocal link exchange program forms a very essential part of SEO as search engines do consider the number and type of sites linking to your site while ranking your site.

The fact that by linking to each other, the websites are promoting and popularizing each other's site on the net is fast diminishing in it's popularity now.The reason being that search engines today have become much more smarter and efficient in discerning the links that are being received by websites. So it has become all the more important today to first check and double check the credentials of the website that is offering to link to you before you link to a fraud or banned or harmful website.

The best way to ensure that you are linking to a good, reliable and related website, ask your self the following two questions, and if the answer to them is yes, go ahead and link to the website concerned.

1. Visit the website requesting to link to your site and ask yourself whether that website is relevant to yours. If the answer is in affirmative, good. Otherwise keep in mind that linking to this site will not get you better or higher rankings.

2. Also question yourself whether it is a quality website and the kind of site to which you would like to link to or which will improve your site's popularity and reach. A negative response to this also means that you will be wasting your time linking to this website.

3. One more factor that you should consider is whether the requesting website has already added your website to it or not. If it has not done so while requesting you, it means that site is not very serious about adding your link to it and just want you to link to it.If it has already linked to your site, this means it is genuine and is seriously interested in reciprocal link exchange with you.

On the whole, there is no harm in link exchange program as long as you are linking to reliable, trustworthy and relevant websites. But do keep in mind the fact that reciprocal linking is no longer so hot an SEO technique as in the past and therefore it is advisable to treat or use it in a very restricted way.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

For Search Engine Promotion, there is no shortcut to success

You have recently launched a website and wondering why it is countering a random success. This is a situation to not to feel panicky or frustrated, you just need a strategy to promote your site to search engines and to visitors. By following five action oriented steps, which are also the most important considerations, you can give your site a boost.

Understanding the site's objectives

What do you expect from your website?
The answer is-clearer your objectives are the more you will be able to focus on the site’s selling points. In the case of commercial sites, the broader objective should be clear-cut. Here the broader objectives are inclusive of educating, motivating, persuading and informing the online customers. Once the objectives of your site are determined give them their due importance during the entire development of an SE promo strategy. Make sure the objectives are clear to search engines and they spider your site in their first crawl.


Making your sales demography - Market Analytics

It is very important to determine who you are trying to reach through your site. Is it a particular community or global audience? What are the requirements of the members of your demography and what influences their purchasing decisions. To know your market is the third most important promotion strategy after designing and implementing. The best you can do to enhance your promo strategy is to know how your competitors perform. Google can tell you accurately and ethically how the successful sites perform. As a matter of fact the development of multi-dimensional metrics is useful in every step of the design, development and SE optimization phases because they provide the raw data, number of hits, average number of pages viewed, and ratio of visitors to buyers.


On-page Factors

An accomplished site is not one day job. Its accurate execution is planned where organic SEO, CSS, and other On-Page factors play a dominant role. The search engine spiders may vary in their algorithm but regardless of their dissimilarity what they look for is a simpler and clearer site. Simpler and cleaner coding assures that your site will be assessed and ranked properly. Simultaneously beware of black hat tactics. They are not only inept but also costly and may get you banned from SEs altogether

Incorporating these on-page factors come into existence when a site is designed. They also play a crucial role in the development and testing phases and after the site's launch. During the site’s further refinement, optimization, and content updates On-page factors again play an important role


Interpretation of the Home Page

Once the technical aspects have been taken care of, next comes your presentation also known as your home page. The clarity of your presentation can make or break a site irrespective of how well you have designed your website technically or aesthetically. Simple navigation, user-friendly site, buttons and links clearly labeled, uncluttered presentation, spider-friendly site map etc are some of the important requisites of an accomplishing website. Color combinations, type font and size, header placement, number of headers, type placement and the tone of the content are other important factors. A successful search engine promotion also depends on keyword density and other SE search parameters.

Promotion and Optimization

Once your site is launched, this is just the beginning- the beginning of a cutthroat competition. Here you just need to be promising and ethical. Your efforts to promote your site to search engines and to potential buyers will depend on your strategies. If you do not know about SEO services, the professionals can cater to your needs; help you develop useful metrics and strategies for improved site performance; help you optimize the sites to enhance your conversion rates.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Cloaking: Undignified And Unethical way of Improving Search Engine Rankings

How would you feel when you go out to buy something in the market and the seller talks all good things about the product that you want to buy. But as soon as you buy that product and try to use it, you find many things that the seller didn't disclose to you purposely fearing that you may not buy the product. That's exactly what cloaking means. Its root word is cloak that means a clothing piece or robe to hide yourself. And that's what cloaking in SEO means. Google defines cloaking as "a website that returns altered webpages to search engines crawling the site." The intention behind cloaking is to return different pages to the users from that sent to the search engines. In other words, cloaking is like withholding information deliberately. The content is distorted and misleading for the users as what they hoped to find on the page differs from what they actually find. The major search engines consider this as highly unethical and take strict action against web sites indulging in cloaking. They may even ban the website using cloaking to earn higher search engine rankings. When a web site owner tries to show one version of a page to the user and another version to the search engines, he is indulging in deceptive marketing strategies. But this heinous practice being used just to get higher rankings in the search engines challenges the very accuracy of search results and algorithms. If search engines do not provide quality information to the users, the users will lose faith in them and wouldn't know where to find relevant information. The very purpose of the world wide web to provide worthwhile information would be rendered useless. When there are more ethical and better options for increasing the visitor traffic of your web site, why malign your name and hard work done till now to establish your brand entity by using short term and unethical strategies like cloaking. Refrain from it as it might earn you some more clicks, but that doesn't mean earning profits. You may rather damage your online reputation if the search engine bans you forever for cloaking.

http://www.segnant.com/




Sunday, July 09, 2006

Steps to Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Program

1. Always have a positive and fresh frame of mind and have confidence, faith in your capabilities as well as your belief that you can make money and earn profit from your affiliate marketing efforts.
2. Have knowledge, be in the know of the things, but don't be over confident or under confident. Marketing is a highly fluid and unpredictable kind of venture.What works today, may not produce results tommorow. Have your head firmly placed on the ground and utilize the knowledge gained in the right direction. Also remain updated about the latest trends in this area.
3. Google Adwords is a reliable and trustworthy agency to market your programs with as you earn a lot more in commissions than spending on PPC. In other words, you are still benefiting without losing anything.
4. Always set yourself apart from other affiliate programs so that people know you are different and better. For this, you will have to write your own articles, reviews, ads, etc instead of using the standard, available ones.
5. Always match your affiliate program with the content of your website or article or newsletter. The page having marketing content should promote and popularize the products and services on that page.


Apply these steps, either together or one by one, or even any one of them to your affiliate marekting programs and see the results. You are surely going to bless me when you see the wonderful results of your affiliate marketing program after using and abiding by these suggestions.

http://www.segnant.com/

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Using Writing As A Marketing Tool

Ever heard of that saying, "Pen is mightier than the sword". Whoever said it could not have been more correct or apt while saying it.And when it comes to web marketing, it is one of the most apt sayings. Writing articles online can turn your website into a gold mine, if you do it the right way and with the right ingredients in it. Usually webmasters prefer buying links or requesting other webmasters to link with them whereas they can very easily, without spending any money, boost their link popularity by just writing articles.

What it requires in terms of investment is only some quality time for writing the articles. The more webmasters that archive your articles, better page rank you receive. And that further leads to improving the ranking of your site in the search engines. So, did you see how by simply writing something informative and relevant to your site you can get high rankings and increase your page rank. Not only this, you save a lot of money that you would have otherwise spent in advertising. That's exactly what happens when you advertise in an ezine and on the other hand you have an article of your own for which you didn't pay a single penny.

The added advantage is the free publicity that you get for your business as writing informative and good articles that help people solve their problems or gives them extra knowledge or may be also help them make profit is something that they would love to invest their time andenergy in.

http://www.segnant.com/