Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Brand your web site, business and yourself by submitting articles for SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the only way to brand your website and business on the internet. SEO amenable articles unavoidably hit the right keywords/phrases that are likely to be used by the people in search of corresponding services. A keyword-rich article raises the ranking of sites in various search engines by hitting as many keywords as possible. Higher the ranking more is the accessibility to the site. The articles need to be optimized because seldom, people check out web sites in the latter pages of search results.
Do You Know The significance Of Article Submission? The distribution of content brings your site new visitors and increases your popularity. Each article submitted gives you a golden chance to publicize your site in the about the author section. You can also submit your articles to top Web sites that promote your products/ services. Submitting your articles to directories is certainly a good course of action if you are interested in increasing the number of back links to your web page. Directories provide web visitors a one- stop zone to find the information, which increases the visibility of your website. One of the greatest benefits of submitting to directories is that the more links you have the higher search engines will rank your web page. It should be noted that it is not rare to get thousands of backlinks for each article submitted, with the increasing popularity of your article. It is normally perceived by the webmasters that their website derives traffic from the search engines. To some extent it is true, but every little bit of promotion helps and web directories can help you gain a big chuck of traffic. To be successfully listed in any web directory, the terms and conditions of the directory should be confirmed. To improve the chances of your listing being accepted a relevant category that is as close to your theme should be chosen.
The articles can also be branded submitting articles to e-zines where you can include your name, business name, your credentials, web site address and e-mail address. The uniqueness of your article might get extra exposure if the e-zine publisher archives their e-zine on their site. Your profits can get multiplied; your publicity can get enhanced, you can gain the trust of your visitors if you allow e-zine publishers to publish your articles in their free e-books. Either ways it is a win-win situation without any halt. If you look for more exposure, an inexpensive option, or for a higher level of professionalism, online directories and e-zines can become a valuable part of web promotional program.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Paying Attention to Forms in Website Designing

Forms form a very important part of your website as they are used for buying products, contacting you, and signing up a newsletter.In other words, forms activate users to take action, do something, achieve something. Forms must be created keeping in mind all kinds of users-whether it is the normal human beings or visually challenged ones.

One of the most important things to remember in form creation is to provide prompt text for each form item and field. The purpose of each form item has to be clear to the users with an appropriate lable for the fields. Not only this, the position and placing of the text has to be correct. It is advisable to place the appropriate text immediately before input boxes, drop down boxes and after the check boxes and radioboxes.

A form has to be accessible to the readers by breaking it down into manageable chunks, like one chunk constituting of personal details, the other dealing with contact information, etc.and so on. So, in case your form is a long one, it is better to use "fieldset" and "legend" tags for both sighted and visually impaired readers.

Another very crucial factor in form accessibility is the reliance of drop down menus on JavaScript. If the drop down menus rely on JavaScript, thet will not be very accessible to the users. They have to be created in such a way that in order to activate them, theuser has to click on a separate button instructing "Go" which allows the form to be activated on the server side. These kind of drop down menus are easily accessible.

In a nutshell, one can say that a thing like forms that might appear to be a very easy and unsignificant area of web designing , but actually is a very important and essential component. Therefore, it needs to be created very carefully keeping in mind the users who are going to act upon the form presented to them.

http://www.segnant.com/

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Google’s infamous “Sandbox Effect”

Google's sandbox is a new filter that affects almost all new websites by placing them on a preliminary "probation" status. Thus the term "Sandbox Effect" applies to the idea that all new websites after becoming search-engine friendly and being indexed may perform well for a couple of weeks, but when the filter is applied to the new website (called sandboxing) the site will still appear in the result pages, but it will not rank well despite of how much unique, well optimized content and how many quality inbound links the site may have. Not only this, this notorious process can even send the established sites to Google Sandbox which all at once obtains hundreds or even thousands of links from other sites. As a matter of fact, this theory can make the webmasters go nuts if they are willing to optimize their site themselves as an amateur. Although a webmaster may succeed in encoding, but he can’t overlook the fact that Google Sandbox can restrain his website/s from having immediate success in the search engine result pages. Sandboxed sites experience a hard time ranking for keyword phrases, no matter how competitive they are. Three to four months is a normal probationary period of any site that has been sandboxed, but it can extend up to six months also. High-competitive searches often spend six months in the Box.
The Sandbox Effect was noticed in March 2004, when the new websites failed to rank well for the couple of months from the date of their launch. Although these sites had good PR’s, well executed optimization and strong incoming links, the result was frustrating. It’s not that only newly built sites can be sandboxed, but also the established sites are also vulnerable to sandboxing. Most of the times, these sites are abandoned because they seek rankings in highly competitive searches and are in for a much longer duration. Sites targeting non-competitive keywords and phrases are usually left out of the Sandbox.
It may be noted that it is not any kind of punishment for the webmasters, but it is google’s own way to discourage spam sites from rising quickly for their keywords; banning the sites that use various tactics to rise to the top of the search results, and gain heavy sales; and repeating the process. As a result google has made probation mandatory for the new sites.
The Sandbox often targets:
  • Top-level domains, directories or sub-domains.
  • The sites registered after March 2004.
  • The site that is full of tactical SEO methods, particular on-page optimization of text, titles, meta data, etc.
  • Websites mainly in the English language.
  • Rankings of all levels.
  • Penalized sites that rank in top results of other search engines will nowhere be ranked in the 100's or even worse at Google.
  • Low quality, spam sites and sites carrying AdSense more often.
  • Commercial and private segment sites only.

Friday, April 04, 2008

Building links to your site the RIGHT way

Link building is one of the most important elements in gaining high search engine rankings because it is via links from other websites only that majority of the people find new sites. Link building requires a bit of competitive intellectuality to surpass or the competitor’s site. Apart from the traffic there is one more side to link building, ranking. Rankings in search engines are greatly commanded by the number of links directing to that site. Setting-up appropriate quality links to a website can increase the rankings in the major search engines. A simple link from an established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and spider its contents. The more the number of the quality incoming links, the more important your site becomes to link to. The process of getting number of quality links is obscure to the search engines, because the engines seldom consider "artificially created" (or useless) links. Rather they look out for the links coming from the commanding sites, or the sites that share the same subject-matter as your site. Otherwise also, getting a reliable site to link to you endows your site an additional visibility.
For building links e-mailing or contacting the Webmaster is considered to be a wise step of action. Though it is not complimentary but for the sake of courtesy you request them to link to your site while outlining the advantages to them and to their visitors. If the popularity of the link is important to your site, call them personally or write them a letter with a personalized touch. Obviously not everyone will be generous enough to offer you their link; however, there will be non-competitive well-ranked sites that will readily agree to trade link with you-- particularly if you offer to link back.

For legitimate link building it would be wise to consider the following points
  • Exchange links with the sites with specific keywords in their anchor text
  • Exchange links with the sites with specified PR
  • Exchange links with the industry relevant pages
  • Watch out for redirected links. Search engines don’t like the redirected links
  • Avoid the Sites with Java Script feed because they don’t allow the search engines to read the text embedded in them. The webmasters of these sites can easily trick you.
  • Avoid getting links from framed sites as it won’t yield your site any benefit.
  • Avoid exchanging links with Robots.txt file because it is an indication for the search engines that the content is not for indexing.
  • Getting a link from a PR4 page with 20 outgoing links is better than a PR4 page with 60 outgoing links
  • Your spread of links from many relevant domains
  • Avoid getting links from the sites with bad coding, image map links and CSS because Googlebot is not a hard-worker.
  • Check the link popularity of your competitors, and find out the sites that link to all or most of your competitors
  • Have the search engines find or "spider" your link partners
  • Think what made your competitor rule the market.

This "off page" factor have become so crucial for the marketing of a site that it can literally make or break a site with the search engines.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Want more traffic? Create an RSS Feed

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a set-up for organizing news and the content of news-like sites and weblogs. But it is essentially not just for news. Anything that can be broken down haphazardly into separate items can be syndicated via RSS. Once the modified information is encoded in RSS format, RSS-enabled program can check the feed for the changes made and respond to the changes in an appropriate way. RSS is a web feed XML-based document that is most popular in the weblogging community and includes summaries of stories or weblog posts with web links to their full version. Many weblogs and news websites make content available in RSS to help you access all your favorite weblogs or favorite news content by checking their RSS feeds. RSS delivers this information as an XML file and allows its regular visitor to track updates on the site using an aggregator. It is to be noted that all RSS files must be in accordance to the XML 1.0 specification, as set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This specification makes it an accessible text file and can create your feed to automatically regenerate from time to time.
RSS streams traffic steadily, generates a list of links and costs next to nothing. Since the search engine crawlers can’t decode the JavaScript feeds the text embedded in them also runs the chance of not being noted by the search engines. But the SEO guidelines emphasize that to make newsfeeds visible to search engines; their text has to be embedded into your page. So, here the best option is to use RSS feed. Anytime you update your website, add a new page, add a blog post or podcast, you are able to organize your post, page or podcast to the search engines, data aggregators and indexes. It can increase the traffic to your website considerably as your message and link is exposed to thousands of viewers. Because a large portion of content is available through the RSS feed – one is not always obligated to create the content himself/herself. Importing feeds from other sites or from the parts of your own site and publishing them on your webpages can also enhance the search engine rankings. Also, without any interference you can automatically keep your website full of fresh, relevant information.
Contemporarily RSS feeds are the hottest marketing tool for web marketing. It allows the webmaster to forward email without ever being detected by a spam filter.