HotMouse.info

What distinguishes a good web design from bad web designs are the key elements like text, navigation, links, graphics and overall general design are critically important.

Text: For a good web design, you must ensure that the background should not confuse the text. Primarily, visitors come to the site to read the text and therefore the fonts should be large enough not to cause eye strain and at the same time not too big. The content must be written adequately and in a user-friendly manner.

Navigation: For a good web design, make the navigation buttons easy to understand and comfortable to use. If you use frames, make sure they are not too evident. If your site is large, provide for an index or a site map. A bad web design has complicated frames, too many frames and avoidable scroll bars in frames.

Links: For a good web design, the link colors should coordinate well with the color of the pages. Preferably, the links should be highlighted so they can be easily identified to the visitor. A bad web design has large and sometimes unwanted graphic files that take too much time to load. They have over-sized graphics that do not fit on the standard screen 640×460 pixels.

Graphics: For a good web design, make the buttons elegant and of the right size. Make sure that every graphic link has a matching text link and graphics and backgrounds use only browser-safe colors.

General Design: For a good web design, pages must be easy and quick to download. Graphic elements such as photos, subheads are to be used to break up large areas of text. Every web page in the site must be akin and appear like it belongs to the same site. In a bad web design, there will be lack of contrast in color and text and haphazard presentation of content. Aside from that, a bad web design also means that pages that look perfect in one browser is not in another.

To firmly decide whether the web design is good or bad, we must understand how users interact with web-sites, how they think and what are the basic patterns of users’ behavior – for the users are the ultimate judges. Visitors generally glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or suggests of the thing they are looking for. Unfortunately, there are still a large part of the page they do not bother to browse. But do remember that while scanning a web-page, users usually search for some predetermined matter or anchors which would guide them through the content of the page. If a page contains high-quality content, users may be willing to compromise even if the site has too many advertisements and the design not of good quality. The golden rule in web design is that the content is more important than the design.

It is quite bizarre to see that there are still so many badly designed websites in use. With a lot of professional help available for designing good websites, it appears the web designers refuse to ask for help and learn their lessons. It is cruel to make a visitor with a slow dial up connection wait for several minutes to load your site. The visitors are serious-minded and do not wish to watch some flash effects or a cartoon or some fireworks display, just to see your products on your site. Web sites can really drive people mad when you make them scroll left and right to read each line. Knowing no visitor likes horizontal scrolling, it is not clear why so many sites have horizontal scrolling.

Advices for new blog owners are quite difficult to find. Everyday, new terms and tools are appearing and it can be a little bit hard for bloggers on where to start. If you want to the basics of blogging like setting up a blog and earning from it, continue reading.
First thing to do is choose a platform for your blog. You can use either blogger.com or wordpress.org. The top two platforms for beginners are blogger.com and wordpress.org. Here’s a simple blog advice if you are having difficulty deciding what to use as your blog platform. If it’s your first time in the blogging world, better choose blogger.com, but if you have some experience and likes to have more control over you blog, go for wordpress. Even if you choose one over the other, they both have the same process. Fill out the necessary information then name your blog and you’re set to go.

There are many ways on how to monetize your blog. The most common ways are through traffic, content and ads. There are many ways how to Get blog traffic. Almost all people think you need to spend large amount of money to obtain a good traffic results. The blogging tips are simple and the best part is, it is free.

Filling your content is the easiest way to earn money from your blog. Always put into mind to have relevant content added in your blog. This will easier for search engines to find it. The more traffic you gain, the more money you can make. Try to post on a regular basis every week and keep your readers coming back for more of your content. Adding your blog to social group is the next step you should do. This will help readers now that your blog exists in the blogosphere.

Another way to earn income is through the use of affiliate marketing. These are programs that you sign up with and promote them on your own blog. You earn from affiliate programs when a reader or visitor of your blog purchases an affiliate product from your blog. The commissions earned for every sales will depend on the product you just sold. When engaging in affiliate marketing, choose only products that are related to your blog. Now you now some of the basics in blogging and better yet how to earn from you blog the only thing left to do is to create your own blog and start earning from it.

Some of site at Google result pages have noticed that the listing that Google has for their website in its results pages has a number of sub-links below its main entry on the results pages and have to come us to ask “What are these?”

These sub-links are in effect ‘short-cuts’ to pages deep within a website that Google has placed in its search results which allow users looking for your site, to link directly into the pages of your site without first going through the main entry page Google has listed for your site (more often than not this main entry page is your site’s Home Page).

Google calls these sub-link short-cuts into the inner pages of your website, “Site links” and defines them as: “Site links are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these site links periodically from your site’s contents. Because we generate site links dynamically, this list can change from time to time.”

There’s no doubt that ‘Site links’ are a useful enhancement to a website’s listing in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) once they’ve been allocated ‘Site links’ by Google. However because Site links are generated automatically by Google’s algorithm (the complex mathematical formulae that Google uses to rank websites in its results), as a website owner there is little control over what can and can’t be displayed the Site links listed for any particular website.

Furthermore, Google, like everything it does with respect to its search results: keeps it’s method of generating Sitelinks a secret in order to stop any one website dominating its search results. So it’s not as if you could drop them an email to ask them. However Google does offer some background information on the subject of Site links and how website owners can to some degree, control their display.

Researching the subject on the web through various SEO blogs and forums it seems that the consensus of opinion by experienced web marketers is that in order for a site to be allocated Site links by Google, it generally has to satisfy a number of criteria, namely:

• The website is easily spider able with a well structured navigation
• The site gets a good ranking with high levels of natural search traffic
• The site has a high click through rate (CTR) from the search results page
• The site presents useful outbound links
• There are many inbound links from high quality, 3rd party websites
• The website age is several years old

There are plenty of advantages when it comes to dedicated web hosting and it is all down to how you want to present yourself. Having a dedicated web hosting is like having your own business card bespoke to your profession and personalised to your own character. The problem with using a free web hosting service is that there is no personality to it, and you are stuck with the basic templates and the level of customisability is not really there. Sure, as a basic platforms to ply your wares, these free hosting services do a pretty good job, but there is no joie de vivre at all, no fun, no customised feeling that it is inherently you or your business.

Let me give you an example of what this is talking about. Imagine is big brand names like Adidas and Nike were to hop on to these free web hosting solutions right at this very minute - what impact would it have on their brand? Firstly, brand confidence would go down a lot and the value of their wares would dip. They have a standard to maintain and this does not show through when they get on the free web hosting bandwagon. Branding is really important when it comes to your business or your products and when you do that kind of business move, you are unable to charge as high as you would if you had your own dedicated web hosting solution.

Branding is really very important and it really determines what kind of people you attract and how much confidence you are able to instill in them. The other thing about getting a dedicated web hosting service is that you are guaranteed a certain amount of bandwidth. This is something you need when you are using the web as a platform for your business. Customer traffic and delivering to them reliable service are very important when it comes to the business of e-commerce and when you are thinking of setting up a website as a satellite of your business, and as a sales platform for either your goods or the goods of your affiliate partner, then you must take up a dedicated web hosting solution. These free solutions you get on the internet do not have nearly the bandwidth that you may need to serve large volumes of customers or store large amounts of data.

You need to have some sort of reliability and as often as it may seem, many of the cheaper and free web hosting solutions can be quite unpredictable and may be subject to either crashes or maintenance. Having your website shut down for a few days can mean a loss of a few thousand dollars worth of business. Dedicated web hosting, especially for a business is by far the best option you can think of, and do not fall into the trap of trying to save a few dollars by getting free solutions on the internet. Not only will you jeopardise your business, but you will lose consumers and eventually your business viability.

Getting the most from natural or paid searches takes work. One must first research keywords to create the most effective keyword list possible or your efforts will likely go unrewarded in the long run. The fact is that it takes only a handful of well-trafficked keywords or phrases, preferably ones that are not used by the entire universe making up your competition, to be successful in either natural or paid searches.

Once you have optimized your page for keywords the next requirement is patience. There is, so far as search engine marketing is concerned, much truth in the old saying “Good things come to those who wait!” The fact is that search engine optimization does not have an immediate effect on search engine search results. Waiting isn’t much fun but it is critical to the success or failure of your marketing efforts. A huge mistake that many people make is adjusting a well researched campaign within the first three months of implementation. Ninety days is needed to begin to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. Abandoning or changing an approach prior to ninety days wastes your hard work and efforts. You will not be able to gather the data required to see the full impact of those efforts without patience.

This article addresses the first part of the formula for successful use of keywords or phrases; how to use keyword tools to build your list of keywords and phrases for optimum effectiveness. Allow me to list the steps in the process and then discuss each one in more detail:

* Brainstorm keywords that describe your business activity.
* Use a keyword suggestion tool such as Google’s keyword tool to 1. research popularity of keywords 2. expand your keyword list
* Choose keywords based on relevance to your business, search volume, and competitive edge.

Brainstorm keywords that describe your business

My business is website design and management. I might brainstorm a list that includes terms like

* web design
* website design
* web development
* website development
* web designing
* website designers

These terms describe my business in clear and unambiguous terms. While brainstorming, don’t limit yourself to a short list or rely solely on your own brainpower. Make a long list and seek input from others you trust. The list you prepare during your brainstorming will become the core of your search engine optimization keyword development process. I suggest that you put your list on a spreadsheet of some kind (I use iWorks Numbers but if you use a PC then excel works just fine) so that you may, at some later phase of the process, manipulate data by sorting. I also suggest that you create a counter using a service such as StatCounter in order to effectively mine keyword search statistics for your website but be sure to block your own IP from the count. By tracing the hits generated by particular keywords your effectiveness can be measured.

Use a keyword suggestion tool such as Google’s keyword tool

The Google keyword tool is a free service that returns useful data for creating a keyword marketing program. There are other tools available, some free and others that charge a fee, but I have not found one that provides the kind of important information that is provided by any of the free tools. I suggest that you save your money and rely on those tools that work for you that you can access for free. Using these tools you mine two important pieces of information. First, the keyword tool returns useful statistics that help guide your searches. You will learn about the volume of searches for the month prior, the average monthly search volume, and the rank of advertiser competition ranging from 0.00 to 1.00 (lowest to highest). In addition, a list of suggested search terms is returned allowing you to add to your original list. The entire list may be downloaded as a .csv file compatible with any spreadsheet file around.

My own search for web design using the Google keyword tool returned 121 suggestions for keywords or phrases plus an additional 78 keywords or phrases to consider–sweet! Not only did I get a huge list but I also got the useful statistics that help me narrow my list to around ten keywords or phrases to use as my keyword meta tag on my website. Below I list just a few of the possible returns:

1. web design / competitive rank 1 / Feb volume 246,000 / avg volume 1,500,000
2. web designer / competitive rank 1 / Feb volume 27,100 / avg volume 246,000
3. website marketing / competitive rank 1 / Feb volume 9,900 / avg volume 49,500

Thinking about each of these returns I may now make some focused decisions. Using only the three results above my own thought process works something like this. The competitive rank of 1 means that all my competition uses these phrases as keyword search parameters so there is no advantage to me in adopting any one over the other. Web design returned the greatest volume so I reject it as a term I want to concentrate on but not totally reject. Web designer looks more promising for my purposes because, while there are fewer searches on this term both in terms of short term and average volume, the entire world is not concentrating efforts on it. Then there is the term website marketing, one I have never considered and, while the volume is low, it may be promising. My next step will be to do a keyword search on that term and see what I get.

In the search above there were only a few items that had a competitive rank of less than one but they were not useful terms. Additional searches may produce terms that are more effective but for now I will work on the term website marketing to see if there is any room for improving my own optimization strategy that is currently in place.

Choose keywords based on relevance to your business, search volume, and competitive edge

As you return to your list you might want to add some descriptors that help narrow the field even more. Make sure that the descriptors you add are in line with your business practices. Don’t, for example, add cheap ad a descriptor if your price structure doesn’t warrant the label. Don’t add premium if your service appeals to an average market. You get the point. Here is a list of some descriptors to consider:

* cheap
* low-cost
* discount
* free
* premium
* professional
* authentic
* top quality
* service
* second to none
* etc

By constantly refining your list, looking at the volume and competitive edge statistics, you are building a powerful list of keywords and phrases that will help your marketing efforts. Now if you can only learn patience…