The Silent Avatar Speaks

Is your website a freind or a fiend to the search engines?

There’s absolutely no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in, and a major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista and so on. By designing a search engine friendly site, you’ll be able to bolster your website rank in search engines and obtain more visitors

• Search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, read the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

• If you want to make your site get indexed easily, avoid using frames on your website. Frames only confuse search engine robots and you could run the risk the ‘bot’ might abandon your site because of using frames. Also, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

• Don’t present important information in Flash movies or in images as search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

• Use Meta tags on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using Meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

• Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

Tags: SEO, Web Design by the silent avatar
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A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with ease.

2) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3) Site optimization purposes
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to
every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4)Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the reasons listed above, it’s most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for everyone.

For a Sitemap Generator for WordPress simply click here

Tags: SEO, Web Design by the silent avatar
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The thing I love about blogs is the opportunity to share your knowledge with others to assist them in becoming successful.

I read a lot of information on the web, some I take on board, some I reject. Not because the advice is not sound, but because it may be difficult to implement their suggestions right now (financially and technically). This seems to be common with “newbie” website entrepreneurs.

One of my readers posted a comment to my blog article “How to Get Your Site Visitors NOT Doing What You Want” asking how do they get their website noticed.

There is no one step answer to this question. In fact it’s hard work! However there are many ways which (when you combine them together) you can drive visitors to your site. I will give you my top 4 ways to get your website noticed. Just keep reading…

What we know for sure is that unless you ARE known, the first port of call for anyone looking for answers to their problem (after all we all “search to solve a problem”) is the search engines (aka Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc)

What you do want is to be visible in the search engine listings, and preferably on page 1 or 2 of the search results for your site keywords.

This in itself is a huge ask. Many factors go into getting a PR1 or PR2 in the search listings. I have come to the conclusion that you have to be well versed in website SEO (Search Engine Optimization), have the right keywords for your site (after thorough research using something like Wordtracker), be constantly adding new information (like in the form of a blog), and include a site map.

All of this takes time, education and money (how much of each usually depends on finances).

Or.. you can use Google Adwords to do the same thing without the depth needed to get an “organic search result”.

I won’t go into Google Adwords here – suffice to say that it’s Google’s advertising juggernaut which returns “sponsored listings” to search engine queries based on the keywords used in the search term.

Yes it costs you money, however given the unlikelihood of getting PR1 or PR2 listings of your website through “organic” means (believe me… there are website owners out there whose sole purpose is to tweak their sites until they crack they PR1/PR2 ranking), this is definitely an avenue to explore.

Getting your hands on as much information as you can about how to utilize Adwords to give you the maximum ROI (return on investment) just makes sense. No point throwing good money down the drain because you don’t understand how it works. Advertising is a known medium for driving customers to buy. It’s no different for websites.

Tell A Friend
There’s nothing quite like viral marketing to spread the word. Every website should have the means to tell others about the site and thereby drive more traffic to the site. I wrote about this is a previous blog post.

Affiliates & Joint Venture Partners
Another way to get your site noticed is to bring affiliates on board who can promote your site to their subscribers. Check out what other successful websites in your niche are doing. Look to see if they have affiliate programs.

When launching a website it is possible to search out partners to joint venture with to increase your exposure.

Let me give you an example.

I have a friend who I did a website for her to sell an e-book. She is an accomplished travel agent with a wealth of knowledge only a travel agent could give in her e-book. I suggested to her to partner with an eBay powerseller (one who sells a lot).

Simply look for a powerseller who sells travel goods, write a quick email asking if they would be interested in sending out an email to their list promoting her e-book with a cut of the purchase price going back to the Powerseller. Just be careful how you approach them as you don’t want to be in violation of Ebay rules and have your account terminated.

Print Media Advertising
Offline Print Media can be a great way to boost your exposure. If your site is in a niche,  seek out niche publications to advertise in. Make sure you track your advertising so you know what works and what doesn’t.  Don’t put in small classifieds in publications. Far better to save up and go for a decent size advertisement which has all the elements of good sales copy (sell the benefits!!) to entice the reader to act.

Branding
I couldn’t finish this post without mentioning product branding. We can all see that product branding works (you only have to think McDonald’s).

Branding a website starts with using consistency. Same colours, same logo, same tagline, same, same, same.

Brand your website where ever possible. Put your website details on business cards, letterheads, email signatures, promotional material, all advertising, posters, banners… anywhere where you can put your website details put it!

Getting your site noticed does take time, effort and energy. Consistently applying the methods which I have shared with you above will pay dividends.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Business Tips, Internet Marketing, SEO, Traffic Generation, Web Design by the silent avatar
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I came across an article today at Webpronews.com which gives a really good information and advice about using anchor text when undertaking a website.

So… What is anchor text? Simply put, anchor text is the visible hyperlinked text on a page.

Here’s a snippet of information from the article to whet your appetite.

Here the words “SEO case studies” and “search engine optimization” are hyper linked to the hidden URLs http://www.seorank.com/seo-casestudies.htm and www.seorank.com respectively. The words within the hyperlink, “SEO case studies” and “search engine optimization“, are called the anchor text.

Anchor text is usually used to indicate the subject matter of the page that it links to.

For example, the text “SEO case studies” indicates to visitors that they can expect to see content about case studies pertaining to SEO if they visit the link. This pattern of usage has been applied in search engine algorithms to enhance the relevance of the “target” or the “landing page” URL for the keywords appearing within the anchor text.

Anchor Text Enhances the Relevance of the Target Page

How to Optimize Anchor Text Within Your Site

Anchor text optimization can be deployed throughout your site to enhance the relevance of most of the web pages based on individual page content. You’ll be surprised, how easy it is to find suitable instances of hyperlinking structures to make use of optimized anchor text.

When linking to internal pages, it is better to use the format:

Read all about Anchor Text Optimization.

Instead of – Read all about Anchor Text Optimization here.

In the example above it shows us that you can leverage the hyperlinking of important keyword phrases instead of hyperlinking unrelated text wherever possible. It’s always a good to idea to restructure your sentences if keywords don’t fit in anchor text.

I highly recommend you read the full article.
Anchor Text Optimization

Tags: SEO, Web Design by the silent avatar
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