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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Successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just think about how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something new to read on your site. Without a doubt this is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, however due to laziness of webmasters this is also the least carried out one. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

Tags: Business Tips by the silent avatar
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Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarters of an offline company, so it’s important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

1. In order to make this happen make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

2. Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

3. Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

4. Ensure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

5. Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

6.Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are five important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

 You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

 
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

 When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

 5) Use audio on your site sparingly.

 If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site reading your content, you’ll want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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