The Silent Avatar Speaks

Small Business Web Development Service

One of the main responsibilities of a small business web development service it to make sure the client has a website that sells. A website that can convince prospects to purchase their product or service. Sometimes it is can be tricky getting a client to do what is best for their bottom line. But a small business web development service is like a doctor or lawyer. A small business web development services can not help a client if the client does not take the advice of the small business web development services.

The number one responsibility of a small business web development services is to educate the client. It is better to not make a business deal then to make a business deal when you know the client is not going to be happy, or get good results.

There are some that want a very “pretty” website, but fails to convince their prospects to purchase from them. Not only that but they make it almost impossible. The prospects arrives at the website, but don’t know how to buy from you.

First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.

Also some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects’ desired payment method.

On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing?

Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects’ confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet.

As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximize your profits!

At Silent Avatar Web Solutions you can rest assured that all of your website need for your business will be taken care of in a very professional manner.

I’m the Silent Avatar.. and i’ve just spoken

Tags: Internet, Online Business, Promotion and Marketing by the silent avatar
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The robots.txt file is probably one of the least understood aspects of the search engine optimization world.

Essentially, a robots.txt file tells the various search engine spiders (a.k.a. robots or bots) to crawl or not to crawl specific sections of a website.

The robots.txt file can indicate files or pages not to be indexed at all, or can instruct spiders and bots with specific instructions about how to index your site.

Many search engine spiders routinely look for the robots.txt file as they arrive on a site and many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts agree that including this file makes good sense because it acts as an invitation to crawl and to index your websites content.

There are however some important instances when you may want to limit or to even exclude bots from crawling a site.

Some examples of this are

• when there are rogue spiders that are crawling for the chief purpose of indexing your site for their own use
• when there is sensitive information (e.g., unfinished projects you do not want indexed such as site redesigns or exclusive beta-tests)
• in situations when site owners decide that there is no need to index portions of their site such as image files, download files, or cgi bins.

Search engines scan through files that surfers will never see and this is reason enough to put a robots file on your site. If your site stats include a section on ‘files not found’, it’s possible to see many entries where search engines’ spiders looked for and failed to find a robots.txt file on your site.

Creating the robots.txt file
Creating a basic robots.txt file is a relatively simple process.

Open notepad or your favorite text editor and follow along with the instructions below.

Every robots.txt file contains records of two fields : a “User-agent” line and a “Disallow” line.

The User-Agent line specifies the robot or spider that you are instructing, and the “Disallow” line provides the instructions on what can or cannot be indexed.

Here are two examples…

Example #1 allows robots to index everything while Example #2 prohibits robots from indexing anything:

In the case of the User-agent, the asterisk (*) is the symbol for ‘all’ – so in the example it allows all ‘User-agents’ or robots.

The ‘Disallow:” field informs the robot (User-agent) what to crawl or what not to crawl.

If you want to allow all of your website to be crawled leave the Disallow field blank (see example #1).

If you want to disallow all crawling include the wildcard forward slash (example #2).

You can use this disallow command while creating a website. Just don’t forget to remove it once the site is live.

The majority of websites welcome robots to freely index a website, however there are some instances where the robots’ crawling may be unnecessary or is forbidden and therefore “off limits” to the robots.

Say you have some confidential documents, or downloadable files for users, by indicating these sensitive files are not to be indexed by the robots you eliminate them being indexed and the subsequent files being accessible to all. You can exclude files files from all robots or from individual search engines.

For instance, say you have a file called TopSecret.htm in a directory called ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ that you do not want to be spidered by robots (because you don’t want everyone to have access to these files).
You would simply add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

You can disallow whole directories by:

If, for some reason, you choose to prohibit some robots/spiders from crawling your site, the User-agent should include the name of the specific spider indexing your site.

For example, if a rogue robot keeps indexing your forum, you would include the following in your robots.txt file:

Alternatives to Robots.txt file:
Having said all of the above about the robots.txt file you do not have to actually create one if you don’t want to, however it is an older, more respected method of controlling robots and webcrawlers.

The alternative is to use the “noindex,nofollow” attribute in their HTML meta-tags. Though not a foolproof way to eliminate robots that routinely burn up bandwidth, such an attribute does mesh with the general objectives of many websites.

Here’s an example of a “noindex,nofollow” HTML meta-tag:

There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of bots and spiders crawling the Web which will take note of your robots.txt file, but not all of them will, so if the information is very sensitive then better no to store it on a server.

If you would like to use a cool tool to generate your robots.txt file you can check out my Resources page on my website.

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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No doubt taking a business online is a decision which shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s easy to get caught up in all the hype of the Internet, but the bottom line is “will you see a return on your investment”?

One of the biggest headaches can be getting traffic (aka customers) to your site, and eBay already has that covered.

Here are the traffic statistics from Alexa.com

Of course there is a multitude of ways to drive traffic to your site. Most take time to do, others you can pay money for and get moving straight way. All should be monitored (especially if you are spending advertising dollars to get the customers) as to how effective they are for you.

So here are a couple of scenarios which you may want to consider…

1. Open an online shop and either hold physical stock or drop ship.

2. Sell your products for a competitive price (including postage).

3. Advertise your site using free classified, forum posts, Pay Per Click advertising, etc

or

1. Research your market on Ebay
   Log in and go to “Advanced Search”. Input your product (be specific). Check “Search Title and Description” and Check “Completed Listings Only”, and check “new items only” (if you sell new) – then search. This will return you a listing of SOLD items which have been listed for sale on eBay, which are more than likely products you would offer to sell.

   Note: Search through “all Categories”, then refine down your listings using “Narrow your results” (which is accessed by going to the left of the window)

   Only review the listings highlighted in green (these are sold items).

   Now… Start a spreadsheet or pen/paper and input the data from the sold items.

2. Enter in the following:

· Item Name ( you want to know which items are the biggest sellers)

· Sold price – (because you want to know the lowest/highest price you can sell for

· Date sold – you want to know which day/s things sell more of than other days.

· Time sold – you want to know which time is the best sale time.

· Postage – you want to know what postage is reasonable (though you shouldn’t make money on postage – it should be flat postage fee plus an amount to cover packaging and getting to the post office).

· The seller (the best seller may have tricks you can use)

Armed with the information from Ebay you have a much better idea what people are willing to pay for the item you are going to sell. You also have a good idea what day you should be listing your items, and what time you should be listing them to get them in front of buyers, and how you should be listing them (I’ll go into that next post).

If you have found that the price people are willing to pay is something that you can work with, the next step is to use this information and set up a listings on Ebay of around 30 products (they don’t all have to be individual products) and list them on the day and time that your research has turned up as being the best time to sell. Don’t list the same items one after the other.

Do this for 1 month and see how sales go.

While you are doing your research you can also be checking out other auction sites like oztion.com.au and do the same thing.

You can also check out forums in your selected niche (let’s say you want to sell Xbox 360 video games). You can simply Google search for “Xbox forums”, join up and have a look around the forum for anyone who is talking about where they buy their games. You can also get a pretty good idea about what products they are buying.

While this might sound a little tedious it will pay huge dividends and either confirm to you the project is viable, or scrap it as you can’t compete with what is already out there (and lets face it with imports from china it’s getting harder and harder to compete)

Having said that… all is not lost if the price issue is looking pretty grim.

If you specialise in a “niche” (and I’ll use the video games as an example, you could “specialise” in games for only Xbox or a certain type of game ie; racing car, war games, etc.

If you determine you have a viable product and can sell at a price which is comparable to your competition, you are then good to go…

You can either set up your own website and market traffic directly to the site or set up a full eBay store and run it as a business, or, you can keep listing products (using the research you have done), and just list single items to sell.

Over to you….

As always feel free to post a comment or question for me to answer.

Tags: Business Tips, Internet Marketing, Traffic Generation by the silent avatar
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