Friday, September 28, 2007

Trust building elements for your web site.

. Your website design should be professional and relevant to your business.

. All the pages of the site should be accessible easily i.e. web site should have easy navigation.

. Add your own content on all the pages, don't copy. The content should be grammatically correct.

. Regularly update your web site so as to get repeat visitors.

. There shouldn't be any broken links on the web site,

. Add real testimonials to your web site. This helps attracting new customers.

. Publish case studies about customers you have helped, who use your product, etc.

. Don’t criticize your competitors. If at all its necessary, do a healthy comparison about features and products.

. You focus should always be on building long-terms relation with your customers.

. There should be Make a ‘About Us’ page on your web site which should contains detail about the mission, goal, Philosophy etc. If possible, add photos of the management committee members and a little bio.

. On the ‘Contact’ page, provide corporate email address (not personal), phone number, fax and address of the company.

. Publish your privacy policy & security policy. Add clearly about what you will and will not do with any personal data.

State what measures you take to ensure that all transactions are secure. Add prominent links to Privacy and Security policy on all the pages.

. Clearly publish guarantee policy. E.g. 100% money-back guarantee. Clearly add refund and returns policy.

. If you use PayPal, put the PayPal logo on your site. If you have a merchant account with a major banks like Citibank , put its logo on your site.

. If you have well-known industry associations, join up and put their logos on your site. Like IBM etc.

. Put images of the credit cards you accept on every page of the order process.

. Use the words ‘secure website’ whenever you try to get any information from visitors, including newsletter sign-ups, forum input and payment.

. Use a high level of security when processing credit cards. Make sure you make your clients aware of all the steps you are taking.

. If you have pricing on your website, make it transparent.

.Let people know which SSL certificate you are using on your web site, to encrypt their personal information and keep it up to date.

Valid Meta Robot tag Content Values

Googlebot can interpret following robot ( META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT) values which can be added into the pages:

  • NOINDEX - prevents any page from being included into search engine index.
  • NOFOLLOW - prevents Googlebot to follow any links on that page.
  • NOARCHIVE - prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.
  • NOSNIPPET - prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results, as well as prevents caching of the page.
  • NOODP - blocks the Dmoz (Open Directory Project) description of the page from being used in the description that appears below the page in the search results.
  • NONE - equivalent to "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW".
To learn more about Web robots, please follow this link.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Myths and Facts about Google Search Result Pages

Guys,

I came across a very nice article by Enzo Chiu i.e. 7 Myths and Facts About Google SERPs, hope this will help you clear most of your doubts about Google search engine rankings.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Optimize your web site for Yahoo!

Hitwise reported that Yahoo accounts for ~ 22% search traffic and ranks at second place than Google (~64%).

To achieve good ranking in Yahoo, following points needs to be considered:

1. Title Tag: Should be short consist of 4-5 words including important key-phrase

2. Meta Description Tag: Should consist of 16-18 small to medium sized words
including important key-phrases.

3. Meta Keywords Tag: Yahoo still gives some weight-age to keywords tag. The maximum size of this tag should be 250 characters.

4. Keywords in URL: Create keyword-based filenames that represent the content within the file.

5. Headings: Heading 1 and 2 tags should be applied on every pages and should contain crtical key-phrases (CKP)

6. Alt text for images: Apply alt-tags on some of the images containing CKPs. Make sure to maintain the keyword density to 3-5%.

7. Site Structure: Yahoo prefers the Linear site structure and ranks well all the web sites which possess this structure.

8. Links: Yahoo prefers quality inbound links.

9. Robots.txt: Allow all the user-agents to crawl your web site.

10. Web site containing fresh content will take some time to get indexed in Yahoo.

Friday, September 7, 2007

Internet Marketing Strategies and Techniques: Tableless Web Site (CSS) - Benefits

Tableless Web Site (CSS) - Benefits

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

How to get repeat visitors to your web site?

Visitors usually leave web site within 10 seconds if they dont find anything relevant. Follow these 10 steps to have repeated visits to your web site:

1. Don't use printed brochure for yor business for your web site's content.

2. Organize the text, picture, and video content into different categories. If you don't have time to develop content, buy them online.

3. Try and see if you can use content management systems (CMS) to develop your website e.g. wordpress. This will help to easily manage your web site.

4. To develop faith among your prospects, you must have a page about your company/business.Also, you should provide a telephone number and an e-mail address for contact.

5. Share your views/experiences about the business you are in. This will help visitors to revisit your web site again.

6. Set up an online forum and let your customers interact among themselves. This will help to know your visitors experiences about your products and services. As a result, you will be able to provide improved products and services.

7. Promptly respond to all your visitors queries.

8. Create RSS feed on your site for the news, services, products sections and keep on adding them.

9. You must have a frequently asked questíons page related to your products and services to help save your visitors' time and effort when they are looking for information on a particular topic related to your website.

10. Advertise your products properly throughout your site e.g. through bannners, call to actions buttons etc. on side bars.

Please be informed that you want repeat visitors to your site. Since the possibility of visitors turning into a paying customers improves when they stick around your site longer.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Tableless Web Site (CSS) - Benefits

Tableless design is a method of web site design without using HTML tables for a layout purposes. Instead of HTML tables, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page.

Following are some of the benefits of tableless layout web site:

1. Cleaner Code: You would be forced to write clean code in the tableless web site. Thus your web site would be W3C guidelines complaint.

2. Faster Load Time: Tableless layout web site loads faster than web sites built using tables. You can reduce size of your web site by 2-5 times by converting into CSS design.

While loading a table layout web site, every time browser has to scan the table twice and then load the content of the page, which apparently increases the load time. On the other hand, CSS files are easily cached in to the browser and CSS layout web site with no td, tr tags loads comparatively faster. Tons of td and tr tags increase the web page size tremendously.

CSS layout web design on the other hand, saves the bandwidth and loads faster.

3. Easy to manage web site: Design your site with CSS and maintain it easily by simply editing one file to make a change throughout the whole site. Thus making changes to a tableless layout is simple since it eliminates the need to manually update the web pages.

4. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits: Search engines gives preference to all the web sites with higher content to code ratio. With CSS layout design, you can organize your important content at the top of the web page and by defining all the content formatting elements in to an external CSS, will help you make your web site highly content based. On the other hand, tableless layout ease and enhance the crawling speed by the search engine crawler or the bot.

5. Screen Resolution Friendliness: Tableless CSS layout web sites fit the browser window on any screen resolution.

6. Wide accessibility: Due to rapid growth in Internet Technologies, it has been necessary for the web content to be accessible to variety of devices e.g. mobile phones. Thus tabless design improves the accessibility of the web content.