Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more.
What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will find that site interesting.
Take your audience's emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.
When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site's general theme.
Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.
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 the utmost 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 above reasons, it is 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.
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minuet detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven 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) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.
Like anything else, you’ll get out of Google Adsense what you put into it. The following optimization tips can help you grow your Google Adsense dollars:
Write interesting content and write every day.
Have more than one site. The more sites you have, the more ads have the potential
to get clicked.
Set up channels and monitor your statistics across all sites. If one site is performing poorly, consider changing the content or the ad layout. Experiment!
Change the ad layout and notice which layout works the best for you. There are
many different layout options and there’s no way you can know going in which
one will perform the best.
If you’re blogging, writingup.com has a list of profitable topics. They state that
you don’t have to write on those topics but you might give it a try or at least plug
some of them in to the search engines.
Google different key words and phrases and notice how much and what kinds of content and ads you see.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
It’s the dream of every online blogger to be the acknowledged king of the hill. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), to be king of the search engine hill is to have as many people link your site to theirs. One-way.
Search engine optimization is a method of preparing a site for high ranking in search engine queries. Methods on optimization vary between legitimate ways like continually improving content relecvancy and ease of navigation to tricks like keyword stuffing, link farming, etc.
The term used for people to have your site linked to theirs one-way is to have an inbound link. With search engine giants like Google and its PageRank system, it places significant value on the number of links pointed to your site because it is considered a vote of confidence and relevance by that site.
As stated by Google: “In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.” And a large vote of confidence online not only means fame but most likely even fortune. This is because the relevancy of a site causes it to rank higher in the search engine search strings, attracting more attention from consumers and attracting revenue from companies willing to pay to appear on the same site.
In effect, one-way inbound links are now as good as gold.
So far, there are five effective ways to acquire inbound links:
1. Wait for Offers. The normal way of getting inbound links. This method is the most ethical of the strategies. This methods banks on the fact that if the site has great content that is constantly fresh and interesting, with a navigation system that does not require rocket science, people will eat it up. Offers will come of their own volition. Then you get your links.
2. Play Musical Chairs. A devious way of getting inbound links using reciprocation with a twist. Reciprocation is the most common form of getting links which doesn’t hold much water with page ranking systems of search engines.
Normally search engines can detect reciprocal links, but if reciprocation is layered, i.e. indirect, it takes the engine much more work to detect it, requiring more complex algorithms. The price for doing this trick is steep, though. You have to have more than one website. Some people make a pretty penny putting up links one-way.
3. Apply for Inbound Links. Yes, it’s not a crime to promote your site. You can submit your site for review at people-run directories whose interests run into the subject matter of your site.
If the world wide web is the analogy of the earth, a directory can be best described as a town, where almost everybody knows each other. Any new arrival gets a thorough once-over and the whole town votes to see if you can get to stay.
4. Links for Sale. Some high-ranking sites are willing to sell their outbound links to the highest bidder. Sites that are popular with PageRank or other search engine ranking systems use this extra capacity for extra income sometimes.
However, the drawback to this is that the sites are only mercenary, selling their sites for rent. You have no link-equity other than the amount of cash you shell out to keep on existing on their site. Search engines such as Google are actively trying to dampen these efforts as it degrades the relevance of their search engine results.
5. Be Generous, Distribute Content. Of all the strategies stated, this is a highly effective method of getting better quality, legitimate one-way links. You give other websites a reason to put a link on their sites to point in your direction.
All sites are always looking for fresh content for their sites. A site cannot expect to stay number one in relevancy if they just keep on refreshing the content of their sites once every month. Most of the time these sites will even pay for fresh online content to a slew of writers. For a discounted offer, you can have a “about the author” link posted on the site with your own content. Be creative. The key is to make it mutually beneficial.
Ultimately, with a little patience, elbow grease, and luck. It pays to just be honest and stick with the stuff you like to talk about. You don’t regret eating up the time and you enjoy the process.
Nowadays, even the smallest company uses the Internet as a main tool in building a customer base, keeping in contact with their clients and this is also their most basic means of advertising.
Designing a company web site is cheap and effective, not to mention essential because the world wide web is the only medium that offers instantaneous information access to millions of users around the globe.
Any web developer worth his salt should know about search engine optimization or SEO.
This is the key towards building an effective web site that would get a lot of hits and visitors. A web site that nobody visits is useless so the challenge lies in leading Internet users to visit your web site.
Thus, your web site need to be "found" when users type in keywords in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, AOL and others.
Once a keyword relating to the products or services that you offer is keyed into a search engine, a direct link to your web site should emerge on top of the list.
You should employ search engine optimization techniques to lead traffic your way, and get more hits that would later on lead to more profit for your company, which is your goal in the first place.
Here are some tips on how you can make it to the top of the list of search engines, and use your SEO techniques to benefit your web site and your company:
1. If you have an existing web site and domain, just optimize the one that you currently have instead of purchasing a new domain.
It will take some time before your web site will show up in a particular search engine, like Google, so it better to use the one that you currently have instead of switching to a new one.
2. Know who your target audience is and aim for them.
If you are in the manufacturing industry and a user types in your product in a search engine, then you would immediately have your target right in front of you.
As soon as the user hits the Enter button or clicks on 'Search', then the person will be lead to your web site.
Make sure that your target market will get 'hooked' on your web site. Once the search engines show the link to your web site, their job is done.
What you should do next is to make sure that your visitor will not leave your web site without them trying out your products or services, or at least leaving some pertinent information so that you can contact them in the future for marketing and advertising purposes.
When hitting a particular target market, learn about their interests, location and age to have an idea of what you can offer them in return.
Also, you can somehow link their interests to your products and services.
3. Search for the right keyword.
You should be creative, persistent and flexible when looking for the keyword or keyword phrases to use in optimizing your web site.
Google and Yahoo offer some tools and tips on how you can come up with keywords that will yield results.
Do not settle for just one keyword. You can also vary the words and phrases that you use for each page on your web site so that you can have more hits.
4. Consider your target market when designing your web site.
The design itself would include the general theme of the web site. You should also pay attention to smaller details such as color and font style and size.
Make sure that the web site is user-friendly and do not forget to insert helpful articles, tips, hints and related links that can be shared to other users.
It is a good thing to have an option to send a link or an article to a friend, which will add more users and increase your client base.
There should also be various ways to browse through your web site, to fit each user.
A person might find it to difficult use the scroll down option so you should also provide hyperlinks which are accessible to them.
5. Concentrate on the web site content.
Regularly update the content of your web site so that old and new users can find something new when browsing through your site.
Make the content brief and precise. Writing a content which has more than 600 words will make the users lose interest, since most of them do not actually read but just skim through the text.
Strive to be the best and most comprehensive web site and you will make your mark when it comes to information about the products and services that you offer.
It helps a lot to pay attention to detail, too.
Finally, keeping your web site's content updated is a must.
Spread the word about your web site and use the basic search engine optimization techniques and you will surely gain positive results once users visit your web site.
Just about everyone has a website today. Certainly, if you're in business one way or another, you have a website. And people have different objectives behind their sites. Some are content-driven. Others provide an online service and have sophisticated user interfaces. Others still are designed to entertain and amuse their visitors. But regardless what your website is designed to do, there are a few primary objectives you should keep in mind before you start building.
This first website objective is FOCUS. Your site needs to have a narrow and specific focus. Why is this? Because there are literally millions of websites out there and the visitors you're lucky enough to attract will only take a few seconds to decide whether they'll stick around or whether they'll simply click the back button and continue browsing elsewhere. Within those few seconds, your site needs to communicate exactly what it's designed to do so the visitor can decide if it meets his or her needs or not.
One of the best exercises to enhance the focus of your site is to establish a 15 to 25-word positioning statement that guides all your development activity going forward. Think about it like a mission statement. It should articulate exactly what your website does in just 15 to 25 words.
Another way to look at it is to do a Google search for a keyword in your field and see what comes up in the results page. Under each listing, there's a short description of what that site is all about. As it turns out, the search engines get that description from the meta tags on those websites but it's exactly the same thing. What do you want YOUR description to say?
Once you've established a positioning statement, you should display it prominently on your homepage. It should be one of the first things visitors see when they land on your website. And as I mentioned above, the same statement should be included in your meta tags as your site description. That way, the search engines know exactly what your site is about at the same time. And if your site shows up in a search results page, that description will show up as part of your listing.
The second objective is DEPTH. Again, this objective serves your visitors as well as the search engines. Build a massive amount of content all about your narrow business focus. That way, if a visitor lands on your website and decides in the first few seconds that they need what you're providing, they'll go on to find a ton of resources all about that topic, satisfying their need and establishing trust along the way.
Depth of content helps your website with the search engines as well. Google uses complicated algorithms to assess value to different websites and one of the biggest things they look for is content. If your website has a narrow focus and lots of content about that focus, it will get ranked higher within your area of expertise. Google will consider your site a good resource for people searching for your narrow focus.
The third objective is to make your site STICKY. This is a relatively new term that describes a website's ability to keep a visitor on the site. A lot of sites do a fairly good job of attracting visitors but many of those visitors take one look at the site and leave within a second or two. As I mentioned earlier, the positioning statement can do a lot to help someone understand what your site is designed to do. But you need more than that to keep them browsing.
The visitor needs to see immediate value when they visit your site. They need to see something that will benefit them right away. They need to see something they can use to make their own lives better. This is the foundation behind today's value-first marketing moniker. People have been over-marketed and have become skeptical in clever marketing slogans. They want to see the value. They want proof that you can deliver. They want to sample your product or service before they buy anything.
You should spend some time and think about what you can offer your website visitors as soon as they land on your site. It could be information. It could be a tool or calculator of some kind. It could be a free subscription. It could be an entertaining video or an interactive game they can play. Whatever it is, you need to capture your visitor within seconds and guide them to something that will benefit them.
Once they've received one piece of value, give them a second and then a third. Guide them through a maze of value, encouraging them to continue browsing and discovering even more. This is the key to a sticky website and you can get a good idea of your progress by measuring your average time on the site through your analytics platform.
There are a million different websites out there and they're all designed to achieve different objectives. But each one of those websites can be a bit better by incorporating more focus, depth and stickiness. All three improve your website' effectiveness and all three offer benefits with the search engines as well.
About the Author
Tactical Execution with Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a strategic company focused on growth marketing and program implementation across business markets. Visit the website for actionable guidance for revenue generation.
