Lots of links

If there is a single link to a page on your website on the net, search engine crawlers will eventually find it. Create more links to that page, and you enhance the speed of discovery, as well as the link popularity of that page.

Anchor text

People now understand how links on the web work … even my 70-odd year old grandparents both do. You don’t have to link with the words ‘click here’ or ‘please click’. Use anchor text – this is a huge boost to your internet marketing and SEO results, given the (assumed!) current state of the Google algorithm.

Use the hash

If you have multiple pages on site that all have very similar content, use the hash symbol in the URL to avoid being penalised for having duplicate content by a search engine. The hash symbol means similar pages are treated as one.

Masking - can it be used for good as well as evil?

What’s the problem with masking?

Well, if you use the same password for everything, and it is all in lower case letters with no special characters, capitals or numbers, then it usually isn’t a problem.

However, as password cracking becomes more common and hackers get increased access to computers around the world, people increasingly have quite complex passwords, which vary for different sites. If people get a password wrong three times and are kicked off your site, it certainly isn’t good for business!

Also, as mobile devices with tiny keypads matched with big fingers become more common, so do password errors and the resulting frustration.

What’s the alternative?

Personally, I see two alternatives. One is to simply remove masking altogether, and this is the option that Jakob Nielsen recommends. This would leave your password up on the screen for anyone to glance at and see … I don’t believe that it is just as easy to see what someone is typing by looking at their fingers, as to look at a screen and notice what they’ve typed. This would mean that using a computer in a public space would be extremely limited … or extremely unsafe.

The other option would be to routinely build a ‘Mask’ button into the login page of every website that uses a password, so people could turn masking off when they are in a private space, or on when they are in public. As with many of the best things in life … this is unfortunately NOT free!

Which would be the better option?

I honestly believe that a large proportion of web users would be LESS comfortable without password masking. Please feel free to correct me in the comments if that is the case.

While it is not currently a ‘done’ thing, I also believe that giving users the option to mask or unmask, or creating software that can automatically mask passwords to install on public computers, while websites themselves remain masking-free, are the ultimate solutions.

It is certainly time to challenge the norms … but with new ideas, not just ‘the stuff we used to do’.

Kids - Not like adults

1. Kids are not necessarily masters of the technological universe

There’s a general perception that kids can work out any computer problem set before them, in half the speed of Mum or Dad. They do learn fast … but they also lack the tools to research solutions to problems when they run up against them.

2. Kids are not patient

Kids are even less patient than adults. If your site or download is slow, they might try to download something multiple times in an effort to make things go faster. Chaos results.

3. Use sound for pre-readers

Even tiny amounts of text will completely foil pre-readers. Mum or Dad will have to be sitting there with them the whole time … and your site will end up being passed over in favour of an ‘easier’ one. Use sounds upon mouse-over for pre-readers.

4. Use small words for readers

You can have your text assessed according to the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease scale to help determine if it is actually age-appropriate.

5. Use simulated environments

Kids are not really designed for extensive abstraction. Pictures of rooms, towns, maps etc are actually a great ‘navigational’ aid, tacky as it sounds!

6. Kids don’t mind reading instructions

Adults will almost always use the trial and error method first … and if that doesn’t work, will then go back to the instructions. Kids are more pragmatic. They actually like reading instructions – so use them!

7. Kids will click off the site through advertising much more often

It’s in your internet marketing interests not to have too much advertising on your site, because kids can’t distinguish between ads and site content. They often click ads believing that they are just another part of your site. You might make a few cents on an ad-click … but your little visitor may also not know how to get back to your website!

8. Know the gender of your audience

The differences in what girls and boys prefer to see on websites when they are young is much more pronounced than when they are adults. Boys hate to see too much text. Girls hate it when there isn’t enough instruction. If you have a clearly defined gender audience, make sure you design your website for them.

1. Because you can usually get the same company to do both!

A great number of excellent internet marketing firms today have the capability both to do professional, creative, highly functional website designs, and then get the things to rank highly in Google. Dealing with just one company will make it much easier all round for you.

2. Because there are technical ways to ensure you don’t lose your Google ranking when you re-design

Those ways are a little involved (and truthfully, a little boring!) to be going into at the moment. Suffice it to say that Google’s little bots can make some mean assumptions, and SEO firms know how to placate the presumptive beast.

3. Because website design is about more than good looks

Sometimes, website designers have a keen eye for design … but are completely blind to both search-engine friendliness and website usability guidelines. Both of these factors are part of the discipline of SEO, which is why it is valuable to either use the same company, or have your two firms collaborating for your site redesign.

4. Because Flash can be tricky in terms of SEO

Sooooo many website redesigns include Flash elements. That’s because Flash is a wonderful invention and a blessing to the web (despite Jakob Nielsen’s protestations to the contrary!). However, it does need to be handled carefully in an SEO context. It is tempting to have the most important information about your site – headings, taglines etc – within a Flash element, because it is so visible to visitors. However, Flash is invisible to search engines, so you need to be careful what you do with it.

5. Because a redesign is the perfect time to add or change content

And your content is one of the most important on-site aspects of your Google ranking, and because having an internet marketing firm go over it can make a huge difference to your Google positioning!

I know that budget-wise, optimising in conjunction with a redesign can be hard. But there is so much evidence that doing so is best practice for online businesses, that I would always recommend leaving the old site up there a bit longer, and saving up enough cash to do both. Or at least, talk to your internet marketing firm about payment terms!

However, many do not believe that SEO can make things work. It did for many, and it will still be worth the effort even at the present situation. More and more paid advertisements are showing up, and these are aggressive in their promises of great pay-offs. But it will not work unless a site has to be optimized first. Search Engine Optimization is indispensable in any kind of Internet marketing procedure. If reports were to be given weight, then many websites are being established without the purpose of hitting the real target market.

Where is that market?The majority of potential customers can be seen sifting through information that they get from search engines. If the website does not contain the relevant keywords about its product, then forget how to reach your goals. Search spiders are keen in detecting title tags, meta tags, keywords and descriptions. While business owners may not understand the way search spiders work, they must learn to meet some technical criteria that search engines use to index sites. Once a website gets the attention from search spiders, then it has a good chance of getting a ranking in results. Without that, consider your products to lie unacknowledged, no matter how superior that product maybe.

The Web is a critical element to get good revenue. In the online world, impression is important. Create the best impression with a web marketing company! Funnel users through proven SEO methods. Focus on your battle and be in the top ranks! Be there when your potential market searches for your product and give a good message that will make them act in positive response towards your product.

Online videos are the newest source of information that every Netizen loves. Why do internet users love videos? The reason is that videos are fun to watch while the information is instantly given orally. Since it is given orally, internet users would think that it is more credible than just by reading a text on the web page. Aside from that, unlike text, videos are really fun. I think I don’t need to explain the theory why videos are more fun than text on the web page.

Even if videos are more entertaining way and the most preferred media by most internet users, why are still there texts on the web page? The reason for that is that the texts are still important part of a website. Come to think of it, if you incorporating both the text as content and videos as addons for your internet marketing strategy, I don’t believe that there would be other internet marketing strategies can beat yours. This would eventually be true not unless there is another newly invented or created marketing strategy.

Way back, websites were built to satisfy the human eyes. But due to the escalating number of websites thriving over the web world, competition is stiff and it is important that you incorporate the techniques of being a user friendly site that is also search engine friendly. Parameters such as having an intuitive user interface, uncluttered, can be easily navigated, and an up to date design are some of the few things that makes up a good website design. You must also consider feeding the spider driven search engines as they will determine your site rankings for attracting possible customers.]

A good website design must be able to convey the right message for the kind product and services that it stands for. Incorporating all the useful parameters and injecting reliable contents to web pages will somehow give you an idea on what an effective website is all about. Once the users find your site helpful and interesting, they will come back for more. Having the considered some of the useful parameters, your website can now compete with the rest in the industry.

High-end web designers are equipped with more than two computer monitors of different sizes. The purpose of this is to test the web design project if it looks good in small or large screen and any other type of computer monitors. This way, web designers can adjust some parts of the website to make it look good in any type and size of computer monitors. However, this is not a mandatory for all web designers. If you are a web designer, there are other ways to do such web design visual test.

What is more from the considering the visual aspect of the site is that you also have to do other more tests if your website is working well. You also need to check all the links on every web page of your site. Checking all the links in your website at least once every week is a great practice. This is to make sure that all your site links are live and not broken. If you are updating your site more often, then checking your site links is necessary. Or else, you might be wasting other links that are not credited by Google because they are not working.

The existence of several web design and SEO companies in the internet is merely driven by the rise of demand in web design and search engine optimization services. Even the rise of social networking site such as Facebook, MySpace, and the dubbed killer application Twitter pushes a lot of internet marketing companies to venture on social media optimization aside from SEO. This phenomenon even made the online marketing business competition more difficult, tougher.
The best way to get your way through the competition is to outsource web design tasks to any offshore web design company that offers services that compromises the price and not the quality.

Internet, of course, is the best place to find an offshore web design company to have your internet marketing venture started. You have to contact any of those companies and ask about the web design services it offers. Try also asking about SEO services. You need site promotion strategies such as SEO and SMO for your website to make your website gain web traffic and target returns on investment.

SEO professionals discussed in several forum threads that H1 tag is the most important phrase (or sentence) on any web page when web designing. Why is this so? It is because H1 tags serve as the web page divider. H1 divides the pages into sections to make the layout of the content more organized. It indicates the topic for the entire web page. It is the first one being read by the web visitors in order to know what the page is all about. This is the reason why search engines give higher priority to web pages with H1 tags.

In order to make your SEO process more effective, your H1 tag must bear any of the keywords that you are optimizing your website for. This way, search engine spiders would recognize that such words are important and would be recognized as the factor in which specific category in the index that the page should be included.

Without H1 tags provides the structure of the page, hence a web page divider. Without it, there is no structure. There is a tendency that the search engine spiders would get lost on the process of its crawling on the web page. You would lose the chance of getting higher ranking. This is because your web page cannot be indexed in specific and relevant category. Keywords that should be carried in your H1 tags are the ones that are being followed by search engines to make your web page theme more obvious and have that page be indexed in particular category.

continue reading here: Using Header Tags for SEO (Part 3)