Archive for March, 2010

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Understand The purpose of Creating Your Own Business Website

March 20, 2010

What is your website purpose?

What are you trying to achieve with website?

You see…

Ten years back you can say by having a website is just for the purpose of showing off. But not today. Not in current technology and current trends. Website is a new lifeline into business success. It is a new trend. By having a website your business could grow to the level where you can never imagine. To be honest you can be a millionaire overnight if the deals is right and you found the targeted customers or clients.

A website contains a wealth of information for a visitor. It is usually concentrated on a specific area of interest. A website is basically a digital book, with individual web pages being the pages of that book. Each web page has a bit of information on the subject. In total, all the web pages, provides comprehensive information.

The creation process of a web site is known as the web designing. A website is for providing information online. It has a large target audience at its disposal. HTML, XML and XHTML etc are used to encode text, graphic etc information in a web page. More complicated sites include animations, vector graphics and videos, sounds etc to attract visitors. To run these media, the websites require plug-in software. Such software includes Flash, Java, and Quick Time.

Commercial and non commercial organizations build websites. Although their purpose may be different, they are used to attract visitors and seek exposure. Commercial websites have to be extra careful and design their websites according to the information content, the user friendliness, the look of the site and its visibility. They have to provide a rich content of information to the customers to inform and attract them to but the products offered by the website company. The site has to be easily navigable so that people have little trouble finding what they seek. The website has to follow one style of message delivery to maintain the relevance of the site. It has to be easily available to the visitors and this can be achieved by the search engines and advertisements.

The beginning web page to any site is known as a web page. This contains a welcome message, a disclaimer, a region/language selection panel etc. Each web page forms an HTML file with its own URL. All these pages are linked by a navigation menu, and all the pages are hyper-linked to it.

After a web site is built, it must be uploaded in the internet so that general people can see it. The web designer has to ensure that the site gets a lot of hits every day. This can be achieved in many ways like submitting the site to search engines like Yahoo!, MSN and Google. Link exchanging with other sites, getting affiliated with other related sites etc also boost the regulars hits to a web site.

Web design in Malaysia is shaping up to be a pretty good business. This industry is seeing new players enter and rock the stage. A lot of companies are shining in website design industry. Most companies are providing all forms of web design services like e-commerce, web hosting, web applications and domain registration to make sure they deliver complete e-commerce solutions for their clients. Now a lot of website design companies are gradually taking over the market previously dominated by developed countries. Current growth suggests that Malaysia will be a key player in the world in terms of web design solutions. This comes as no surprise after Malaysia’s grand success in the other fields of information technology.

Aligned with that success many business owners started to realize the main purpose into having a website for their business. I guess they finally understand that website is a most amazing trend for business growth. It is a massive way to expand the market globally and increase business’s revenue.

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SEO Tips: How To Improve Your Website Ranking Properly

March 10, 2010

If you are new to internet then you might be wondering how to push your website in the first position or for page. You might as well spending hours of efforts to surf on the net looking and reading all information about website ranking and not understanding even a single words.

At the glance, the methods engaged to increase your Search Engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you – the time has come to face your website!

No doubts that getting your site at first page of major search engines will benefits your business and increase your sales. So, a high Search Engine ranking for your website is so important that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue and your ultimate mission now is to get your website rankings in higher in the first page.

Due to the heavy increasing of web pages on the net, the demand for SEO services has increased massively over the past 2 years. Currently, at least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high Search Engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase.

To get more sales you must push your site to a better position. The higher your page comes up in Search Engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what Search Engine optimization is about.

You might want to do it yourself to optimize your site. You can dip yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings or you can also hire a SEO specialist or expert to get the job done.

On the other hand, you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. If you want to do so then you can do all the SEO tips below which I am about to reveal.

The first piece of element you should examine is the title bar on your homepage. The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase Search Engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name. Example, if you are running a website design company then you might want to use website design as part of your title description.

Once you done that, then click on all your links and inspect the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. This is called optimizing each page based on the contents available on the page.

Make sure to steer clear of very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

Once you done that the next element to put under your microscope is your website content. Good and related contents will boost your site. Search Engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The content on your site must contain the most important keywords – the words that potential customers will be typing into Search Engines to find your site. Example, if you are running a flower business you might want to use flower delivery services as part of your main keywords.

One of the best practices is aiming to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on Search Engines, this text is a must and extremely important. However, the Search Engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic or flash format. For your information search engines unable to read text in graphic or flash format.

How can you identify whether your text is in proper format? To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your Search Engine rankings.

Next important element called META tags. I know these sounds like something out of science fiction and you might have no idea what I am talking at all, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that META tags are the key to high Search Engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. You can say it is just for the sake of letting the search engines know that you are using it. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a Search Engine will use META tags in their ranking formula. After all you are actually following proper SEO rules.

So, how can I find out whether my website has META tags or not?

It is quite simple actually and to find out if your page is set up with META tags, you must access the code. To do this open your website, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are META tags, they usually appear near the top of the window.

For example, a META tag would read: META name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your Search Engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. Probably you have heard this term mostly used by SEO Company as part of their services. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of Search Engine rankings. Almost all Search Engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

For example you can do this to check your website popularity. Type in Google or any search engines link: www.yourwebsite.com and hit enter. You should see how many sites are linking to you.

If you type in “free link popularity check” in a popular Search Engine, the Search Engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there are not many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low Search Engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign.

I believe you heard before the term exchanging links. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires inspecting the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your Search Engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

As a conclusion, Search Engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a Search Engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can boost your rankings yourself. Worst to worst you can at least learn the basic rules of SEO. Don’t ever ignore this all-important SEO factor in Internet marketing success. Remember, the higher your Search Engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way and you know what it means.

Cheers! :)

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SEO Tips: Choosing Good SEO Company To Improve Your Site Ranking

March 5, 2010

There are tons of SEO companies available on the net that give various types of search engine optimization services. But which company is actually delivered? To be honest most of them are actually delivering the results but what makes the different is how good it is. In today trend you need SEO optimization for your site. Period!

There are few elements that will decide the success of your efforts to hire good SEO specialist to boost your site rankings and that is:

1. Your budget – You will need proper budget if you want fast and good results.
2. Your target audience – You really need to identify your target audience and your specific niche to actually capture visitors that will really buy.

A Search Engine Optimization Company can be a priceless asset in your Internet marketing promotion. And choosing good SEO Company will actually increase your products or services popularity. So, what does these SEO Companies really do? They specialize in knowing how to boost your website Search Engine positions, monitoring those positions on the regular basis, and adjusting their strategies to account for undesirable results in any given month. This is to make sure all the efforts are giving results and are done properly.

SEO optimization will take some times to get some results if you are planning to do on your own. There are a lot of things you need to know and understand if you plan to do it yourself and if you are not well verse in website HTML coding, SEO rules and other elements that affecting the results then you will waste time and energy. But if you get it right and once the optimization done properly and the traffic start pouring into your site, you cannot stop it. Since this takes a lot of time, effort, and specialized knowledge, it can be in your best interest to go to an outside source rather than try to maintain high Search Engine positions on your own.

On the other hand, like every business, there are good companies and there are lemons. The best thing to do before you even start planning to hire a SEO consultant is preparing list of questions that you want to ask. Not only that you also need to prepare a lists of things you actually want to do. You must explain clearly to the SEO expertise in order to get proper answers. Knowing the right questions to ask and the criteria to look for will help you in choosing an affordable, effective Search Engine optimization company. Based on that, the SEO consultant might be able to draft out some plans that based on your budget.

There are few important things you need to be aware of before start hiring SEO specialist. When you are looking at different companies, begin by considering the approach they employ to raise your Search Engine positions. Meaning, identify how they will carry out the tasks of SEO optimization and what they will do to boost your website. Steer clear of companies that use cloaked, doorway, or bridge pages to increase your positions.

Why I should avoid all those type of services?

Simple actually where these techniques are actually violating most the Search Engine policy, and in the worst case scenario, will only get your website severely penalized, if not removed entirely from a Search Engine index. So, beware before hiring.

Probably, you have heard before cloak page. This technique is widely used by marketers that promoting affiliates programs. A cloaked page is a page that is created which is invisible to the regular visitor to your website. The cloaked page is coded to detect a Search Engine spider and divert them to this special page, which is set-up to artificially boost your Search Engine position.

Other tricks that probably SEO Company will use are doorway or bridge pages. Doorway or bridge pages utilize the same concept, but often reside on an entirely different server. Google, the largest and most important Search Engine on the Internet, will remove your website from their index if they detect you have cloaked pages. So to be sure never ever employ any company that uses this technique!

Another vital element is to get a guarantee that the company you hire will not work with your competitors while they are working for you. Apparently, this would seriously compromise the effectiveness of the Search Engine optimization campaign. Be aware that some companies will use the success they achieve for your website to sell their services to your competitors. So get your guarantee in writing, and make sure it is legally binding.

Another important factor before hiring is of course, to check out is the company’s track record of results. However, do not take the company’s word for it. They will undoubtedly be slanting their results in order to sell their services to you. There are a lot of ways this can be done to cheat especially those who have no idea what is search engine optimization is all about. To go beyond their simple statement of success, ask them a few relevant questions, and verify their answers.

You can start by asking them which engines they have achieved the best results on. The ones that are important are the most popular engines, and these are the ones you want to see good results on for your business.

Next, every SEO experts will ask your market target in order to suggest some keywords that will be used for your website optimization. So, once they done that you should find out what keywords and phrases they are claiming great results with. It is easy to get high rankings with unpopular words. For instance, the keyword “cat leashes” will get high popularity ranking because no one else would think of using it. What you are looking for is good results using popular keywords that will increase your site position and that suit your business.

There is lots of free keyword software available on the net. You can just simply type free keyword tool on the search engine and should be able to find some, download and install it. This keyword software rates the popularity of keywords and phrases based on actual Search Engine use. You can play around and do your own research based on your products or services.

Then, look for good results over an entire site that the company claims to have successfully worked for. What you want to achieve here is to get some ideas and proof. You want to see a wide range of positions over a number of different Search Engines using different keywords or phrases for the entire site.

If possible, request a report for any client the company claims to have done well for. This report should show good positions on a number of the most popular Search Engines for a variety of different, popular keywords and phrases. But take note that some company might not want to give you this for some reasons like protection or confidentiality.

When you are checking out and verifying the Search Engine optimization companies, make sure they have actually done the work they are claiming to have done. Some companies will use other company’s results in order to get you to sign on with them.

In any case, if you are in doubt, call the company they are showing you results for, and ask for the name of their Search Engine optimization company. Gather as much information as possible about them and based on that you should be able to evaluate their success stories and proven SEO strategies.

It is important to keep in mind that a successful Search Engine optimization campaign will result in maximum exposure across a wide range of popular Search Engines using a variety of keywords and phrases. This is the formula for a successful campaign, and you should keep it always in the forefront of your marketing strategy.

By right the SEO Company should provide report on the marketing that they have done. You can ask the Search Engine optimization company you are considering for a report that shows you rankings across a number of popular Search Engines for a period of at least six months. By getting this report you can actually verify the claims they made earlier as a SEO expert. Not only that you can also verify that your site is actually has increased the rankings and you are getting proper traffic. With this you can now move on and decide on your future marketing plans.

Take not that Search Engine marketing is a process that is continual, and you need a company that not only understands this, but keeps constant tabs on your Search Engine positions. That company must also be able to adjust its strategy in the event that Search Engine rankings drop. If you are new to SEO then you should aware that this is not a day job. There is no way you can increase your site ranking to first page in a day or two. It needs time and it needs a lot of works of evaluation, modification and optimization of your website. Not only that, the search engines must crawl to your site to get indexed. Normally, to get proper ranking it should take at least 3 to 6 months. You can see clearly after that the traffic will keep pouring in.

Now you should understand that SEO optimization process in not a day task. So, since Search Engine marketing is an on-going process, your positions must be constantly monitored. If you want your Search Engine optimization company to do this for you, request a sample of a monthly report. Again, paying monthly might burden if your company is still new in business. What you can really do is to ask for quotation or pricing based on your budget. Remember that low budget will not boost your site immediately. You should understand the law of ROI where you get for what you pay.

It is necessary that this report should show rankings for the most popular Search Engines. Do not be impressed by a report that only shows great results for a limited number of small Search Engines. Analyze the reports and consult your SEO experts to clear your doubts and how to improve it.

These are fairly easy results to acquire. Also confirm that the popular Search Engine results they are showing you are indeed the popular Search Engines currently.

Be sure the sample report the company shows you is in a format that you can easily understand. Most company has their own reporting style. For example, it could be in the form of a chart that covers a period of at least six months and presents data such as the top 50 positions broken down on a monthly basis or the top 5 pages each month.

Then, based on all the above criteria as certain that the SEO Company you are considering actually monitors these positions or pages every month, and that the sample report they show you includes findings and recommendations for the specific site.

This also insures that the company will actively monitor and make adjustments to their strategy on a continual basis rather than simply gather statistics on your positions. You need a company that is actively participant in your Search Engine marketing campaign, not just an information gatherer.

Obviously, as I mentioned above your finances have to figure into your choice of company, but bear in mind that a Search Engine optimization company is crucial the success of your marketing campaign. It is not just a casual accessory. If you cannot afford a company that will do a thorough and reliable job for your website, you might consider waiting until you do have the finances in place. So, to get the results that you want be sure to have some proper budget. It is your business anyway and you should know what you want at the end is making profits.

Most companies have their own packages and will not willing to reduce the price or work based on your budget. This is simply because they know amount of works that involves into getting the work done. If you have to find a company and cannot wait for your finances to catch up, you may be able to find an affordable company that will also be able to supply quality, reliable work, such as a fairly new company.

You should also remember that there are risks involved with using a company without a proven track record – and that risk is your money! Do not take that leap unless the company can supply you with a least a few references.

References are the most reliable indicator of a good company. Do not use a company that is not willing to show your references because of any reason, confidentiality included. Remember, even doctors will provide references! The firm you choose should provide you with a minimum of two references, one that is from the past, and one that is current.

You might want to contact those references but be aware that you might not get the answer since they will get worried or suspicious. Not all people are open enough to share their company information to others. Anyway, if you contact these references, be prepared to ask precise, specific questions so that neither of your time is wasted. Ask them what their experience was like with the company, such as their availability to answer questions and deal with problems and their ability to meet deadlines. Ask the reference to rate the overall performance of the company.

You can also find out if the company requested that the reference make significant changes to their web pages that affected the visitors coming to their site. You are looking for a Search Engine optimization company that can balance the needs of both Search Engines and site visitors without compromising either.

The most essential question to ask is whether the work of the Search Engine optimization company resulted in higher profits for the reference. Without profits, it does not matter whether your positions are at the top of the list or not. But also take note that your products or services quality will also affect the profits. No way can SEO Company guarantee your sales. They can only guarantee that your site will be ranked higher than your current rankings. They can push your site to even first position but whatever the case is at the end they cannot guarantee your sales. It is your products or services quality will decide the demands. More demands more profits.

So, hopefully based on the all the SEO tips I gave above, you are now ready to hire proper SEO expert to boost your website rankings. Now you now have all the proper knowledge about search engine optimization which you can use when planning to hire proper SEO Company.

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SEO Tips: Discover How Search Engines Really Work

March 1, 2010

SEO or search engine optimization has become one of the most powerful weapons to increase the site traffic. As we should aware that without traffic means no sales. So what is search engine and how does it really work? Search Engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various Search Engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks and act the main sources of information and that is:

1. They search the Internet by selecting or choosing pieces of the information on the Internet based on important words which is also known as keywords.
2. The search engine they keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them.
3. They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index which is also known as keyword phrase.

Each search engine has their own unique way of performing but it served for the same purpose. Early Search Engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. But not in today trend where a top Search Engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day.

Before a Search Engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a Search Engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites.

When a spider is building its lists, the process is called web crawling where the robots will crawl into pages that are contents rich and that has necessary elements that allow search engine to get in and grab the information.

Quality of the information depends on how rich the contents are and how well the contents are written. In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a Search Engine’s spiders have to look at a lot of pages. How does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. So, the more popular your site is the better ranking or position you will get.

The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web.

Search engines act as a information storage. What they will do is, once the spiders have completed the task of finding information on Web pages, the Search Engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful. There are two major mechanisms involved in making the gathered data reachable to users and that is:

1. The information stored with the data.
2. The method by which the information is indexed.

In other words, a Search Engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found which I mentioned earlier act as a storage. In reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained links to other pages containing the word.

In other words, there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.

The truth is, to make for more useful results, most Search Engines store more than just the word and URL. There are some other data, components or elements are also being monitored to provide more meaningful results. A Search Engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might allocate a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the META tags or in the title of the page. So, you will need to understand this so that your website pages are fully optimized for the search engines.

Different sites have different way of analyzing and information gathered. Each commercial Search Engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different Search Engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders. Meaning even though others might be using the same sets of keywords in their site, they might not get the same results as you are.

So, what is the purpose of index actually? An index has a single purpose and that is it allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word.

The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table’s effectiveness.

How does it work?

When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the Search Engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.

Hopefully, by reading this SEO tips article you managed to get some useful information that will help you in your website SEO optimization. By understanding all these you will be able to perform proper search engine marketing and site promotion that will surely bring you results to your business.

Cheers! :)

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