Debunking Web Builder Myths and The Truth Behind Them

Most of these rumors and myths are spread around by professionals that build websites for a living. They do not like website builders because they take away their business. There are a lot of rumors about web builders. However, most of what they say about web builders is false. Here are some of the common myths, and the truth behind them.

Site Builders Can't Get Listed in the Search Engines

Some people will claim that sites built with a web builder cannot get listed in the search engines. This is based on the fact that search engines such as Google do not tend to list duplicate sites. Site builders do create similar sites as far as background images and headers are concerned. However, this is not what Google and other search engines look for. The search engines are looking at content. So, even if you manage to choose all of the same options and templates as another site that is created with the same website builder, you are sure to be listed in the search engines as long as you have your own domain name (not a sub domain), and you do not duplicate content.

Site Builders are Limited in Features and AddOns

This myth is simply not true. Web builders have come a long way over the years, and most features or add ons that can possibly be added to a site are available through the best website builders. However, if the site builder does not offer the feature you require, you simply need to find it elsewhere on the web. You can generally find websites that, for free or a small service charge, will customize a feature or add-on for your site and provide the code to make it happen. All you have to do is copy the code and paste it into your website.

Some people will tell you this is not possible with a site builder. However, this is also not true. In fact, most web builders will allow you to edit the HTML code for the site by going into what is called the WYSWYG editor. The best website builders will have this feature, and it will allow you to easily copy and paste any code necessary that is not already provided by the web builder.

Site Builders Cost Too Much Money Long Term

Website building professionals want you to believe that a web builder will cost you as much or more than their services. However, this is simply not the case. In truth, a good web builder can be as little as twenty-five dollars per month, and include web hosting. Alternatively, you can pay a professional as much as a thousand dollars or more to build your site, and must pay an additional fee when you want that site updated. In addition, you still have to pay for hosting. While the monthly cost is recurring the entire time you have your site, it is still a cost-effective method.

Read More

The Relationship Between Graphic Designers and Their Clients

As all graphic designers will know, clients come in many shapes and sizes, making every project a unique experience. Some clients can make you wish you took up another profession while others are a pleasure to work with. Clients - we can't live with them and we can't live without them.

For a graphic designer, the ideal client is the one that doesn't haggle with you on price, the one that pays on time and perhaps most importantly, the one that, while providing you with all the relevant information you need, doesn't get too involved in the design process. They trust your expertise as a designer and leave it to you to create something that will get the right message across to their audience. One of the toughest jobs for a graphic designer, especially when designing a web site, is to balance the conflict that often arises between what their client wants and what the end client wants. Many a times, clients make subjective design decisions based on personal likes and dislikes that can jeopardize the message intended for their audience. Often, they may also demand more than what is required to get their message across, diluting what is important.

Typically, a designer will meet with a client at the kick off meeting to discuss their requirements for, say, a new web site. If there are five of them in the meeting, each one will have their list of five "musts" for the home page. You're left with a list of twenty-five items for the home page, when in fact the user is only after one thing. The conflict now begins between prioritizing what is important for the client and what is important for the end client. A designer's job is to prioritise and pare down the less important items in a place where users can access them if they wish and ignore them if they just want to find out the price of something, read the company story or watch the featured video. Resolving these conflicts isn't always easy. It all depends on the client. Some clients are reasonable and take the designer's advice once he/she has explained the reasoning behind their design decisions. Others, unfortunately, are not so reasonable. That being said, it is the designer's responsibility to always argue their case, politely of course, and not to ignore the end clients just for the sake of getting paid.

Read More

About Commenting Platforms Before Choosing One

Every serious blogger knows that a major aspect of their blog's life is the comment box. Without this box, blogs lose their sense of engagement and personality -- they become just another website. Additionally, some SEO experts even suggest that comments help establish a blog as an authority, thus improving its PR (PageRank) with search engines like Google and Yahoo.

What are commenting platforms

For various reasons, some bloggers decide to replace the default comment box with another custom box. They are called commenting platforms, and they are developed by third-party developers for blog and website owners. Some bloggers need more versatility with their comment box; therefore, they replace the native field with a third-party commenting platform. Of course, there may be other reasons why a blogger would change this field.

The benefits of a commenting platform

Unlike native commenting fields, these platforms offer a wide range of features. Here are just a few of the benefits you receive from installing a commenting platform:

. Social media integration

. Comment threads

. Reply by email

. Real-time commenting

. Export comments

. Import comments

. Commenter profiles

One very notable feature that many third-party platforms have is the ability to like a user's notes and input. Some applications, such as Livefyre, use a reputation point system that is placed next to every one.

The drawbacks of a commenting platform

Now that you understand some of the benefits, you should be aware that there are negative aspects associated with these types of platforms. You memorize or bookmark these negative aspects to help you look for the right platform for your blog:

. Third-party platforms take much longer to load than native WordPress or Blogger platforms, thus possibly hurting your Google PR.

. All platforms operate from an off-site server. Therefore, there is a risk that the servers could go down, potentially damaging your comment data.

. Many bloggers report that their platform is very buggy.

. Almost every commenting platform requires readers to login before they can comment.

What you should look for when choosing a platform

If you decide to use a platform for your blog, you need one that is reliable and well-known. There may be new commenting platforms in the near future that address all of these issues, but it is up to you to try out the platform on your own blog to make your own judgment.

You should also determine what features you must have for your blog -- social media integration, email replies, commenter profiles and other features. The features you choose should reflect the type of content you produce.

Hopefully this information will help you make an informed decision. Do your research before committing to a commenting platform.

Read More

Tools and Publishing Platform Options

If you want to make a name for yourself on the web, one of the most effective ways to do so is through the use of a blog. The name blog is short for weblog. Essentially, it is a collection of articles or posts that are presented in a format where the newest information is the most accessible. Older posts are eventually categorized into the archives. The articles can be further categorized using tags so that posts can be browsed through by topic.

Why are blogs so helpful? They allow you to stay current and build an audience. A website that doesn't regularly update with additional information will not attract a regular audience. It is possible to have success with this type of website, but the most loyal audiences form around blogs. Additionally, blogs allow you to continually pump out information, which means that there is more material which can potentially be discovered in the search engines. This leads to more traffic, which leads to greater success.

Another thing that is so useful about blogs is the fact that there are a great deal of blogging platforms available. These platforms make it easy to set up a blog without requiring a great deal of knowledge of computers. In addition to that, the most popular of these platforms are available for free. This makes blogging one of the most cost effective ways to set up a website.

One of the most popular blogging platforms is WordPress. While it isn't quite as simple to set up as some of the other options, it is highly customizable. A wide range of themes are available to choose from in order to give your site a unique feel. Additionally, plugins can be added to the basic platform in order to give your website all kinds of unique functionality. Since WordPress is open source, you also have the option of altering the code yourself in order to give your site a completely unique feel.

WordPress.org is where you can find the software and install it on your own server. WordPress.com, on the other hand, will handle the hosting for you at no cost. The downside is that you can't advertise a website that is posted on WordPress.com.

Another very popular blogging platform is Blogger, which was once known as Blogspot. The primary advantage of this platform, provided by Google, is that it is very easy to set up. The downside of Blogger is that it is less customizable. Tumblr is a similar platform.

Joomla is a more advanced type of platform referred to as a content management system. It allows you to design web sites and online applications with a wide range of capabilities not available with a standard blog platform. This is a great option if you want more functionality, but if you aren't looking to do much more than share text and pictures, this isn't the right choice.

Read More

Claim Your Own Share of Your Site Business

How Do Search Engines Work?

What we refer to today as a search engine is a more complex search portal. Search portals are generally synonymous with gateway, for a World Wide Web site that is or proposes to be a major starting site for users when they get connected to the Web and need to find information. There are portals of a generalised nature and specialized or niche portals. Some major general portals include Google, Yahoo, Excite, Netscape, Lycos, CNET, Microsoft Network.
Here, I will examine the typical composition of a search engine results page (SERP). Every search portal delivers results from different data sources. The different ways in which each search portal prepares and serves these information to the users is what gives each portal its own unique identity.

The SEO strategy you adopt for your site can be affected by changes to the way a major search portal presents its search results.

A typical search engine results page is comprised of three major components: spider-based (organic) listing, sponsored listings, and directory listings. Not all SERPs contain all three components, and some portals incorporate additional data sources depending on the search term used.

1. Spider-based (Organic) Listings

Spider based results are featured as the primary element of SERPs by most search portals. These listings are referred to as editorial, free, natural, or organic. For consistency, I will be referring to spider-based listings as organic listing throughout the rest of this article.

Each spider based engine uses its own unique algorithm, or formula to determine the order of search results.The databases that power organic search results primarily contain pages that are found by web crawling spiders. Some search providers offer paid inclusion and trusted feed programs that guarantee the inclusion of certain pages in the database.

Organic search listings are the primary focus for search engine marketers and consultants, but they are not the only focus. The continued use of pay-per-click is essential to a well rounded strategy. It paramount to know that most of today's search portals do not operate their own spider-based search engine; instead they acquire results from one of the major search players like Google and Yahoo. There are many search portals in the market, but only a handful operate crawling search engines. The following major search portals operate their own spiders, Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN.

2. Sponsored (Pay-per-click) Listings

It costs alot of money to run a search portal. Spider based engines operate an extremely high expense, and expense that most can't afford. Portals that don't operate their own spider based search engines must always pay to obtain spider search results from portals that does. Today, even the smallest size search portal can generate revenue through sponsored listings. Sponsored listings is simply where a company has paid to have their site prominently listed when someone searches for certain words or phrases. Sponsored listings is used primarily used as their primary search results by Meta search engines.

Sponsored listings in addition to helping search portal stay afloat, provide an excellent complement to organic search engines by connecting searchers with advertisers whose sites might not otherwise appear in the search results.

Majority of portals do not operate their own pay-per-click advertising service. They instead show sponsored results from one or more partners and earn a percentage of those advertisers' fees. The major PPC providers are Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft's adCentre.

The PPC advertising model is simple. Advertisers place bids against specific search terms. Advertisers' ads are returned with the search results, when searchers click on one of those words or terms. Advertisers are charged per click amount they bid for those terms each time searchers click on those words or terms.

Different ranking methods are used by different PPC providers to rank their sponsored listings. These methods start by advertisers bidding against each other to have their ads appear alongside the results returned for various search terms' but each method has its own broad matching options to allow a single bid to cover multiple search terms.

PPC ranking systems are no longer as simple as allocating the highest positions to the highest bidders.Google's methodology, combines the click through rate of an advertiser's listing (that is, the number of clicks divided by the number of times the sponsored listing is displayed) with the advertiser's bid in assessing where the PPC advertisement will be located. One of the reasons why Google has gained popularity significantly is, that its method tends to optimise the revenue generated per search.

3. Directory Listings

Directory originate from human edited web directories, such as Look Smart, The Open Directory, and the Yahoo Directory. Most search portals offer directory results as an optional search, thereby requiring the user to click to see them. Search portals have lately reduced their emphasis on directory listings, as quality of organic search results improved.

However, the importance of directory listings has not diminished in obtaining organic engines rankings.

Search Engine Optimisation

It is vital to note that there are two steps involved in getting a web page into search results pages.

1. Getting in the search index.
2. Getting the web page to the top of the final indexed results before it is presented to the searcher.

The first step is relatively easy to accomplish. You need to let the spiders know that your new web pages exists and how to find them. This can be easily be achieved by pointing to the new page from an already indexed page. Some search providers provide an option for a new URL to be manually submitted for inclusion into their index.

Achieving step 2 successfully is the most difficult. Bulk of Search Engine Optimization tasks is centered around this. Search engines spend some incredible amount of time and effort on making their algorithms find find the best ways to effectively rank sites. According to the Search Engine leader Google, there are in excess of 200 factors that determine the rank of a web page in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

SEO is the process of making changes to your web pages to conform to Search Engines standards in order to rank at the top of Search Engine Results for related keywords that your site optimised for.

What Do Search Engines Look For?

Before delving into the specifics of SEO, let me first explain what search engines really want.

Search Engines have a goal of been able to fulfill the search needs of its users by providing with highly targeted relevant information. Google makes most of its money from selling advertisements that are served along with regular search results. Google is able to do this because it is the market leader and the most popular search engine in the world.Google is widely used because it provides users with the relevant results from their searches.

What Search Engines Don't Like

It is extremely important to have a sound knowledge of what search engines don't want in order to succeed in your SEO campaign. The lack of this knowledge may mean that, your perfectly optimized site may not be indexed and could even be banned. Therefore, when you learn about factors that influence search engine rankings, you should also learn which tactics to avoid.

Spam

Search providers hate tactics intended to fool them into awarding high rankings to irrelevant pages. These tactics are called "spam." They strive to provide the most relevant results to their users, but spam clutters their indices with irrelevant information.

Some website owners create spam after they have learned which criteria spiders use to rank pages. For example, they give high scores to pages filled with keywords. This is termed as keyword stuffing. Website owners and Webmasters came up with a way to add more keywords without sacrificing a site's appearance. Invisible text are used ( the background and the text are the same colour, so the text is not seen by the visitors). Previously, robots that indexed invisible keywords ranked those sites higher for keyword frequency and weight.

Spiders are now familiar with this technique and class it as spam. The use of invisible text can get your site banned from most leading engines.

The following techniques are usually considered spam by major search engines:

• Meta refresh tags
• Invisible text and overuse of tiny text
• Irrelevant keywords in the title and meta tags
• Excessive repetition of keywords (classed as keyword stuffing)
• Overuse of mirror sites (same sites that point to different URLs)
• Submitting too many pages in one day
• Identical or nearly identical pages
• Submitting to an inappropriate category (for directories)
• Link farms
• Frames, dynamic content and Flash intros.

Although search engines won't penalize you for the use of frames, dynamic content and multimedia files, they will have difficulty indexing such pages.

Recently, some engines started to index dynamic content. However, most search engines are still unable to index multimedia and dynamic pages, and those that are, don't index all of them. Here's a list of files that search engines don't index:

• Text in graphics (use ALT tags)
• Pages that require registration, cookies or passwords
• XML
• Java applets
• Acrobat files (PDF), except Google
• Dynamic content (URLs with "?" in them), except Google, AltaVista, FAST and Inktomi
• Multimedia files (Flash, Shock wave, streaming video)

Build Workaround Pages to Avoid Indexing Problems

If your site consists largely of files that search engines don't index, create workaround pages. Workaround pages should contain the most important information about your products or services. Workaround pages should be optimized just like doorway pages.

Search engines will index workaround pages even if they can't index the rest of a site. Always link to these pages from your site map to make sure search engines can spider them, and submit workaround pages rather than non-optimized pages.

Conclusion

SEO Best Practices to Consider

There are tried and tested SEO tactics that you can use to ensure your site is successfully crawled, indexed, and positioned in the major search engine results pages. Though SEO tactics evolve with the technologies used to render Web sites, certain fundamentals remain constant.

How can you tell if your site adheres to current SEO best practices? You should start by providing honest answers to the following questions.

• Are the keywords you're targeting relevant to site content?
• Are targeted keywords popular phrases used in search engine queries?
• Do page titles start with your targeted keywords?
• Does your site employ H1 header tags for prominent content titles?
• Is your permanent body copy contextually sufficient and keyword-rich?
• Do text links include targeted keywords that point users to pages within your site?
• Do you use CSS image replacement in graphical navigation on the site?
• Do graphics used in the site have descriptive, keyword-rich alternative attributes that are useful for visitors to your site?
• Does your Web site have a site map with text links?
• Do the URLs of your dynamic, database-driven pages look simple and static?
• Does your site have a flat and simple directory structure?
• Does your site's home page and other key category pages have PageRanks?
• Is your site listed in Open Directory?
• Do you routinely list your site in other trusted, human-reviewed online directories?
• Does all pages in your Web site have keyword-rich meta tag descriptions?
• Does your site have a custom error page?
• Does the site's file names and directory names include targeted keywords?
• Does your site avoid using pop-ups?
• Is the exact same content visible to both users and search engine spiders?
• Do you avoid free-for-all linking offers?

If you take time to Implement the above 20 most fundamental elements of SEO best practices (or at least bulk of them) and avoiding the worst seo practices should provide you with a sound approach to better visibility for your Web site in major search engines.

Read More

5 Tips To Make Your E-Commerce Website Design More User Friendly

Before you start putting every little idea you conceive into the website, make sure you mull over a few tips first to make E-Commerce website design more user friendly.

1. Keep things simple and well-organized.

Magazine-style layouts and templates are everywhere on the information superhighway these days. All the featured articles posted on the home page of the website might confuse readers and make it difficult for them to tell what your site is all about. Making money from your website is likely to be more difficult if your potential customers are confused.

With that in mind, set up a website that is pleasing to the eyes. It should not be too cluttered or too busy. Keep things neat and properly sorted. Categorise items in your inventory or divide them by type of service. Make sure the site has navigation tools that will allow customers to find the things they are looking for.

A menu on the side or a navigation bar at the top portion right under the header is a fail safe way of organising the site and improving site usability. You can use the front page to highlight your recent product additions or bestsellers. Some website owners also include a moving or a flashing image that will alert potential customers about their newest products or items that are on sale.

2. Show your best products on the front page and use photos to guide your customers.

Choose the best photos of the products you are selling. If you are selling clothes, pick the photo that will look best as the primary photo of that product album. This will immediately pique the interest of the customer and will start the ball rolling. If not, you can use a particular logo or an illustration to show your customers what is included in that album.

A picture of a hanger will work well for the clothing album while a picture of a pair of shoes will suit well for your company's shoe collection. Show a photo of an envelope for the "Contact Us" portion of your page.

3. Navigation should be accessible and easy.

You might have incorporated some sort of navigation features in your website but if this cannot be located and accessed easily, your consumers will immediately feel lost. As mentioned above, a navigation bar at the top of the page or a menu at the side of the page should help your customers find out where exactly they are. Label every page so your customers won't get lost and make sure there is a Home page option where they can go back to the front portion of the website.

It also helps to include a site map. If you are using Blogger or WordPress as platforms, incorporating a site map should be easy. Plugins are available that create a page that will include links to all the primary pages of your website. Your potential customer can simply click on this link and locate the page they want to go to in the list.

4. Include a search option in your website.

Every E-Commerce website design should include a search box. Customers are looking for quick ways to find the item they want. Most of them do not want to rummage through the contents of your site to find what they are looking for. They would want to type the keyword in the search box and hit the search button. It is simple and straightforward.

Your website should also pull out accurate search lists. Make sure the products are labelled correctly with the right keywords. The search list should be comprehensive as well. It should indicate the type of product, the cost and some details about it.

5. Checking the items out should be simpler.

Keep in mind that not all Internet users are really tech-savvy. You might have old clients that do not know how to navigate a virtual cart. To make things easier, your buy now or checkout button should always be present in every page, preferably close to the photo of the item. Make the image or the font bigger and more colourful so the buttons will be harder to miss.

Your E-Commerce website should be conducive to shopping. Adopt a multi channel retail system to make things easier. E-Commerce website design is more impressive if it allows customers to shop with ease.

Read More

SEO Friendly and Web Designing Services

SEO or Search Engine Optimization and web designing services are intrinsically related to one another. The development process are obviously different in both cases as different methods, analytics and analysis are followed, but it is undeniable that both SEO strategies and SEO friendly web design services contribute to the enhanced visibility of a website by enabling it to attain a better online presence. Before introspecting into the relation of SEO and web design and development, let us have an idea on how search engines (SE) work.

When a search query is entered in the search engine's search box, there are number of results that appear. However, the online users do no not usually go beyond the first page for satiating their requirements. So, it is the aim of every online business owner to make their business website appear in the first page of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). All search engines use set of rules (algorithms) that process tons of information in quick span of time and filter it on the basis of the keyword or key phrase. Then, these filtered data are collected by search engines robots which virtually visit each website to collect keywords and code from them. Here is a secret! SEs obviously take the web content into account while crawling, but it composes only 20% of the whole process. Rather, SE crawling take the programme codes and the designs into account. Thus, SEO friendly web development service is necessary for making a website search engine friendly.

The programme codes that are used to develop the webpages, the relevant incoming links, and keywords usage are some of the most important factors which make the SE crawlers to index the web pages. Title Tag Optimization, Meta Descriptions and HTML source codes also play a dominant role in making the website 'crawlable'. Hence SEO friendly web development service is essential in order to improve the website's organic rank.

A professional SEO web designer not only makes sure that the website is visually appealing, but also sees to it that it is accessible to the SE spiders, so that it can be indexed by search engines. The website design should be such that there are proper navigation tools and must complement the service that the enterprises render. Putting in informative content is another vital point of SEO friendly web design and development service.

The SEO friendly web design and development companies emphasize on usage of proper heading tags, italic texts, bold text and lists. Normally, HTML codes of webpages have heading tags, italic tags and other lists and it is recommended to use them while developing a website. By using CSS, these tags can be styled in different ways. Using heading tags for headings and bold tags for important texts help the SEs to understand which text on the page is heading and which text is an important one.

There are many companies that offer SEO friendly web development as well as designing services. A professional SEO web development company seeks to increase website functionality and enhance its visibility by developing sites that are SE friendly.

The most common SEO friendly web design and development services include logo graphic designing, user friendly interface designing services and lots more. The ultimate aim of the SEO friendly web design and development services is to identify the end requirement of your business and achieve marketing goals, whereby, your site will experience increased traffic and better sales leads.

Read More