Your content’s URLs, or Universal Resource Locators, may not be something that you think about every day. Making your URLs as friendly and easy-to-use as possible is one of the basics of optimizing your website for search engines as well as vastly improving its general usability.
The base URL, or address, of your website often looks something like this: http://www.example.com. It’s what people type into the address bars of their browsers to navigate to your website. Using a relevant URL is an important part connecting your users with your offerings.
Say, for example, http://www.carsales.com, if you were, indeed, a car salesmen. That’s all pretty obvious, but how can you make your URL friendlier? Here’s two things to think about:
1) Human readable URLs
Often times, because of the nature of the programming behind a website’s functionality, URLs have a tendency to devolve into hard to read, hard to understand strings of text. The URL is used to pass information to the website’s scripts – or programs – and some developers don’t take the time to develop a friendly URL system, opting instead to pass raw data through the URL. Take for example, a web page on a fictional dog toy company’s website which lists all of their assorted dog collars. In some cases, you may find a URL like so: http://www.dogtoys.com/?catId=col&page=1
As you can tell, the URL says nothing legible about collars. That means it isn’t any help either to search engines or to actual users in terms of delivering any real meaning. Not only will search engines not be able to use this URL effectively to catalog the web page’s contents, but users will have a hard time remembering it if they ever choose to return to the web page. Instead, a “friendlier” URL may read like so: http://www.dogtoys.com/collars
That’s much simpler. Now search engines and real people alike will have no difficulty knowing what might be offered at that page, or remembering how to navigate back to it.
How do you get your website to sport human readable URLs?
Ask your SEO consultant to make sure your web pages are configured to allow them, and that they boast the most effective language and phrasing in terms of “find-ability.”
2) “Hackable” URLs
Once your website offers human readable URLs, it’s time to take it one step further. “Hackable” URLs refers to URLs which can be modified by users to deliver intuitive results. This is accomplished by arranging your website’s structure categorically, and reflecting that structure in the web pages’ addresses. For example, a “hackable” URL for a web page providing purple dog collars might look like this: http://www.dogtoys.com/collars/purple Now users can glean at a glance that this page will offer not just dog collars, but dog collars of a specific color. So what if your user wants to see all dog collars, regardless of color?
They simply “hack” off the specification at the end of the URL, which gives them: http://www.dogtoys.com/collars.
This practice not only adds more meaningful, precise language into your URLs which will ensure better search engine cataloging, but also adds meaning and intuitive navigability for your users.
Pump Up Your Website is a leader in the field of search, social media and email marketing. We’re also very good at web design, Internet development and ecommerce. We use tools like WordPress Blogs, Facebook and Twitter to make your business successful. Visit us at http://pumpupyourwebsite.com.
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com for MayonWebHosting’s Blog
Tags: friendlier URLs. hackable URL, url
By Monika Ruthe in Web Design
When you are designing a website, also think about the photos or “images” you want to include. Images in this context means diagrams and drawings as well as standard photos. All of them are held in a digital format on your computer and saved as such on the web server. Be aware of certain pitfalls in their use as this will make all the difference for visitors to your website.
Size matters
Images or photos come in all shapes and sizes. As digital cameras have advanced, the available camera size has soared from barely 1 mega-pixel to 10 or 12 or more mega-pixels, with a consequent increase in the photo size. You may have experienced what happens when a friend emails you a photo taken on their nice new camera. The attachment can be huge, and takes forever to download, even on broadband. Now imagine what would happen if you put that photo on your website – exactly the same: it would take ages for the image to be downloaded by the browser.
What you have to do is “re-size” the photo, using your photo-editing software. It’s an easy thing to do: open up the photo-editor and the photo you want to re-size, and click the menu button marked “image” (this is how most editors label it). What you have to do is change the horizontal width to a number of pixels that fits inside your web page. So if you have decided on a page width of 1,000 pixels, a photo size of 250 pixels would be one-quarter of the page width. Let the photo-editor work out the corresponding vertical length for you automatically, so apply the option to “maintain aspect ratio” or similar wording.
When you save the image, you will be given the option of saving it in different resolutions or qualities, from low resolution to high resolution. Unless you are building an “arty” website, low resolution will be quite adequate. Some photo editors actually give you a specific option to save at a suitable resolution for websites.
Finally, use “save-as” with a different file name rather than just “save” so that you don’t overwrite the original version.
Help the browser
When you include the image in your web page, you will have a line of HTML code looking something like this: img src=”mynewphoto.jpg” alt=”Words for Photo” height=”125″ width=”250″
It’s important to provide the height and width data. You can make a note of these values from when you re-sized the photo. By providing the data you are helping the browser allocate that amount of space on the page, and process the remaining HTML while the image is being downloaded.
If you don’t specify these values, older browsers will stop formatting text, download the image, check its dimensions, make room for the image and then start formatting text again.
If you follow these tips when designing a website, you will speed up the download time for your web pages, which will make it better for visitors to your website.
M. Ruthe runs a website design service for small businesses and has developed an online information resource for aspiring web designers. For further information on various aspects of website design visit www.bedfordwebsitedesign.com
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com for MayonWebHosting’s Blog
The web is a wild place. It is an art gallery without the admission fee. Web designers are artist of a different medium. Like artists not all of the website designs that they create are going to work. Some websites are truly annoying. Take for instance a painter that really likes the color blue. If it is used in every piece of art the painter makes it will visually not stimulate our eyes and we will become bored or annoyed with the artists art. The same is true for web design. As a website developer you need to make sure that your “art” is different for each client and you need to avoid common mistakes that draw attention away from the client’s product or service. There are several things to steer clear of when designing websites to ensure a perfect site for your client.
Top Five Most Annoying Website Design Techniques
1) Colors that assault the eye – If your clients insisting on using every color of the rainbow in their site design it is your job as the website designer to talk them out of it. Even though they think it adds just the right touch of pizzazz to their site you know better. Colors that are too bright or morbidly dark will not be suitable to promote your clients work. Even if you are promoting a circus keep the main site colors down to a maximum of two or three. Do not give in to the more is better philosophy with color.
2) Background sounds – Nothing is worse that a site that replays the same sound bit throughout the entire site. Or worse yet a slogan that plays each and every time you click on a new page within a site. Full songs are also an absolute annoyance. It is best that the site visually provides the entertainment leave the background noise out of future web designs.
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3) Spelling Errors – You are using a computer with a spell check button make sure you use it. Nothing is worse than bad grammar, incorrect punctuation or pour spelling. Before you go live with any site make sure multiple eyes have looked over all text. Even if the client has provided the text for their site do not trust that it is correct. Always double and triple check for errors or inconsistent tenses. They will thank you for catching the error before the site has become viewable to their clients.
4) Font Size – If you use all capital letters in your design people will feel like the site is shouting at them. Using all small letters will make people feel like you are whispering. It is best to stay consistent with normal text and punctuation. This way it will make the website feel as if it speaking to the viewer in a normal voice which will make it more pleasing to read.
5) Blinking links and popup windows – These items are to the web what junk mail is to our mail boxes. Useless information that gets in the way of important information. Stop using popup windows and blinking lights to attract attention to your art because the reality is that they are just annoying.
Remember in web design it is all about how your website design is perceived by the people viewing it. Make sure the art you present does not detour anyone from visiting the websites your clients have had you design.
If you have enjoyed this article from Kevin Germain at CPS please visit http://www.cpsmi.com today. You will find useful information on website development.
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com for MayonWebHosting’s Blog
Tags: web art, web design, web development, Website Design
LOCAL Internet Marketing – Your Website
You should definitely have access to a website that you are able change by yourself! It’s no longer acceptible to use a hard coded website for small business reasons. Webpages which do not change at some point, contain recent material and continue being relevant quickly sink in the search engine ranks. A small business really should take into consideration its internet site application as no more challenging to work with than Microsoft Office. There are excellent content management programs available on the market. A couple of the most well-liked include DotNetNuke which is a Microsoft backed content management system and WordPress, a popular blogging system that can be extremely effective as a small business web site. Regardless of which alternative you select, you must be able to add, modify, delete webpages and be able to add things to the menu on the site without coding.
First – KEYWORD RESEARCH
Presuming you are a traditional local company that would ordinarily use the yellow pages, the yellow page categories are a good start for locating keywords relative to your company. Once you have the overall business categories which you are convinced people might be typing into the the search engines, you can go to Google’s Free keyword tool and find an immense quantity of data for the keywords you’ve got and recommendations for others you may possibly not have thought about. Your initial keyword research is just to get an idea of exactly what the most common phrases are. As an example, you could represent an HVAC business.
Keywords could possibly include “air conditioner repair”, “furnace repair”, “heating system installment”…etc. Google will give you loads of information relative to the terms you’ll want to be making use of.
Next – LOCALIZE YOUR KEYWORDS
Upon having developed a list of keywords strongly related your small business, you’ll want to localize your list. There’s no sense in showing up in a search in Chicago if your business serves the Dayton marketplace. So as an example, in the event the general keyword is “plumber,” your localized keyword is “plumber dayton” or “plumber dayton ohio.”
Manage YOUR SITE – Helping the the major search engines find your website.
Important keywords need to show up first on the home page. Making a “quick links” area on the home page can be quite useful because it links the keywords to internal webpages within your website utilizing the keywords you are attempting to promote. This is particularly crucial.
Generate or change an inner page of your site to discuss the relevant key phrase. A page in your site should be dedicated to a single keyword subject! Too many internet sites try to cram way too many keywords into a single page.
This only confuses the search engines which are trying to figure out what your web page is about. Make it easy. If you have a content management system, adding and editing a web page should be as simple as 123. Use the keywords in context on both the home page and the inner page of your site and be sure that your inner page has a hyperlink from the home page.
Market your new content
Google LOVES content…certainly good content. The moment you have finished the improvements to your site, you should then market your site content by linking to it from other web resources. These inbound links need to use the keywords you’re promoting if possible. If not, the next best thing is a direct link to the home page and the inner page.
Backlinking is often the toughest aspect of website positioning. You will discover a number of ways to build links but our favorite is to write additional articles and publish them. By doing this, you get to have additional web content material that is very relevant to your site information leading to your site.
In addition: MAPS MAPS MAPS
It’s equally essential to be certain that you have modified your local listings in the major search engines including Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and also a handful of the maps sites.
Of these, Google Maps is the most important. If you’ve executed a local search lately you’ll see the local listings predominant in the search results. Don’t ignore this. Further, these results also are used widely in mobile phone applications. Try browsing for your business using the Google iPhone app if you have an iPhone and you’ll see what I mean.
Web exposure is an constant activity. The set it and forget it concept used to work but now, your site will get buried by savvy rivals. You don’t get the luxury of an alphabetical listing either. You have to work a little harder than your competition. With a web site that you can manage on your own and perhaps a little instruction, getting your internet site to show up for specified Google searches should be part of your daily or weekly routine.
Local Web Search Results is an Website Marketing Company located in Dayton Ohio focusing on LOCAL search engine results.. Check out their Results First program. You don’t show, you don’t pay! Local Online Web marketing Dayton Ohio.
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com for MayonWebHosting Blog
Tags: local advertising, local business marekting, local marketing, local search, small business marketing
So many women entrepreneurs come to me and ask still “I don’t know how to start up a fan page for my business or how else to promote myself on social media.” It is for this reason I am writing this article today…there are just too many of you out there still not familiar with what social media and social networking can do to jumpstart your business.
So, let me put it like this. If you go to in person networking events and strike up a conversation with someone there who most likely could be your target market, at some point you’re going to get to the point where you might ask them if you can follow up with them, meet for coffee, would they’d like to receive more information about your services, or, possibly on occasion, you could have them commit to becoming a client right then and there if they really connect with you and need what you have to offer right?
Picture the same scenario happening not in person but in a chat room, forum, fan page or between private messaging on one of your social sites. The same situation can happen if you structure your social networking in a way that invites that type of conversation and interaction. The key is though to have a system on what to say to whom and when.
Then how to follow up and continue those interactive conversations privately so the prospect gets to know you, sees what kind of advice you can bring to the table, you start establishing that trust until then they feel comfortable taking some kind of action with you.
This can take one or two messages back and forth or it can take multiple, the point is that you become consistent about your online communication efforts and you do it in a way that doesn’t take too much time, which means you’re organized and you have a system. My business as a Big Picture Business and Marketing Coach actually does quite well from my social networking and marketing online. I get an average of 2-3 prospects per week and I really don’t do that much at the moment to be honest. The people that I do end up communicating with personally on sites like Facebook are either all hot or warm prospects and by the time we get to the messaging stage (which is where I step into the system) they have already identified themselves as needing my expertise and assistance. This low level of time investment for me to gain this small number of prospects however also results in anywhere from $4,000-10,000 per month in revenue for me now. How would THAT help YOUR bottom line?
So, in the system you develop you need to make sure you’ve built in the right information to attract the right prospects, not just everyone; this takes some creative copywriting, you don’t just want to say ‘hello, let’s be friends’. I teach this in depth in my group coaching programs and private mentoring and keep in mind this is just ONE marketing strategy out of hundreds that you may want to consider; don’t discount everything else just because this happens to be free and easy to do from home.
So there is much more to this that I can share in one article but here is my 5 simple steps to social media start up success:
1. Outline Your Goals – what do you want to accomplish by communicating online? Do you want more customers? Do you want more exposure for your website? Do you want to sell products? Do you want to just be social?
2. Choose Your Sites – you don’t just want to get a profile on every social site out there, you should be somewhat strategic where you put your information and how you spend your time based on your overall goals.
3.Determine Your Strategy – this is more than just ok I’m going on to my sites 3 times a week for 30 min each, you need more than a strategy than that. You need to know what to say and how to reach MORE target prospects or people and how to build a following, get people to interact with you, etc.
4. Schedule Your Time – this is huge, so many people waste countless hours every week because they don’t have a strategy on what to do on social media, they aren’t focused and yet they don’t see the value in investing in learning more how to do this effectively but I think I’ve shown you above what could be possible for you if you paid more attention to this aspect of your marketing right?
5. Provide Consistent Interaction - you’ve got to be consistently out there, talking, typing, texting, blogging, commenting, messaging, posting, liking, following and more!
This marketing strategy doesn’t have to take a lot of time when you have a system.
A small team or at least one person to help you manage some of the front end communicating could provide you many leads for your business and pretty quickly at that. But trying to do this on your own I can tell you will be extremely time consuming and more difficult than you think to reach thousands each month which is what you want to build a bigger business.
(c) Copyright 2011 K. Sawa Marketing International. Katrina Sawa is an Award-Winning Author & Speaker who’s helped hundreds of small business owners take dramatic steps in their businesses to get them to the next level in business, revenues & their personal life. Get her Free Entrepreneur’s Success Kit at www.JumpStartYourMarketing.com!
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com for MayonWebHosting’s Blog
Tags: social media success, social network, social networking
