Getting a website is not enough, being there does not mean that you will be seen. A lot of people imagine that once you get a website and visitors and customers will start pouring in. The disappointment from those high expectations hits them really fast, it only takes a month or two to realize that noone will come and knock on your door just because you have a websites. There are millions of sites on the web today and probably thousands of people own a website in the same nice you are. So you can imagine what it would mean for someone to find you and your website..
It takes dedicated effort, it takes knowledge and still in the bigger part it is testing and analyzing and then testing and refining your strategy and testing and analyzing again. After you have your website built there is a loop of Define → Measure → Analyze → Improve → Control → Define.
What that means is that you first have to Define your goals, your keywords, your niche. Then you have to Measure which keywords get the best traffic, then based on that measure what the competition is like, how many links they have and from what websites, how hard it will be for you to compete with them. Analyze is the process of constant monitoring of where your visitors are coming from, how long they stay on the website which parts of the websites they like and which they don’t, where are they leaving from. Looking for patterns and models, for gaps and flaws as well as for undiscovered opportunities, under-performance and over-performance based on your expectations. It is hard to define the whole process but the truth is that it is different for everyone, once you start doing it you will be able to develop habits of your own. The next part of the cycle is Improve. You have to use everything you found out when you where analyzing in order to improve the performance of your website and you have to apply Control in order to make sure that you will work on all of the key points that you spotted while analyzing your statistics and the plan that you made on what should be improved. Control is crucial, and it involves a lot of focus and dedication. A Rule of thumb is write it down and then follow it. You can’t remember everything. And then back to Define. Once you have the data from the first cycle you will be able to Refine and Define new goals and targets for your website.
Dominating the search engines becomes harder and harder, you have to really have unique product or service in order to be able to get the buzz out of people who can mention you in their social profiles like Facebook or Twitter, or at some community forums, or bookmark you with their favorite social bookmarking services, or link you from their blog or website… The other option you have is to go and do all that yourself, create the initial buzz but still if you don’t know what you are doing it takes some time to master the skills. And the other thing is at the end of the day it will be again all about the quality / uniqueness of what you have to offer. Even if you put huge amount of time and effort in promoting and marketing your services or products, if they are not really worth it you will only have mediocre results. One have to admit even that is better than nothing though..
The two cents in this story – get out there and work, experiment, analyze, test again and again, analyze, improve your performance, analyze again. To be honest it is an infinite loop, but in the process of doing it you will develop a lot of skills that will allow you to lead your niche. Reading about it is not going to get you anywhere. Take some action! Even the longest journey begins with a single step… Persistence is one of the most valuable assets you can develop on your way to online riches. Just do it!
CSS stands for ‘Cascading style sheets’ which is a computer style sheet language. It gives web designers the liberty of affixing different styles like color, spacing, font and so on to the HTML documents of a website. The work pattern of CSS is same as a template, styles can be labeled and then applied to many web pages altogether. Numerous benefits are associated with CSS like effortless website maintenance, easy access to alter the style sheets, SEO advantages, etc are associated with it.
Use of CSS in your websites can make a website more search engine friendly, so that your website gets higher ranking in search engines. The bots very well understand the cascading style sheets and makes a website score fairer in online rankings.
As far as nature of search spiders are concerned, they are very lethargic. They usually avoid going through lengthy and complex HTML codes for getting the indexes. The search engine spiders prefer HTML coding with CSS as they are precise and clear when compared to any other table based coding. Lots of over work is saved by these external style sheets. Primary reason behind HTML codes getting clear and yield higher search engine rankings are the CSS files which help in designing and deciding the attributes. Overall download time of the website is minimized as combination on CSS and Java script files decreases the web page size. Thus the indexing becomes faster leading your website to higher rank positions.
Application of CSS makes a website light-weight which is preferred by major search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Google. CSS eliminates junk HTML codes and keeps them well organized making them a favorite among the search engine spiders. Bots are not concerned with complicated HTML coding but the website and its content.
CSS works not only for search engines but also for the website visitors, as it gives a well-formatted look to the web pages. Visitors also prefer websites that have standardized format and do not have old fashioned and complex HTML coding.
Have you noticed how often when you open a website for the first time, how much time you need to decide whether or not you are going to continue with your journey on that website. Experts say it takes couple of seconds to the average user to decide whether or not he will read on, stay on the website and dig further more. If your design, color scheme and overall looks of the website cannot attract the attention or are too annoying the visitors will just click the X in the top right corner and carry on with your competitors website..
We are all aiming at better traffic volumes, better positioning in the search engines, better conversion rates. At least we should be if we are serious about our intentions and plans to develop the online side of our business or even turn our website in a full time business venture.
Apart from the design there is the accessibility and usability of our website. Those fancy terms are actually used for how easy it is for the average visitor to deal with our website, to find what he is looking for and finally make that purchase or whatever action you are calling for. The general understanding if you are selling a product or a service is that the users of your website should be able to reach it in 3 clicks. This means 3 clicks away from the homepage is ok, anything further deep down becomes difficult for the average person to cope with.
You should aim at making your website easy for navigation, with links to internal pages visible and well positioned, with easy ways of going back and forth without risking to be lost inside the website. Think of that – if your website is visited by someone that doesn’t use Internet that much, or a child, will he or she be able to find their way. If the answer is Yes then you are on the right track. If it seems to complicated then you have to find a way to simplify the whole navigation and design. Simple is better. There is a very useful marketing method called K.I.S.S. – Keep it Simple and Stupid. Stick to it. Do some tests, ask people to open your website and observe how they interact with it, ask them how they feel and based on the feedback that you receive work making your website better.
ew Post
It has been 10 days since Yahoo closed GeoCities – the free hosting service that they acquired back in 1999 for $2.87 billion. Rest in Piece GeoCities! After the news for Yahoo pulling the plug to their free service we started seeing a lot of GeoCities customers moving our way and we are Welcoming all of you that are looking for a substitute. Our Free Web Hosting service has a lot to offer.
What would we do without GeoCities we wonder… Where would we have put our brightly colored, constantly flashing backgrounds? Who else had rotating .gifs for links and neon green page hit counters? There is no substitute for your plethora of font colors and sizes, for your broken HTML codes and page badges… Anyway this name will always remain a symbol for the industry, and Internet relic.
If you’re a GeoCities user, you’ve been given plenty of warning, but you can still hop over there and get your data out today before current owner Yahoo turns out the lights.
Use the time while you are here and take a look at our Free Hosting plan.
