Search Engine Optimization

Your website is where your business resides -- it's like the headquarter of an offline company. Hence, it is important to practise good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

Make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

Overture or now known as Yahoo because of Yahoo’s takeover, was the original inventor of the use of the P4P or Pay for Performance. Overture saw that the internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in the arena.To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted.
Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume this could still be a substantial figure for your company.
Getting a consistent substantial flow of website visitors is every company’s goal. Many methods are devised and utilized to ensure that there would be more people to boost the sales and to be aware of the existence of such a product or service. Website visitors are potentially the life blood of your internet based business.
Yahoo/Overture utilizes the same principle as Google’s Adwords. In fact, they are very similar to each other that they use keyword and keyword phrase searches and to determine which ads to show per search. When a person types in a keyword or keyword phrase to search for anything, the search engines gives out the results in a page. Then at the right side of the page, you will see selected ads that have paid for their ads to be viewed with certain keywords and keyword phrases searched.
For example, Lets say you run a car parts retail/wholesale site. You choose keywords that can prompt or trigger your ads to be shown in the page when a keyword is searched. When a search engine user types in Honda Accord, your ad may come up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. You don’t need to fully optimize your site with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

While some labor so hard to make their site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search, you get the chance to be on the top of the list or at least in the first page of a search result increasing your chance to be clicked on. With that, you drive traffic and website visitors to your site a lot faster. You will have to pony up some cash when using this service though. There are different ways Yahoo/Overture will charge you. It may be in the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or in the many times your ad is clicked on. Others offer many other services like having your ad show up not only in the search engine pages but also with some third party sites.

Third party sites support ads that have the same theme or niche as them. With more areas your ad is shown, you increase the chances of people knowing about your site or product. With more website visitors you increase the sales of your site which makes your investment with your ads a wise one.

With so many competitions in the internet based businesses, it is necessary to take a huge leap forward from the pack by advertising. Yahoo/Overture will be a great place to start. Many have utilized their services and have reaped the rewards of this decision. It’s a marketing strategy that will increase your website visitors as well as increase your sales resulting to profit.

It takes money to make money, while there are some methods that are basically low cost or free, using a marketing service such as what Yahoo/Overture offers will provide results faster and on a larger scale. Many businesses have learned this the hard way, don’t be counted with them.

Bandwidth (sometimes loosely referred to as "traffic") is the amount of bytes that are transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site per day.The first thing that you need to know is that there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. Don't believe any commercial web host that advertises itself as offering "unlimited bandwidth". The host has to pay for the use of the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, most will simply just charge you for the extra amount that you use. Many startup sites that require high bandwidth have found this out the hard way when they suddenly receive a lot of hits and end up with deductions on their credit.
The idea is to find a website that will not charge you outrageous usage fees if you do end up using more bandwidth then they initially thought. As most websites fail as moneymakers most web hosts are not counting on you becoming so successful that you hog their entire cyberspace. However if you do, watch out as exorbitant fees are often hidden in the fine print of the contracts that they have with you.

To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives use less than 3GB of bandwidth per month. If you plan to use more space, then buy more space.If you are performing SEO techniques on your website it is almost guaranteed that your traffic requirements will grow over time. This is a natural side effect of your site becoming better known. CHECK THE FINE PRINT of the web hosts Term of Agreement policy to see if they will charge you any extra if your site uses too much bandwidth

Web sites that offer free hosting usually offer you what is called a split domain name. In fact some web hosting sites will still stick you with a split domain name even after you have paid for hosting so be careful.An example of an owned domain name would www.healthywealthyandwise.com. If you choose a free hosting service your domain might change to look something like www.freesitehosting.com/healthywealthyandwise.Which looks so big and funny too. Yes i am serious it looks funny and very unprofessional

Another big drawback of the split domain that comes with free web hosting is that most URL submission services simply will not accept it as a URL or only accept it as a short version.So let' say for example that you decide to enter www.freesitehosting.com /treasure chest into a search engine submission tool. The next thing you know, when your site is listed in the search engines, your full domain name is list, but when you click on it, it leads you to some strange portal or information about how to register a domain name with your host. Even worse it sometimes informs the person searching that your domain name is for sale, which of course makes it look like you have gone completely out of business!

All web hosts impose a limit on the amount of traffic your web site can receive per day and per month. This means that if your site attracts visitors beyond a quota your free web host implied on your site the web host will disable your web site (or perhaps sends you a bill for the hosting of the excess traffic).100MB traffic per month is too little for anything other than your personal home page yet that is exactly the amount of bandwidth that most free web hosting deals offer.

Yes a free hosting can cost you more than paid one. As most of us think wow i got free hosting now i don't have to pay and i am saving but you do pay and how i will tell you.
There are two kinds of hosting:

Shared hosting : This means that your web site will be sharing space with a number of other sites. The host manages the service, but it is your responsibility to maintain your site. The major problem with this scenario is that if one of the other people sharing the site experiences heavy traffic your site could go down as your host tries to accommodate the heavy load of visitors.You can get this one for free but you will regret it only

Dedicated hosting. :In this scenario you lease a server from a host. You'll pay more, but because you're not sharing, traffic with other web masters you don't have to be concerned about your site suddenly appearing to degrading or disappearing. This option is sometimes divided into unmanaged hosting, which provides limited support for lower fees, and managed hosting, which costs more but provides higher-level support, maintenance, security, and services.

Free web hosting has some MAJOR disadvantages, especially when it comes to search engine optimization.
One of the main reasons to stay away from free web hosts is that search engine spiders and robots hate the pop up advertising that free web hosts always use to subsidize the cost of allowing you to use their space. Many search engines and spiders won’t read these pages for content at all, especially if they contain a lot of pop up banners or images which are merely read by the bots as blank space.It is also typical for the web host to add an increasing amount of pop up sites and web banners to your page to get you so annoyed that you finally spring to pay for a “real” URL.The presence of pop up frames cause big problems.Google, Yahoo search engine spiders, crawlers and bots don't even bother to crawl a site with pop up frames

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your web site as identifiable as possible to both people and search engines.You might wonder Why?This is because having a people-friendly web site is not the same as having a search engine friendly web site. A search engine friendly web site is one that appeals to tiny robots called “spiders” that search the World Wide Web for your site every time some one types in a search for information.The intention of SEO copywriting is to elevate your site's ranking in the search engines by including what are called targeted keywords and keyword descriptions right in the body of the text. These keywords are obtained by finding out how people phrase their requests when they input a request into the search engines.Step by step guide.Important follow every step.

Be A Great Host

Your first step to preparing yourself for search engine optimization is to make sure that you have a web site that works. Having a site that functions is more than half the battle when it comes to advertising and promoting your site.The reason that it is absolutely of the essence that you have a website that works seamlessly from the home page to the check out page is because just one broken link or one arrival to a 404 page makes all of the hard work that you will do optimizing your site useless.

How?

Choose a web host with a big band width you that you find your customers being able to access the many SEO articles that you have attached to your site or visual components of your site So your site becomes visible and support all html tags without aborting memory.It is absolutely paramount to find a web host that keeps its promise to keep your site running 24 hours a day; seven days a week. This means that you need to stay away from websites with limited bandwidth and lots of downtime. This means staying away from “free hostingEven if you are willing to pay for your website you have to be careful. The problem is that any Tom, Dick or Harry can host your site on a server.So practice the principle of Buyer Beware. Make sure your web site host promises you the stability you need to advertise your services properly.


Reason?
Your choice of web site host is crucial is because a site that is down is neither robot or search engine friendly.Otherwise the search engines may be led to believe that your site is never up and your customers may be lead to a disappointing first experience with your web page that makes you appear as if you are out of business.