The Marketer’s Mind

Give your customers a reason to stay

Visitors like to do things on websites, if your website allows your visitors to do something interesting or useful, there is a good chance they will bookmark your site and come back.

What you offer them to do is going to depend a bit on the type of site you have and the type of visitors you attract.

There are a number of website scripts you can get if you want to build something interesting.  There is a good resource for website scripts at www.easy-scripts.net

They offer a variety of website scripts from a unique memorial script to a yahoo answers style question and answer script to a fun joke script and a guess the stars script.  So you can get the type of script that will fit well with your site.  They are all very reasonably priced.

A good one for marketers is at www.searchengine-submission-script.com where you can purchase a script that will allow your website visitors to submit their websites to search engines for indexing.  That is the kind of thing people will come back to your site for.

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What is search engine optimization – SEO?

SEO or search engine optimization is a technique of taking the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases associated your web site and ensuring that this ranks your web site highly in search engines so that when somebody looks for particular phrases, it returns your site on top. It essentially involves good tuning the content of your web site along with the HTML and Meta tags and as well requires appropriate link building method.

 

Search engine optimization demands a lot of work to be fully accomplished. There are several aspects you have to modify in your web site or add also to get SEO. These will include getting tons of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your web site niche or theme.

 

With SEO you’ll be able to get the benefit of returning a high traffic volume. Let’s only say you get just a turn out of victorious sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a 100 hits or more a day, you get an effective turn out of sales already. If you get only 20 to 10 hits a day, you will make fewer sales.

 

You may very well have to rewrite your web site content so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial, but easy and informative. There are certain formulas and guidelines to be watched with making your web site content practical and conducive to SEO.

 

You will also need to cooperate with several additional sites so that you could have link exchanges . The more incoming and outgoing link generated by sites from one to others are among the components search engines use to rank web sites.

 

Tips, guidelines and techniques for SEO are plenty to be found here. We’ll show you  how to start to getting better rank in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.

 

The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This could require a small time and effort in your part but the benefits will be amazing.

 

To be honest, you are able to essentially get good information on SEO anywhere in the web. But only a few truly show you how to work out an inexpensive search engine optimization effort. And those few that really inform include our site. Here you can learn the basics first steps to get a good search engine optimization. And improve your site page rank.

 

All of the time, keep in mind that search engine optimization techniques are crucial in developing your web site status. With that in mind, be sure that you write high quality, keyword valuable content and link your web site to and from a knowing class of extra sites. These things will assistant better your web site popularity and drive increased traffic through your web business.

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Design Tips That Improve Traffic & Sales

You’ll have to decide whether you want to do the web site design yourself or hire it out to a professional.  I’m surprised at how many times I talk to people that tell me it will be a long time before they can make some changes to their web sites.  Most of the time, it’s because their niece had originally done their site over a spring break weekend and she’s in the middle of finals right now or some other nonsense.  Your web site is very important to your business and should not be created by somebody who will not be immediately available for updates and changes.  Make sure that your web site designer will be there for the long haul!

I recommend at least learning some of the basics about web site design so that you can make minor changes yourself without the assistance of your webmaster.   If you’re looking for a great web site design package I recommend learning Macromedia’s Dream Weaver.  You can read more about this product at http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/

Dream Weaver is the preferred choice of professional web site designers and is far superior to FrontPage or anything else out there right now.  Not only is it the best but It’s also the easiest to learn. Another really great program that just came out recently and is used by both beginners and experts alike is XsitePro. This software program makes it easy for anyone to create a website and even helps you to optimize them for the search engines. I have had sites I built with XsitePro indexed by Google in just a couple of weeks!

Keep Your Images and Pages Small in Size!

Keeping the size of your images and web pages is very important because if it takes too long to load, people will simply leave.  Remember, a lot of people are still surfing at 56k so plan for that.  Examine all your images and make sure that if the photos are all saved as .jpgs (quality level 7 or so) for maximum space savings.  After you’ve sucked the air out of your images, you can use a tool called PrettyHTML to suck the air out of your HTML files.  You can get this program at this web site: http://mpp.at/pretty/

Pretty HTML has a “Compress” option that takes out all the spaces from an HTML file.  I use Dreamweaver a lot and while it’s a great program, I find that when I cut and paste a lot, the file size goes way up because there are lots of spaces in it.  Using PrettyHTML will take all these spaces out and make a nice small file for viewing on the web.  I’ve seen files go from 350K down to about 23K before! Also, and this is crucial make sure your images have “alt text” code. Search engine spiders can’t read pictures and this alt text code helps then read your site, so be sure to use keywords you are after.

Navigation

Good navigation means using easy to understand menus and never putting the user into a dead end page.  Search engines can send a customer to any page of your site so it’s important to make it easy to get back to your home page from any other page on the site.   You should be able to get to any page on your site from any other page on your site.  Having good page linking also helps with getting your site ranked with the search engines because if a search engine hits one of your pages, it will find ALL the pages in your site.

Build a Site Rich in Content!  

The most important thing to remember about first rate web sites is that they are always rich in content.  For example, if your site sells Widgets, then include as much relevant information as possible about widgets on the site.   Make it easy to navigate around your site, tell about all the benefits of your widgets.  Finally, make it extremely easy for somebody to buy your widgets online with a minimum of effort. We will cover how to automate content to your site later in the book.

The home page of your web site is without question the most important page of the web site.   It should contain enough information so that someone can tell immediately what you do.  Make sure that you have at least a brief paragraph or two that explains your products on this crucial page and not just pretty graphics!   Your first page should be a concise introduction about your company and products.  The details can come in the later pages.  

Another way that web site publishers are making money is by using blogs and automated content in addition to manual content to make monetize their sites with advertisers like Google and Yahoo. We will go over this method in detail in the chapter on blogging.

Tell Your Customers How To Reach You!

Make sure that your web site has some type of Contact Us link that lists your company name, email address, mailing address, phone number, and fax number.  People really like to be able to talk to somebody on the phone when they have questions.  If they can’t reach you on the phone, they will move on to a company they can reach!  I also believe in listing your phone number and email address at the bottom of your home page for easy access especially if you have a product that you sell.