Going for Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, an expensive and popular endeavor

For the last five years or so, search engine marketing has become an increasingly popular promotional technique. As the popularity of the medium has increased, so have the costs of playing the game. Pay-per-click advertisements are being driven up in costs as the demand for online advertising space increases. Organic search engine marketing is a long-term, uncertain and often costly endeavor.

So here's the real question: is all the hype over search engine marketing is really worth your attention? Let's find out!

Paid vs. Organic Search Engine Marketing

Paid Search Engine Marketing

There are two basic methods of search engine marketing. The first is paid search engine marketing. Using this strategy, you pay for advertising on search engine result pages (commonly known as SERPs). With many companies dealing in paid search engine marketing, the advertisments are also shown on other web pages where the content of the page seems to match the topic of your ad.

Organic Search Engine Marketing

Organic search engine marketing consists of building up the reputation of your web site with quality content and incoming links in an effort to rise to the top of search engine result pages. In this marketplace, you are competing with hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of web pages all focusing on the same topic as your site.

Getting a significant enough of a reputation to beat out the competition takes a lot of time and effort. Search engines are also slow to reward sites for building reputation quickly, so the time you put in now might not pay off for months down the road.

So, is search engine marketing worth my time and money?

The fact that the search engine marketing marketplace is thriving means that a lot of individuals are throwing in their lot with at least with the paid method. On popular topics, companies will pay 2-20 dollars per click on their advertisments. Since the market determines the cost, these advertisers must be getting a bang for their buck, otherwise they would drop out.

While competing with advertisers for popular topics can be expensive, there are still some significant opportunities with less popular topics that can offer even a greater return on investment.

And what about organic search engine marketing

While it's difficult to track how much web site owners are making off of organic search engine marketing, many people make their living off of the business leads they get from organic search engine results.

In conclusion

Search engine marketing, in either its organic or paid form, is still a growing marketplace, and until it reaches its saturation point, there are still significant opportunities to be had.

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Domain name registration is easier than throwing rocks!

While there are few connections between stone tossing and domain name registration, one parallel is the shear ease of doing either one.
For an individual who is just starting to design their own web sites, the learning curve of understanding all of the technology, the lingo, and the concepts behind the web can be a big challenge. When it comes to the registration of your first domain name, most people don't know where to look outside of their favorite web browser's address bar.

Domain name registration starts with a search
A common method of checking for the availability of a domain name for registration is to type in the desired domain name in your web browser. However, there are a couple of potential problems with this method:

The domain name could have no hosting account associated with it
Even if it doesn't look like there is a web site behind a domain name, it still might not be available for registration. Sometimes people purchase domain names as investments, in the hope of selling them later at a profit, or starting a web site at a later date. In these cases, they may not have a hosting account associated with it, an the domain name will look like it's available for registration.

The domain name could be "parked"
A "parked" domain name is one that has already gone through the registration process, but is being hosted at a domain name registrar's web site.

How to search for a domain name
My favorite place to search for a domain name is over at www.networksolutions.com. You can easily check to see if multiple domain names are available for registration with a single input. They also store your previous domain name searches so that registration is easier later on. One more plus is that you can search for multiple domain name extensions like .net, .us, and .com before you decide on one for registration.
Next, it's time for real domain name registration
While I like Network Solutions for searching for a domain name, I like the prices of domain name registration at www.godaddy.com a whole lot better. They offer some nice domain name management tools as well.
To complete the domain name registration, you just add a domain name to your shopping cart and checkout, just as you would to purchase a season of Seinfeld. And that's it, badda bing, badda boom!

READ MORE - Domain name registration is easier than throwing rocks!

Make Some Money With Reseller Web Hosting

A little about reseller web hosting

Many web hosting providers offer particular web hosting plans call "reseller web hosting". These plans are offered to individuals who want to try to do just that, re-sell their company's web hosting services.

What do web hosting providers offer reseller hosting?
A reseller relationship between the web host and the re-seller works like this:
the re-seller saves a lot of time and energy by not having to run their own web hosting servers. They can draw on the technical expertise of those operating the hosting servers in keeping the servers up and running on the web, installing and upgrading software, and often times taking responsibility for making regular backups of data.
The web hosting provider benefits from this relationship by outsourcing their advertising, billing and customer support to the reseller. These items can be particularly costly, and distributing the costs among a network of re-sellers can be tremendously advantageous.

How is a reseller account different from normal web hosting accounts?
Reseller web hosting accounts typically come with some extra tools that typical hosting accounts don't have. With these tools, you can manage customer hosting accounts and allocate resources between your different customer accounts.

How does billing work for a reseller hosting account?
Typically, the web hosting provider sends a single bill to their re-seller. The re-seller then bills their customers and uses their own system to keep track of invoicing. Web hosting providers generally let their re-sellers determine how much they will charge for their accounts.
Let's say you get a reseller account with 10 gigabytes of bandwidth and 1 gigabyte of storage space for $30. You can then split this into 5 different accounts, each with 2 gigabytes of bandwidth and 200 megs of space. To break even, you would need to charge at least $6 for each customer account. A markup of 100% is typical for reselling, so you would then charge $12 per account, making an additional $6 per month, per customer, or $30 total a month.

But $30 doesn't seem like a lot of money!
True. If you're running an entire business re-selling web hosting, then you're going to need a significant number of customers to get a decent monthly income. Web hosting providers improve their margins by automating as much of the billing and customer support as they can. In order to become a competitive, affordable force in the marketplace, you will need to take a similar approach.
Consider also using reseller hosting as an add-on for your other business can be a great upsell, and you wouldn't have to focus too much energy on advertising and promotion.

READ MORE - Make Some Money With Reseller Web Hosting

Shared or Dedicated Web Hosting

First, what's shared web hosting?

Shared web hosting is the most common form of hosting out there because it comes fairly cheap. The "shared" part means that your web site and online files share hard drive space with other customers on the same computer. Shared web hosting accounts usually come with a limited amount of space and a certain amount of bandwidth.

What about dedicated web hosting?

Dedicated web hosting means that an entire computer, commonly called a "server" in the hosting world, is dedicated to hosting your files on the web. You get all the hard drive space, you get to have whatever software you want on it, and you pretty much get to make the calls.

Dedicated web hosting servers are much more expensive than shared hosting because you are leasing an entire computer for a certain duration of time. You pay for the cost to upgrade the server, you pay for the software on it, and you pay for the cost of keeping the web hosting server in a secure facility with a rocking bandwidth connection.

A third option: using your own computer for web hosting

Your computer is hooked up to the internet, so why not do your own web hosting on your computer? You already have the hardware infrastructure in place, so why not?

There are a couple of good reasons to leave web hosting to the experts:

Your house or appartment is not a secure facility

Most web hosting providers have their servers in a co-located secure facility. This means that their servers are in a building that has a guard at the door, that has a backup generator, that requires a keycard or code to enter, and that has emergency systems in place in case of a disaster.

It's tough to configure a web hosting server

If you've never tried configuring a web server, you're probably a happier person. Getting the right programs in place, with the right configuration, for the right uses, can be a huge headache.

Dedicated, shared or home-grown hosting?

For most web sites, a basic shared web hosting account will be the easiest and least expensive route to take. A dedicated host should be considered when 1) your bandwidth and hard drive space needs exceed what is offered by a shared hosting account, or 2) you need to be able to configure your web server in a way not available with shared web hosting.

Running your own web server from home or your place should only be considered if you need special freedom with your server, or you have a lot of extra time on your hands.

READ MORE - Shared or Dedicated Web Hosting

You Don't Need to Pay for Web Hosting

If you're in the web hosting market for the first time, the options available to you can be daunting. You probably know that getting web hosting is a necessary part of getting a web site online, but if haven't shopped around and are vague on some of the technical aspects of web hosting, you have a little bit of a learning curve ahead of you.

First, web hosting is hard drive space and bandwidth

To keep it simple, web hosting is simply hosting your data (in this case, web site data) on someone else's computer that has a perminant connection to the internet. The owners of the computer monitor the amount of data you transfer through their internet connection, and that's called bandwidth.

Second, size does matter (with web hosting)
You get what you pay for with web hosting, but sometimes you end up paying for stuff you just don't need. Most web sites start out needing very low bandwidth since a new site only gets visitors after promoting it somehow. The upshot is that most of the time, it's best to start out with a smal web hosting plan, and then work your way up from there.

A rough plan for basic web hosting
To start out with, a gigabyte of bandwidth and 100 megs of space are typically 5-10 times what you actually need, but they tend to be the among the least expensive hosting plans available. Prices for these kinds of plans range from $7 - $20 a month. This is typically a low monthly bill, but price shopping can help you get the most bang for your buck.

Comparison Shopping
Contrary to the general principle of going for the chepest service provider, I would say that first on your comparison shopping checklist should be finding a web hosting provider with good customer reviews. It's relatively simple to set up a web hosting business. The challenge is providing good tools to your customers and good customer support.
Since the cost of web hosting is fairly low, trying to snip of a couple of bucks from your overhead every month by chosing a hosting company that doesn't put their customers first can turn into a huge problem later on.

Don't forget to look at uptime
One more thing, as you're shopping around for a web host: make sure they mention something about their uptime. Uptime is the percentage of time thier servers are up in any given month.

READ MORE - You Don't Need to Pay for Web Hosting

Your First Web Page Tutorial

Seeing as we're just starting to put some articles together for Web Design Factory, I thought maybe we should start from the ground up. If you've never built a web page before, this article is for you. If you're a step beyond being a newbie, you'll be able to quickly identify if you've surpassed this level of design.

Before you start, take a look at our online tool Learn HTML By Example. You can even download the HTML tool and use it on your local machine, or upload it to your web site. Using this tool while going through the tutorial will increase your retention.

All right, let's get started!

Step 1 - Create a Document

This part is easy. Just do the following:

1. Open a simple text editor like Notepad (on Windows machines this is found in Start > All Programs > Accessories).
2. On the blank file screen, type in "Hello, World".
3. Then go to File > Save As to save a new file. In the Save as Type box, select All Files. In the File Name box, type mytestsite.html.
4. Select a place to save the file and then click Save.

Viola! You have just created your first web page. To view it, just navigate to where you saved the file and double-click it to open it. It will open your new web page in your default browser. Didn't know it was that easy, did you?

If you do a little experimentation, you'll soon find out that no matter what you type into your HTML file, all the browser will show is the string of text you typed in. This can get old pretty fast. What about color? What about different fonts? What about FUN?

Step 2 - Formatting Your Document

In order for a browser to know how to display your web page, you have to tell it exactly what you want it to do. The simplist way to do this is by using Hypertext Markup Language, otherwise known as HTML.

Let's try something simple to begin with. Say you have a bunch of text, and you want to split it up into paragraphs. Your browser will ignore extra spaces and new lines in plain text, so you have to tell it what to do. Here's two ways to accomplish the same thing:
<p>This is one paragraph</p>
<p>This is another paragraph</p>

Or you can do this:

This is one paragraph
<br /><br />
This is another paragraph

Try copying this code into your new page, save it, then refresh the page on your browser. The two examples display slightly differently, but they accomplish the goal of separating text.

In the above examples, you can probably tell which part was HTML. That's right, it's the <p></p> and <br />. These elements are called tags. As you may have guessed, the <p> is short for paragraph, and the <br /> is short for break. HTML was designed with English speakers in mind, so it's fairly easy to remember which tags do what.

As you might have also noticed, the <p> tag has an ending tag, which is </p>. Most HTML has starting and ending tags, like <h1></h1> or <div></div>. There are also a few that don't, like <br />, <hr /> and <img> tags. For these, it's best to tell the browser that there is no ending tag by adding a backslash before the ending bracket. So for instance, instead of using <br>, use <br />.

More Formatting for Your Web Page

Now that you know how to split text up on your web page, let's make it even easier to read by using headings.

HTML has several heading sizes to choose from, all the way from <h1> to <h8> or so. Using headings to format your web page has the added benefit of telling the browser, and eventually search engines, that the particular text inside of the heading is more important than the other text.

Try adding the following code to your new web page:

<h1>Heading 1</h1>
<h2>Heading 2</h2>
<h3>Heading 3</h3>
<h4>Heading 4</h4>
<h5>Heading 5</h5>

As you can see, the font sizes for the headings get smaller as the numbers go up. This is because when you lay out your page, you will probably have an <h1> to describe the content of the entire page, and then you will split up the following content under smaller and smaller headings. I've rarely seen any headings past <h4> used.

Two other very useful tags are the <ol> and <ul> tags. These create ordered lists and unordered lists, respectively. In addition to telling the browser that you want to start and end a list, you also have to tell it to start and end list items, which are contained in <li></li> tags. Here's an example you can paste into your code

<ol>
<li>This is ordered list item one</li>
<li>This is ordered list item two</li>
<li>This is ordered list item three</li>
</ol>

<ul>
<li>This is unordered list item one</li>
<li>This is unordered list item two</li>
<li>This is unordered list item three</li>
</ul>

A Complete Web Page in Code

Now you have a basic understanding about how a browser uses HTML to determine how to display text, images, and other elements. Let's add in one more example here of how a complete web page should look. You can use this code to start your own web pages:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>This is the title of the page</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso- 859-1">
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is the heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph in the body.</p>
</body>
</html>

Some elements you see in this example that we haven't gone over before is the <!DOCTYPE> tag and the <meta> tag. We'll go over these in future tutorials, but for now, the basic purpose of the DOCTYPE is to give the browser more information about the web page code. Same with the <meta> tag you see there.

Now it's time to play around! Either download our free Learn HTML By Example tool or visit our online version.

READ MORE - Your First Web Page Tutorial

Usability Tips for Ecommerce Web Design

Potential ecommerce customers will typically scan a number of web sites before deciding on one to buy from, so it is important that your web design be structured for usability.

A Definition of Usability in Ecommerce Web Design

Usability is a subjective rating of how easy a web site is to use, and in the case of ecommerce, how likely it is that a potential customer will be converted to a real one. A measurement of usability consists of several different factors, but boils down to how well a web site gives its visitors what they a really looking for.

Ecommerce Web Design Usability Tip 1: Avoid a Cluttered Layout

Web surfers won't take enough time to get used a web site unless they've decided that a web site is really where they want to be. So, your web design should make it clear to visitors what it is that they will find on your ecommerce web site. A design layout, cluttered with too many options, won't give the visitor a clear idea of what they can or should do on your site.

It could be that you have exactly what they are looking for on your web site, but if your layout design looks like a pizza with "the works", potential customers might get stuck in the cheese and never find their way to the product they want.

Ecommerce Web Design Usability Tip 2: Make it Easy For Customers to Find Products Different Ways

Add navigation to ecommerce category listings

This is especially true if you have a large number of products in your ecommerce site. Make make room in your web design layout for navigation in product categories that will allow a potential customer to browse products by price, by name and by the date added. Some customers will be looking for something inexpensive while others will want to browse your newest products. You want to give customers the shortest route from their entry point to what they're looking for, and this will help narrow down that distance.

Add search capability

If customers have something specific in mind, nothing beats being able to search for a product name or description. Keep the search simple and straightforward, so that customers don't inadvertently get lost in overly-helpful web design.

Ecommerce Web Design Usability Tip 3: Make the Checkout Process Very Simple

The one place you will lose ecommerce customers with bad web design is in the checkout process. Anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of customers abandon their shopping carts at the last moment due to usability problems. You can avoid this by keeping the checkout process simple, using only one or two pages and requesting the necessary information. Make sure to use clean web design layouts for the forms and the confirmation pages.

Conclusion

These are just a few things you can do with your web design to increase the usability of your ecommerce site. Keeping things as simple and as clear as possible is a good rule of thumb.

READ MORE - Usability Tips for Ecommerce Web Design

Ecommerce is More Than a Shopping Cart

Because of the complexity involved with developing an ecommerce web site, it is easy to get tied up with the technical intricacies of integrating or developing a shopping cart and put the customers's experience in second place.

The percentage of shopping carts that are abandoned on ecommerce web sites before a potential customers makes it to the home stretch range between 30 and 60%, depending on the research you read.

Why does this happen? Where does a customer lose trust, or decide that your product is not worthy of their finances? A shopping cart is created when an item is put into it, and by that time the customer knows that they want to buy something from your web site. So why does a shopper change their mind? This article covers a few of the most common mistakes people make with ecommerce usability.

The Shopping Cart Works - That Must Be Enough To Run My Ecommerce Site

Do you think an ecommerce shopping cart "works" when a customer can technically go through the checkout process and complete a purchase? You might be making a mistake here. Just because it is possible for a customer to go through a checkout process on a shopping cart, doesn't mean that they will. There are too many other elements that can get in the way of their shopping experience to believe that simply having a functional shopping cart is enough to run an ecommerce site.

The Little Lock Means A Lot - SSL and Shopping Carts in Ecommerce

As the public's awareness of the connection between identity theft and online shopping has grown, so has awareness of how to identify a secure shopping cart on an ecommerce web site.

Secure web sites use something called an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to encrypt information as it is passed back and forth from a web site to a customer's computer. Browsers will indicate if an SSL is being used on a web site by displaying a small lock on the bottom of the browser window. This lock means that it is very difficult (though not impossible) for computers relaying information between the customer and the ecommerce web site to siphon off meaningful data like credit card numbers supplied to the shopping cart.

An Easy Shopping Cart Checkout Process Means More Ecommerce

Too many shopping carts complicate the customers checkout process beyond what is absolutely necessary. Customers are using your ecommerce web site because it is more worthwhile for them to shop at your store rather than a competitor's, and one way you can stand out is to make your shopping cart as simple as possible.

Often, a shopping cart checkout process consists of several pages, each gathering a different bit of information such as a shipping address, a billing address, credit card information, a review of the order and finally confirmation of the order. This process can be confusing for some ecommerce shoppers and simply too cumbersome for others.

Try to Make the Shopping Cart Checkout Process a Single Page

That's right, make the checkout process a single page. Have the customer review the order, then below that ask them for their contact information. You will get more business from your ecommerce site and more customers happy with the shopping cart process.

READ MORE - Ecommerce is More Than a Shopping Cart

What is a Content Management System?

"Content Management System" is a catchphrase that's still catching some serious wind out there on the web, but not everybody understands what it is or why someone would want one. This short article will help you wrap your mind around the concept of a content management system.

To Understand "Content Management System", You Should Understand Content

"Content", in terms of the internet, consists of information of some sort. This information can be visual, audible, or textual. News articles, photographs, movies, and radio shows are all forms of content.

Where Does the "Management System" Come In?

Content on the web can be "managed" by simply constructing web pages by hand or with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editor and uploading it them to web sites. When a web page needs to be altered in some way, you just open up the web page file, add the changes, and upload the new file.

But, when you start trying to manage a lot of content that way, mistakes and inconsistencies between pages will start to creep in. Also, it takes a significant amount of open up your web page editor, find the file you're looking for, change it, save it and upload it. It may not seem like much effort when you're working with just a few pages, but imagine working with thousands of pages that way.

The Definition of a Content Management System

A content management system is a software tool used to manage content through an interface layer. In practical terms, this means that instead of going through the process above to manage web page content, instead you would visit your web site, click a link to the content you're looking for, edit the content via a simple form, and click another button to save the changes.

Following are some of the benefits of using a content management system:

Index creation is automated with a content management system

The meaning of an index here is a list of hyperlinks to pages with related content. For instance, you can have an index of news articles or blog entries. Such indexes are usually used to help visitors navigate or browse through a web site.

If you don't use a content management system, every time you add content, you also have to alter the index. If the index is created as a static page, then you also can't give visitors the option of searching the index or ordering it in different ways (like by date added or alphabetical order). With a content management system, an index can be created automatically, erasing the potential for mistakes and saving time.

You can use a content management system to populate templates

Sounds boring, but this is a really useful tool. Imagine you have 100 articles - a reasonable number - and each one is a separate web page file. You can use tools like "includes" to manage the layout of all the pages, but what if you need to make structural changes to the page. For instance, you need to add in a new meta tag to all of the articles for indexing purposes?

Without a content management system, you would have to open, edit and save every file, upload them, and hope you didn't make any mistakes. If you did use a content management system, you would only have to edit a single web page. Have over a 1000 articles? You'd still only have to alter that one page. Sweet, huh?

Conclusion

I discussed just a couple of good uses for content management systems in this article, but there are many, many more. I use them in nearly every web site I build, simply because they make content management much easier and cleaner. If you have more than a few of the same type of page on your web site (articles, news, jobs, etc.) then consider using a content management system in your site site.

READ MORE - What is a Content Management System?

Three Search Engine Optimization Tips for URL's the SEO Firms Won't Tell You

Quick Search Engine Optimization Primer

It's time to stop letting the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firms have the upper hand when it comes to secret knowledge about how search engines work! Even if you end up hiring an SEO firm to optimize your web site, you should have some knowledge about what they might suggest you do, and how to qualify the fees they charge.

The three SEO tips I offer below are straightforward, but they are also some of the most powerful techniques and insights into the way search engines work that you will find.

SEO URL Tip 1: Duplicate Content Kills

What is Duplicate Content in Terms of SEO?

Duplicate content, in terms of SEO, can mean a couple different things. For one, duplicate content can mean using the same textual content on multiple web pages. A common misconception about SEO is that the more pages you have the better, even if they contain the same content.

Duplicate content can also mean several different URL's for the same web page. This often happens on accident, but it can also be a purposeful technique to increase the number of web pages a search engine sees.

Simply put, this technique can cause you many serious problems down the road.

Duplicate Content Means Search Engines Only Index One Page

For one, search engines will consider duplicate content on the web a form of plagiarism, and so they will only display one page out of the duplicates to show on their SERP's (Search Engine Result Pages). This means that if you have 5 pages, only 1 will actually be added to a search engine's index. Since you don't know which one that will be, you put more power in the hands of the search engine than you really need to.

A Quick SEO Overview of PageRank

PageRank is the Google search engine's way of ranking web pages. Every web page gets a certain amount of PageRank for just existing. When a web page hyperlinks to another web page, they pass on some PageRank to the web page they link to. Therefore, the more inbound links (links coming to a web page from another web page), the higher the PageRank.

PageRank is used by Google as a major factor in determining where a web page lands on the SERP's, so getting and and conserving it is of utmost importance when it comes to SEO.

Why Duplicate Content is an SEO Nightmare in Terms of PageRank

The main reason duplicate content is a major SEO issue is due to problems with PageRank. If you have 5 web pages with the same content, each of these have an equal number of incoming links, and only one of them gets indexed, that means that the indexed web page only has 1/5 the amount of PageRank it could have if all of the inbound links were coming to it.

To put this another way, duplicate pages split up your PageRank, and since PageRank is going to pages that don't matter, it gets lost, never to be seen again.

One More Reason Duplicate Content Can Put a Stop to SEO

This one is the clincher: duplicate content is against most search engine's terms of service. This means that if Google finds out that you're using duplicate content they can penalize your site, rendering it virtually invisible on the SERP's.

SEO URL Tip 2: Getting Keywords in URL's is Critical

Getting keywords in your URL is one of the most overlooked techniques for SEO-ing a web site. Here's a quick overview of what you can do to work your URL into SEO shape!

What is a URL?

A URL (Universal Resource Locator) is the name of your web page which appears in a web browser's address bar. URL's are used by search engines as an identifier for your web page. They also store the URL in their index as one of the ways they determine the subject matter of a web site.

The first part of a URL consists of a domain name, like "www.impliedbydesign.com". The second part of the URL consists of the filename, or something like "/seo-optimization-article.html".

Use a Keyword Rich Domain Name for SEO

The first part of a URL is the domain name, which you can SEO by adding in some of the most important keywords regarding your web site. For instance, a web site selling blue widgets might choose a domain name like "www.blue-widgets.com" or "www.budget-blue-widgets.com". Even if you have to be creative because the domain name you wanted initially isn't available, you can still SEO the domain name by getting in the keywords.

You also might have noticed that I used a dash between the keywords. This gives the search engine an easy way to separate the keywords from one another, giving the domain more SEO power.

Use a Keyword Rich Filename for SEO

The second part of the URL - the filename - is fairly easy to get SEO-ed. Using the same method you used with the domain name, you can create a keyword rich filename. Just add in the keywords the web page is focused on, separate them with a dash, and you're good to go.

One important thing to note is that you can over-SEO a URL, either causing a search engine to put up a red flag in regards to your site, or diluting the power of your keywords. The trick is not to use too many words in the domain name or the file name. This will keep the importance of your keywords from diminishing since they won't have to share significance with other, less important keywords.

SEO URL Tip 3: Query Strings are Bad News

For a long time, URL's with query strings were an SEO dead end, since search engines wouldn't index them at all. In recent years, search engines have started to index URL's with query strings, but at a price.

What is a Query String?

A query string is a string of characters at the end of a URL that pass important information to the URL. The query string starts with a question mark and uses an ampersand to separate values. For instance, the following example is a URL with a query string: http://internetbrowserbussines.blogspot.com/articles.html?category=2&orderby=1.

What Makes a Query String Bad News for SEO?

Firstly, a query string makes a URL longer so when search engines index the page, the SEO-ed, keyword rich domain name and filename lose significance to the other characters added on by the query string.

Secondly, and more importantly, a query string indicates some other SEO problems with a web page. It indicates that the page is likely created "dynamically" or "on-the-fly", meaning that that page doesn't actually exist until someone visits the page with a web browser. These kinds of pages usually run off of a database and can have thousands of unique URL's with different content for a single web page.

The two problems with this is that 1) The query strings could inadvertently be creating duplicate content pages, diluting PageRank and 1) It is generally believed that search engines don't consider dynamic web pages as important as static web pages, simply because it is so easy to generate SEO spam dynamically.

So How Do I Keep the Query String from Having Negative Effects on My SEO Efforts?

The best thing to do is to get rid of the string altogether, thus allowing your web site to use SEO URL's. This is easier said than done, but there are a couple of tricks you can use pass those variables in the query string to your pages in a more SEO manner.

First, try to use session variables where you can. Session variables are stored on the server, and keep track of a visitor's information. If you move most of the query string into session variables, they will be invisible in the URL's.

Secondly, you can use tools that cause a URL to look a certain way to a visitor, and another way to the server. The actual technology you use will be different depending on weather you're using a Windows or a Linux web server, but there is information across the web on how to implement it. Just look up "url rewrite IIS" for Windows servers or "url rewrite apache" for Linux servers.

Once you get the query string out of the picture, your URL's will be squeaky clean for SEO.

Conclusion

The three SEO tips for URL's we covered in this article will do wonders for your SEO efforts. Getting the query string out of the URL is a commonly-overlooked technique that you can use to give your web site an edge in the search engine optimization department.

Using all three of these in tandem will give you the added benefit of not having to implement the SEO techniques later after your web pages have been established. Doing so will inadvertently result in you starting all over in the search engine indexes.

READ MORE - Three Search Engine Optimization Tips for URL's the SEO Firms Won't Tell You

Getting Search Engine Traffic From Google

How To Find the Sources of Your Web Traffic

There are three major search engines battling for 95% of search engine traffic out there: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Of these three, Google has the majority market share, with figures ranging from 50% all the way to 90% of all traffic received. This means that if you're receiving more traffic from MSN or Yahoo, that you might be using techniques on your site that make it difficult for Google to index your pages. Losing out on traffic from Google can translate to a loss in real sales and conversions.

In this article, I'm going to describe briefly how to monitor the traffic you are getting from search engine traffic - particularly Google, and what you can do to increase your chances of being indexed and indexed well.

How To Find Out How Much Search Engine Traffic is Coming From Google

There is software available - typically called "statistics packages", which grab information from your web logs and translate it into a readable, very usable format. Your web logs contain a lot of useful information like where people came from to get to your site, what pages they visited and for how long, what search engines they used to get there, and what search phrases they used.

The software reads this information and stores the key metrics in a database, so when you visit the statistics page, it will pull the aggregate information from the database and will display it on the page.

How to Improve Search Engine Traffic

Various statistics packages are usually included with a web hosting package.By using a statistics package for your web site (such as AWStats, which you can find at http://awstats.sourceforge.net/), you can determine just how much of your traffic is coming from which search engines. If you use AWStats, for instance, there is an area on the statistics page labeled "Links from an Internet Search Engine", which will list just how much traffic is coming from each search engine. It's very handy!

How To Improv Your Search Engine Traffic From Google

If you're not getting most of your search engine traffic from Google, then you might need to make some adjustments to your web pages in order to attract more of Google's attention. I've noticed from experience that Google works a little differently than MSN or Yahoo. For instance, Google seems to be more choosy about which sites it indexes. MSN and Yahoo are a little less scrupulous, so your web site might show up in their SERP's (Search Engine Result Pages) before Googlebot - Google's search engine spider - even visits your web site.

If Your Web Site Hasn't Been Indexed By Google

If your site isn't showing up at all in Google's search engine result pages, then the best thing you can do is find some inbound links to your web site. These links are considered an indicator to Google of your web site being worth indexing, so they will likely follow the link and land on your site.

If Your Web Site Has Been Indexed, But You Don't Get Much Search Engine Traffic From Google

You can check this by typing the following into Google's search form: "site:www.mydomain.com". This will show you what pages have been indexed by Google. If there's any, then Google has indexed at least a part of the site, meaning that you're on the map.

If not all of your pages show up as being indexed, then you need to make sure that you have an internal linking strategy in place. The only way Google can find pages on your web site is through hyperlinks. If there are no hyperlinks form one page to another within your site, then some of your pages will be hidden.

A good strategy here is to add several random links on each page to other pages in your site. This way, the search engine spiders will eventually find all the pages in your site. You can also add a web site map with hyperlinks to all of your pages on a single page. Add a link to the site map on every page and viola! Google's googlebot is only two links away from any page on your site to any other page on your site.

A Few SEO Tips From Experience

Okay, All My Pages Have Been Indexed, But Still no Search Engine Traffic From Google!

If you've gotten all your web pages indexed by Google, but aren't showing up in the SERP's, then it's time to do a little footwork and make sure your pages are search engine optimized. Here's a few simple things you can do to improve your chances with the Google search engine:

SEO Tip 1: Check Your Hyperlinks For Important Keywords

Search engines pay a lot of attention to the text in hyperlinks, especially Google. Make sure incoming links are using your target keywords in the text. Also make sure to include keywords in internal linking as well.

SEO Tip 2: Google Looks at Keywords in the Title, Headings and Paragraphs

Google actually suggests that you use keywords throughout your web pages in order to make it clear to search engines - and to visitors - what your page is about. Search engines pay attention the the "semantics" - the meaningful structure - of your web page in order to determine what the web page is about. They look in particular at the title, the headings and the content in paragraphs. Each of these elements should include the same keywords.

Be careful not to go overboard with the keywords, however, or your content could be considered spam.

SEO Tip 3: Reduce the Amount Of Code a Search Engine Would Have to Index

Search engine spiders have do go through the entire code on a web page to pull out the important parts. The more code there is, the more the search engine has to work, making it less likely that all of your content will be indexed. Make it easy on the search engine by using techniques such as external stylesheets and moving your javascript to external files.

Also try to put your important content towards the top of the page, so that if Google's search engine spider peters out partway though the indexing process, at least the important stuff has been indexed.

Conclusion

Google is particularly fickle when it comes to what web sites it sends it's search engine spiders to. The bad news is that if your web site is lacking in search engine friendliness, then your site might not show up in Google's SERP's. The good news is that by SEO-ing your web site for Google, you will also be improving your search engine indexability in MSN and Yahoo as well.

READ MORE - Getting Search Engine Traffic From Google

Five Reasons to Use a Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart

Many of the most popular shopping carts have been around since before the era of search engine friendly-ness. Because of the age of the carts and their reliance on already-developed code, many of them have had difficulty shifting focus to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO shopping carts are especially important for ecommerce web sites because for many, the entire site consists of the shopping cart software. If search engines can't index the the site, it gets a huge penalty on search engine result pages.

Because of the incredible lack of search engine optimized shopping carts out there, I thought I would give shoppers in the market for a shopping cart some compelling reasons to look a little past the surface of a cart and see if the cart is actually that "friendly."

Reason 1: To Get More Traffic to Your Shopping Cart

Most people find ecommerce web sites through search engines. The more highly search engine optimized your shopping cart is, the more likely that it will show up in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). High rankings on search engines means that your site is in front of more eyes that are looking for what you sell. More eyes means more traffic to your shopping cart.

Traffic from search engines is particularly valuable because if a potential customer finds your site on a search engine, they have likely typed in keywords that match the subject matter of your ecommerce web site.

By using a SEO-ed shopping Cart, you can increase the search engine traffic to your shopping cart by incredible numbers.

Reason 2: Search Engine Optimization Means Quicker Indexing

When a search engine knows that it likes indexing your shopping cart, it will set up a schedule to come back and index and changes or new pages you have added to the web site. The easier you make it for the search engine spiders, the faster they will return, and the quicker they will do their work. Imagine adding a new product to your shopping cart and having it show up in the search engines the same day. It can happen!

Reason 3: Moving an SEO-ed Shopping Cart Later Means All New Pages

Each shopping cart using their own file naming scheme, meaning that the URL's of product pages will be different from one shopping cart to another. The search engines rely on these URL's to identify what pages are which. When a filename changes, the search engines interpret that as one file disappearing and another, unrelated page, being created.

Search engines take into account the age of a web page when it comes to ranking, so a newly named page won't get the same kind of rank as an older, more mature page. In addition, any incoming links that have developed over time to your shopping cart pages would be linking to a nonexistent page.

Keeping all that in mind, you can see how helpful it would be to get it right the first time. With a search engine optimized shopping cart, the URL's will be constructed especially for search engines, rich in keywords and without unnecessary characters. These provide a good foundation for the SEO of the rest of the web site, so you will see improved ranking as a result.

If you start out with a non-search engine optimized shopping cart, eventually you will want to move to one that is and when that happens, all of your pages will disappear.

Reason 4: An SEO-ed Shopping Cart Retains PageRank Better

Most shopping carts on the market were designed to be easily programmed and altered. This makes it easier for the shopping cart programmers to add new features or alter existing ones. Because of this focus, often times the same pages in a shopping cart will have several different URL's each. This means that when a search engine comes to index your site, they might see 500 pages where there are only 50.

Initially this might sound like a good thing, but ultimately it reduces the power of your web site. Google - the most widely used search engine in the world - uses something called PageRank to measure the value of a web site, and thus to determine what its rank will be in the search engine result pages. When one web page links to another web page, it takes some of its PageRank and passes it on to another page.

When there are 10 URL's for the same page, it means that PageRank is being split 10 ways, rather than being focused on a single page. This makes the pages far less powerful when it comes to showing up on the SERP's.

A search engine optimized shopping cart will take the PageRank into consideration, and will create a single URL for each web page, making each page on your shopping cart as powerful as possible.

Reason 5: An Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart Helps Usability

A search engine optimized shopping cart will use a little code as possible to display a page. This is because search engine spiders will only spend a certain amount of time on each website, and on each page on a site. The less code there is for a spider to wade through, the more chance a site has of getting all of their web pages indexed.

What this inadvertently causes are changes in the code that actually make the pages load more quickly than they would otherwise. Part of this is due to file size (which will save you bandwidth), but it also makes it easier for web browsers to display a page without thinking as hard.

Conclusion

While there aren't a lot of search engine friendly shopping carts on the market today, it pays in the long run to do a little research about which ones are out there and choose from those. There are numerous reasons to start off on the right foot with some good software so that you don't have to eventually lose all the positioning you've gained by moving to another shopping cart.

Keep in mind that just because a shopping cart says it's search engine optimized, it doesn't mean it is. Get familiar with search engine optimization techniques before starting your shopping cart research.

READ MORE - Five Reasons to Use a Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart

In Modern Ecommerce You Need an Edge

The online marketplace has changed dramatically in the last eight years, with ecommerce growing in popularity and competitiveness. Ecommerce on a broad range of products is being done so well by sites like Amazon.com and eBay.com that getting a piece of the e-business pie requires focusing in different areas than the big players do.

Find a Niche For Your Ecommerce Web Site

Search engines and online directories have been inundated with ecommerce web sites that sell everything under the sun. If you're going to be competitive online, then you need to find a niche. Because the big names in ecommerce are going for the whole enchilada, small businesses have the opportunity to duke it out for niche online markets.

The bad news? There's a ton of businesses out there, filling virtually every niche there is already. The good news? Very few of them are doing it well, giving new businesses the chance to do it better. Here's a few things you can to give your ecommerce web site an edge:

Invest in a Quality Ecommerce Web Site

A quality ecommerce web site uses a highly-usable shopping cart, is optimized for search engines, loads quickly and is pleasing to the eye. Strive to excel in all four of those categories, and you will see not only a high number of conversions, but you will also start to generate some good, qualified traffic from search engines.

Find Ecommerce Partners

When you have an ecommerce niche, there are likely a number of other companies offer complementary products or services that your customers will want to know about. Seek out potential partners online, and try to foster relationships where you encourage visitors to visit the partner's ecommerce site. These relationships can take the forms of links, advertisements, or even word of mouth.

As an added incentive, consider implementing an affiliate program where your partners earn a percentage off of each referral they send to your web site.

Get Creative Marketing Your Ecommerce Site

Marketing an ecommerce web site presents the biggest challenge to most emarketers. The good news is that there are many, many online channels you can use to increase the visibility of your site. Make sure to find every possible free online directory and submit your site to them. Not only will you get a valuable incoming link to your ecommerce web site, you will also get some traffic from the links. Start a small pay-per-click marketing campaign using the major pay-per-click engines like Google AdSense and Overture.

Also try to add content or services to your site that will attract incoming links. The more incoming links your web site has, the bigger the edge you will have over your competitors.

READ MORE - In Modern Ecommerce You Need an Edge

What is the Difference Between Web Design and Web Development?

Some of the time, the terms "web design" and "web development" are used interchangeably, but the two phrases actually mean two different things. So that you don't get stuck with a service you didn't sign up for, I will go through the two terms and describe them thoroughly.

The Definition of Web Design

Web design typically refers to the process of designing a web site or web page layout and often includes the graphical elements on a page. The design can be developed using a graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop, and provides the framework for the look and feel of a web page.

The finished product of the design does not typically contain code. Rather, the graphical representation of the web page is used by another or the same party as the basis for the code. The representation is divided into areas that can be represented by web code, and other areas that are purely graphics.

Often, web design and development firms use the term "web design" to refer to the entire development of a web site because it is the most commonly recognized term in the marketplace. However, it is important to clarify what a firm means before signing up for their "web design" services.

The Definition of Web Development

Web development is typically used to described the programming required to construct the "back end" of a website. The back end is the area of the site that isn't seen by visitors, but which does the work required in order to present the right information in the correct format to the visitors.

Web development is used to describe any database-driven web designs using dynamic scripting languages like PHP, ASP, ASP.NET and Coldfusion. It also covers database design and development. The term can also be used for client-side scripting such as JavaScript and Java.

READ MORE - What is the Difference Between Web Design and Web Development?