Web Tune-Up Pros

It’s the Flu Shot, Stupid!

webpros — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:33:49 +0000

Google has unveiled a new service to allow you to track flu trends before you travel in the United States.

Check out the Google Flu Trends site.

The Importance of Search Engines

webpros — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 03:12:34 +0000

It is the search engines that finally bring your Web site to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first two to three listings in the search results. So it does matter where your Web site appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to Web site than anything else. So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your Web site.

It is found by surveys that a when customers want to find a Web site for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:

• The first option is they find their site through a search engine.
• Second, they find their site by clicking on a link from another Web site or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.
• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Thus it’s obvious the the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90 percent of online users. In other words, only 10 percent of the people looking for a Web site will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Don’t forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the expert. With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

Must-Have Features for Your Web Site

webpros — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:03:10 +0000

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles

The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understand your target customers

If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your Web site give enough contact information?

When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

Achieving Proper Keyword Density on Your Pages

webpros — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:32:42 +0000

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

Basics of Traffic & SEO I: Search Engines

webpros — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:24:06 +0000

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site’s Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages.

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

IE8 Comes a Cropper; Google’s Chrome Blazes

webpros — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:00:12 +0000

When I installed Internet Explorer 8 the other day with high expectations, those expectations were immediately crushed when IE8 couldn’t even properly render my public blogs let alone my WordPress admin panel. Elements were skewed way out of proportion, and I don’t mean by pixel size, but by hundreds and thousands of percentage points.

I uninstalled IE8 almost immediately (which Microsoft makes inscrutable in Vista by hiding IE8 under updates on the Control Panel).

When Google launched its new Web browser called Chrome yesterday, I jumped on it as soon as the download became available at noon PDT.

I was impressed by Chrome’s blazing speed and accuracy in rendering Web sites, but since it didn’t automatically import RoboForm, I didn’t opt to use it for my default browser, though it does offer an option to save your logins (which are not automatically password encrypted).

So, even as my experiment with Chrome continues, I can say that speed alone will make this Googlian browser a winner.

Download Chrome at www.google.com/chrome.

IE8 Beta Available: Weird So Far

webpros — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:59:24 +0000

I jumped on getting a copy of Internet Explorer 8 (Beta) because I’d read that, tab-based like IE7, the entire browser won’t crash if one site on one tab has problems. With IE7, one site would crash your entire browser and every tab.

So far, I’ve been experimenting with IE for a total of about two minutes, and I’m ready to shuck it. It’s screwed up the Admin tool for my blogs. Instead of one line for a title, it now provides an area bigger than the post area itself.

If you want to try it, here’s where to go.

But I’m going back to IE7.

$8,462.73 in a Nanosecond: It Can Happen to You!

webpros — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:34:22 +0000

If you’re subscribed to any of the multitudinous e-mail/newsletter lists by the ubiquitous Internet marketers and so-called get-rich-quick gurus out there, you’ve no doubt received many an enticing e-mail with a subject line similar to my title for this posting.

The only ones making any money, however, are these e-mail scammers, and I’m not sure how they sleep at night. Some of them have really big and prestigious names in the industry, who will–of course–reveal their secrets to you only if you join their members-only sites for $49, $149, $249, etc., a month.

Even a thousand fools (easy enough to find) at $49 a month will yield big bucks.

This practice is what Internet marketers call "selling shovels," using an analogy from the California Gold Rush, when the only ones making money were those selling shovels to the hordes of prospectors, 99.999999999999 percent of whom would remain forever penniless.

More likely, these marketers are selling you piles of bull shit created by their Web-based shovels.

Case in point: The FTC recently busted brothers Eric and Calvin Louie of California for their shoveling-the-shit sites, fastcashathome,com and realcashprograms.com. Their shovels earned Eric a 2004 Lamborghini Gallardo and Calvin a 2005 Ferrari F430.

The FTC now owns the automobiles and has put the Louies out of business.

The duo was nabbed under the FTC’s Project Fal$e Hope$ program. The FTC–and the Council of the Better Business Bureau–have their phone lines open for tips on other such shovelers of shit.

Dial away–you’ll be saving lots of fools lots of money.

PPC Campaigns: Alternatives to Google AdWords

webpros — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:38:48 +0000

Google, of course, is the 900-pound gorilla of search engines, clearly dominating in the number of online searches performed daily. However, Google also equals Garbage, as the site attracts every unserious lookie-loo and teeny-bop with time to kill out there.

That being the case, is Google the best place to start your pay-per-click advertising campaign? Yes, if you do your research and prepare well, Google could well be the route to take. Making Google especially attractive are the offers of $25, even $50, in free PPC clicks offered by certain hosting companies when you sign up.

Still, you may want to get your feet wet elsewhere, as this is a costly proposition, and unless your PPC budget results in traffic conversions (sales) that double–at least–your PPC expenditures, you’re wasting your time and money.

Using a list developed by Michael Bloch, I’ve researched Bloch’s recommendations and narrowed his list of alternative PPC providers to three.

ABC Search offers both geotargeting and so-called click-fraud protection and will match you $100 for $100 when you sign up, but be careful–that generally means you have to agree for automatic renewal at $100 when your first "donation" runs out.

Bidvertiser also offers geotargeting and fraud protection and goes one step further–it allows you to choose the sites on which your ads will appear. You can also get $20 in free clicks as a new bidvertiser.

Search123, though it offers no geotargeting or stated fraud protection, maintains a huge network of partners and offers $20 in free clicks for your first $50 entry. What I liked about Search123 is the care and detail with which they explain their program. I eliminated many other services because they had no explanation, just a form to sign up. (Careful: 123Search is a virus-like copycat that will take over your browser.)

Now, any PPC campaign is only as good as the keyword phrases chosen for bidding. The traditional tools for keyword research are WordTracker and Keyword Discovery, but if you want to use both (a definite plus), join NicheBot, which is the service I use. If you want a good piece of automated software that will assemble your profitable keywords and phrases for you, then use Niche Inspector.

Google Sued Over Parked Domain AdWords

webpros — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:04:53 +0000

Some people try to make a living, or extra bucks anyway, by creating so-called parked domains, which are static sites devoid of content but rife with links, and Google is more than happy to oblige them by allowing the placement of AdWords advertising thereon, gaining the owners access to AdSense bucks.

Not so fast, some advertisers are crying–while shouting "wolf" at the same time.

Recent lawsuits have targeted Google for a) placing the ads on parked domains to start with and b) placing the ads on sites with URLs that allegedly violate trademarks and copyrights (such as bedbathandbeyondcom.com).

The latest to join the legal fray is an Illinois firm named JIT Packaging, which accuses Google of placing its ads on "low-quality" sites that produce few if any conversions.

(My favorite parked domain is gamil.com, which I land upon everytime I misspell Google’s gmail.com. However, never I am ever tempted to hit a link or an ad on a parked domain, which I guess helps prove the "low-qualityk" portion of the legal argument.)

Google reportedly had no comment over the latest lawsuit.

Web Tune-Up Pros

It’s the Flu Shot, Stupid!

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The Importance of Search Engines

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Must-Have Features for Your Web Site

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Achieving Proper Keyword Density on Your Pages

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Basics of Traffic & SEO I: Search Engines

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IE8 Comes a Cropper; Google’s Chrome Blazes

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IE8 Beta Available: Weird So Far

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$8,462.73 in a Nanosecond: It Can Happen to You!

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PPC Campaigns: Alternatives to Google AdWords

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Google Sued Over Parked Domain AdWords

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