search engine rankings

10 Most Likely Mistakes Made When Designing a Website

Its important now days to have a website for your business. Obtaining the services of the best web design company is imperative to avoid the pitfalls that are outlined below.

No plans for thinking ahead.

To create an effective website, it is important to first work out a good plan. For a clear and consistent site design you should layout the site before designing it. If you want to make sales then your site should be organized.

Excess Font and Colour Usage.

A business website will not help if it looks like it was done by an amateur. This could mean a simple, neutral color palette with a white background. Too many different fonts and colors distract from the site content and may turn visitors away.

No Contact Information

Non-working contact links are one of the worst errors in website design. All the pages of a well designed website should have a contact button or email address. Those visiting must not be required to hunt for this button.

Content that is no longer relevant

For a website to be successful in bringing in business, it must maintain its relevance and stay up to date with information. Any changes that have taken place concerning the products offered, such as sales, prices, or items on hand, should be given immediate attention. Lack of updating may also result in a lower search engine ranking.

Unusable links to pages

Customers will be driven away by broken links. It’s recommended to test all links on a site before it’s made public and to continue weekly testing to ensure that visitors are not led astray by bad links.

Non return pages

Each website page must have a link that returns people to the home page. This is the best way to have the site user friendly. Additionally, this prevents the awkward situation that arises when visitors encounter a dead end after following a link that has been forwarded.

Ceasing operation of back button

This agitates customers and will drive away business. It is good to have various ways of getting around the site.

Website links in new browsing windows

The best choice is having the links open in one window, but this is still being debated. Your system can be slowed by having to many tabs or windows open.

Poor Website Optimization

One of the biggest factors to drive traffic away is slow loading pages. Don’t place too many apps or images on the page and get some good hosting and you’ll avoid this.

More Then Enough Technology

All web browsers should be able to open your business site. To make use of a site visitors shouldn’t have to download anything to their computers.

You can avoid the problems discussed above by employing a good web design company for both design and maintenance. This is a good business investment.

Looking to set up an online business? Bird and Co is a creative agency providing ecommerce web design in Worcestershire.

The Best Way To Get Traffic To Your Blog?

Just what IS the best way to get traffic?What is the easiest, most reliable, and cheapest way to get traffic to your website? In other words, what is the best way to get traffic?

The biggest obstacle for most online or off-line businesses is getting high quality traffic. It makes no difference if you are selling a product, promoting affiliate links, or displaying adsense – you need lots of quality traffic. So how is this done?

Getting traffic by buying advertising tends to get very expensive. It is easy to spend several thousands of dollars A MONTH in advertising through Google for example.

You could buy text links. Also expensive – and rapidly losing effectiveness in the search engines. Just 100 links can set you back upwards of $2,000. But you need THOUSANDS of links for most niches, this gets too costly.

A lot of people are constantly purchasing the “Latest and Greatest” black-hat technique – whether that be “blog and ping”, “tag and ping”, log-file spamming, blog-comment spamming, or whatever else some clever whiz-kid has come up with. The problem with this method is that by the time the whiz-kid releases it to the public, it is already past its effective sell-by date. Too bad, so sad, you missed the boat. And perhaps you get your website banned also. This is NOT the best way to get lots of good quality traffic!

But did you know that there is one, rock-solid, technique that has been quietly working since the very beginning of the internet, is completely immune to changes in search engine algorithms, is 100% legitimate and ethical, takes very little time, and costs almost nothing?

If you want your new site listed by the search engines in days rather than weeks or months? This will do it. If you want top rankings for organic traffic, even in highly competitive markets? This will do it. This is the best way to get traffic.

To see for just what the best way to get traffic is, you seriously should check out a fully optimized viral blogging system developed by top internet marketers David Wood and David Sharpe called the Empower Network.

The Empower Network is a viral community blogging system that provides a simple, but extremely effective blogging platform and training starting for just $25. The trick underlying this powerful system is that it is far better to have your blog on a high authority domain than by having your own individual blog websites if you want to make money faster with Faster google search engine rankings.

Please understand this. This is NOT the “latest and greatest” fad. It will not be “out-dated” in the next month or two. This is an already well-established method that is being quietly used by all the most successful internet marketers – but that has now been brought to a whole new level of simplicity and power.

Please consider that if you are paying money for Google adwords and/or any other form of expensive or ineffective online advertising or traffic generation and NOT using the Empower Network to get faster search engine rankings then, quite frankly, you are spending far too much money AND leaving money on the table!

Want to find out more about best way to get traffic, then visit Dave Wertz’s site on how to choose the best how to make easy money for your needs.

Knowing What Google Cached Means And How It Performs

If someone wants to know what the term Google cached is all about, then this article might be able to clear things up. This term has to do with the way information on the web is saved for future referenced. You will be able to understand what it is, what it means and why it is important.

The word cache comes from a French word that means to hide. It is a secret place where a person hides anything from jewelery to weapons. Translate this to today’s technology, a cache is a place in the computer where information is “hidden” which makes it easy to find information that a person is looking for.

When a person is looking for information on a web browser, the websites visited a stored on a hard drive. This is done in the form of a cache which is the term that is used. This allows the browser to easily get the information a person is looking for when they search for it again, especially when they visit certain sites often.

A web page is Google cached because it is examined and stored by the web browser of that name. This would also apply to any other browser that a person is using at the time. When a paged is being searched for, it is the stored version that is used to match your question. The saved version of the page goes by the name “cached” and can usually be found between the website link and the link that says similar page. You have to look directly under the information that is in blue letters.

This feature may seem insignificant, but it is quite useful in certain situations. There are times when the internet is crowded and this may make it difficult to download certain pages. Sometimes a website may not be available anymore or it may be slow. This is where the saved page comes in as the individual is still able to have access to what they are looking for. But, this is not the only reason why this is important.

It is also useful in saving the internet browser time when getting the information a person is trying to get access to. A cache is a way of keeping record of what a person is searching for. Sometimes an individual will type a search term and a number of terms will show up before the person is finished entering the word. This is one of the other ways this feature is useful.

There are many who are uncomfortable with the thought of having their previous searches saved and readily available by a web browser. This is especially true if one has filled out forms with personal information online. If this is the case then it is best to clear the caches. This will also help to make more space available on your computer.

So the next time you perform a search on the internet, you now know what Google cached means. It is a way to have what you are looking for available, and saves time for the internet to find information. Hopefully, this information will help others to understand how this feature is useful for them.

Google Cache is just one of the critical factors that go into achieving top search engine rankings. If you want to learn more of what it takes to dominate the first page of the search engines visit Google Cached Secrets.

What All Businesses Should Know About Search Engine Optimization

When first taking a business online, the one thing that all businesses are concerned about, is getting traffic to their site – preferably targetted traffic. Targetted traffic is simply visitors that are interested in what the business is selling and will, eventually, make a purchase.

There is a lot of hype around how website owners can get hundreds and thousands of visitors to their site and how they can get their site on Page 1 of the Search Engines – yes, a lot of it is hype but some of it is true.

There are a couple of excellent ways for Small Business Owners to gain targetted traffic to their site including:

* Pay Per Click Marketing (Google AdWords)

* Search Engine Optimization – so your business can be found in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

* Social Marketing

* Offline advertising

Out of all of these, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the one method that site owners should have a basic understanding of, because it’s the one method that is ongoing and, in my opinion, most beneficial.

Search Engine Optimization is literally about having your website listed in the SERPs (indexed) for the search terms you want to be found for. SEO is also about having your site found as high as possible in the Search Engine rankings for those keywords – preferably on Page 1.

However, SEO is an ongoing process – once you’ve got your site listed, it takes ongoing work to improve the ranking of your site, and then maintain it.

Whilst a lot of the SEO work can be outsourced, it pays to understand the SEO Basics and why they need to be done – that way, business owners will understand whether they are getting a fair price and whether the work being offered by SEO companies is the right type of work.

My one single tip to ensuring that website are indexed, and start ranking for their chosen keywords is to write great content. Don’t be fooled by the stories that you can get your site ranked with a little bit of content – whilst you may get your site listed and ranking well for a while, it will most likely be temporary. Writing great content is the way to ensure you maintain and improve your rankings.

When you write your content, use one of your chosen keywords throughout that content – but no more than 1 to 2 times in every 100 words to avoid ‘keyword stuffing’. Once you’ve written your content, read it aloud before publishing it to make sure it sounds natural.

My final advice with this tip, is to use formatting like bold, italics and underlines to highlight your keywords and bring attention to them.

This tip is only one part of a series steps to optimizing your website for Search Engines, but I consider it one of the most important parts to the process.

Get your free copy of Get Ranked: 11 Steps To Search Engine Optimization here.