The importance of building search engine friendly web sites

There are many aspects in regards to search engine optimization. There are on-page procedures such as optimizing meta tags, titles, page copy, urls, alt tags and the like. We also know that another important aspect is off-page seo whereby a lot of time and effort is put in in order to obtain quality inbound links to your site. This normally takes the shape of directory submission, article writing and submission, competition analysis, social media marketing and blogging to name a few.

These are all crucial elements of search engine optimization and are a major part of any seo specialists daily chores.

One element of SEO that can be easily overlooked is the building of a web site that is not only "user friendly" but also "search friendly". By "search friendly" we mean that the search engines can crawl and spider your site unimpeded which will enable it to extract all of your content and in turn index it within the search engines database. After all, what use is getting thousands of inbound one way links to your site, if your site is not user or search friendly?

There are a number of things worth considering when building a user and search engine friendly web site. They are:

1. Use as much text as possible in the form of HTML - Search engines love plain text. They are not able to read images, video files, audio files or flash, so try to not use too much of these in your site design.

Another thing to consider is that some sites make users log in in order to view certain content or use a form to find content. Both of these are bad. Spiders/crawlers do not know how to log in to your site or fill out a form in order to find your content. So if you want your content to be indexed by the search engines, stay away from this. If you MUST do this, try to produce a snippet of the content to entice users to log in. That way the spider at least has something to chew on.

2. Make your urls understandable - This means creating urls such as www.samplesite.com/how-to-bring-up-your-children.html and NOT www.samplesite.com/children/article-09876R-YTUR-4tr.html or even www.samplesite.com/display.php?id=25 . As you can see the first url is not only "user friendly" but is also "search engine friendly" meaning that the search engines read more meaning and relevance into this url than the second one. Don't forget also that if you were to copy the second url into an email, your signature or post on a blog etc it wouldn't be totally clear where the link was going. This cannot be said for the first url.

3. Structure your site well - This means making your site as flat as possible. Instead of structuring your site in way that means a user has to click 10 times before reaching their target make the content a maximum of 4 clicks away or less.

4. Design your site for users NOT search engines - As much as possible treat the search engines as if they were human beings manually scouring your site for content to index. If it is easy for humans to find what they are looking for on your site, logic says that the spiders will also find what they are looking for and index it. The more "speedbumps" you put in the way of spiders, the slower your site will be crawled and indexed (if at all).

5. Content is king - One of my favorite expressions which is so true. Great content has many benefits, after all, its what we are all after, even the search engines. The search engines job is to find "relevant" search data. When the search engine starts dishing out "irrelevant" results, thats the time when it is going to become out of favour with web users who will move onto another engine.

Having great site content has many benefits such as if your content is good and original, people will want to link to it and your site, so its a good way of building natural links which is something that google likes. If you write good genuine creative content on your topic you will start to become an authority in your chosen field meaning more links and brand/site awareness.

The more content you have the more opportunity you will have of inserting your keywords making it look as natural as possible to the search engines. Although keyword density is no longer a major factor with search engines, it is something that needs to be done.

Well, thats the end of this article with some tips on making your site not only "user friendly" but just as importantly "search friendly". It is something that can be easily overlooked especially as gaining backlinks is viewed as THE most important SEO practice at the moment.

Overlook it at your peril!!

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About the Author: Rob Griggs is an SEO specialist based in Spain. For further information on his web design and seo services, please visit his search engine optimization web site.

Adding A Regional Component To Your Web Site

What is a regional web site?

A regional web page is one that focuses in on a specific area such as a city, county, state, country or area of the world. You do not have to have a regional web site to add a regional component to your site. There are two types of sites I am going to talk about. First is the regional site itself and then a web site with a regional section in it. If you already have a web site and want to expand the content and the audience then adding the regional section is a great option for you.

Building a regional web site.

Regional web sites are becoming more popular. Five years ago if you built a site about the community you live in there was a good chance you were one of only one or two sites to do so. Obviously if you were only one of two web sites for a community then you were at the top of any search for information about that community. It is not as easy now. This is still the case for many smaller towns and counties. But there is much more competition for larger more populated areas. Don't just rule out larger areas because if done right then you can still do great in these areas as well.

The first thing to do is decide on the area you want to build a page about. A good place to start is where you live or your favorite vacation spots. This is a good choice because you are already familiar with the area. I will share two things the site will need. The first is more important and the second will bring in more traffic.

Next you need to list the things that make the community you chose unique. It is especially good to find the lesser-known unique things about your community. This can include historical places, unique places and fun places. It can even include the best places to kiss. It can have reviews of local restaurants and business, a history of the community, little know facts about the community and any other things that make your community unique and special.

This is important because most community sites are just a group of links pages about the area. This is part of doing it right. When your page is unique and full of quality content it is easier to get good quality links to your site. Many people forget about this and concentrate on make pages about the key words that people search for. When this happens you end up with a site that nobody wants to link to and nobody wants to spend time looking at the different pages of your web site. Quality is always at the top of the agenda. The goal of any web site should be to be the best web site on the internet about your particular topic. You decide which is better: To have 1000 visitors who visit your site a day, who average looking at 2 pages, or 300 visitors a day who average 10. In the long run when you have hundred of well-ranked sites linked to you then you will get the thousands of visitors who visit many pages on your site.

After you have the above and have a quality site for your community then it is time to start looking at keywords. This is what brings people to your site. A good tool for finding out what people are searching for is Overtures Keyword Selector Tool.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Type in the name of the community in the search box and click the arrow. It will give you a list of how many times that a term has been searched for in Overture the previous month. I will also list all the phrases that were searched for using that term. This way you know what people are looking for when they search for something in your community. Now you can take the information in this book and apply it to making pages based on these keywords. Remember that with every page you build quality is the key. You want your site to be better than any other site about your community. For an example of how to use this tool try this link.

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

As an example if people are searching for museums in your community do not just make a link page to the museums web sites. Rather list every museum in the area and add a paragraph or two for each. You can also make a page about every museum and have an index page called museums in your community that link to all the museum pages you have built. If you have 10 museums in your community people will visit most or all of the museum pages. Be sure to add a short description on the museums in your community page.

Adding a regional section to your web site.

This is an idea that has become very popular in the last few years. As the internet continues to grow it is becoming harder to be at the top of the search engines for the most popular terms. So one of the things you can do is to make regional pages for your products or information. I stumbled on this by accident years ago. As I have mentioned I have a very large arthritis web site. As a service to my visitors I decided to add a section to the web site that listed had a page in for every state that listed arthritis resources in that state. It quickly became one of the most popular sections of my site especially in the search engines.

This can be done for any product or service that is not specific to a community. For example I knew a guy who was representative for a Satellite TV system company. He could sell a system anywhere in the country. Once he made the sale the company arranged for the system to be installed. So he built a page for Satellite TV for every city in America. He did this because he found out that many people were searching for Satellite TVs in their communities. He had about pages for over 500 different cities.

This worked well for a while, but he had a problem. Basically every page in his site was the same. The only difference was the name of the city and state. The search engines now frown on this. He tried to fix this by adding unique information about each city. He finally gave up on this and redid the site under a new domain name. Once a search engine punishes you it is hard to get back in their good graces.

So if you are going to do this for a product or service you need to make every page unique. As mentioned above, quality always is important and you can no longer cheat the search engines. So do not take the easy way. Take the time to make every page one that the search engines and your visitors will be proud of.

This can also be done as a service. One of the most popular sites on the internet is topix.net. They have the largest news network that includes news for almost every city and town in America. This can be done for almost any service from adoption to zoos. Some subjects have way too much competition and companies that are spending too much money for you to compete with. Regional travel and legal sites are examples of these. Even though there is a ton of competition for some types of regional sites there are still literally thousands of different topics and services that do not have too much competition.

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About the Author: Rusty Ford is editor at http://arthritis-symptom.com/.

How to Defend your Website from the Google Duplicate Proxy Exploit

There is a current and active way to knock a website out of Google's search engine results. It's simple and effective. This information is already in the public domain and the more people that know about it, the more likelihood there is that Google will do something about it. This article will tell you how it works, how to get a website knocked out of the search engine rankings, but most importantly, how to defend your own website from having it happen to you.

To understand this exploit, you must first understand about Google's Duplicate Content filter. It's simply described thus: Google doesn't want you to search for "blue widget" and have the top 10 search terms returned copies of the same article on how great blue widgets are. They want to give you ONE copy of the Great Blue Widget article, and 9 other different results, just on the off chance that you've already read that article and the other results are actually what you wanted.

To handle this, every time Google spiders and indexes a page, it checks it to see if it's already got a page that is predominantly the same, a duplicate page if you will. Exactly how Google works this out, nobody knows exactly, but it is going to be a combination of some or all of: page text length, page title, headings, keyword densities, checking exactly copy sentence fragments etc. As a result of this duplicate content filter, a whole industry has grown up around trying to get round the filter. Just search for "spin article".

Getting back to the story here, Google indexes a page and lets say it fails it's duplicate content check, what does Google do?
These days, it dumps that duplicate page in Google's Supplemental Index. What, you didn't know that Google has 2 indexes? Well they do: the main one, and a supplemental one. Two things are important here: Google will always return results from their Main index if they can; and they will only go to the Supplemental index if they don't get enough joy from their main index. What this means is that if your page is in the supplemental index, it's almost certain that you will never show up in the Search Engine Ranking Pages, unless there is next to no competition for the phrase that was searched for.

This all seems pretty reasonable to me, so what's the problem? Well there's another little step I haven't mentioned yet. What happens if someone copies your page, let's say your homepage of your business website, and when Google indexes that copy, it correctly determines that it's a duplicate. Now Google knows about 2 pages that it knows are duplicates, it has to decide which to dump in the supplemental index, and which to keep in the main one. That's pretty obvious right? But how does Google know which is the original and which is the copy? They don't. Sure they have some clever algorithms to work it out, but even if they are 99% accurate, that leaves a lot of problems for that 1% of times they can get it wrong!

And this is the heart of the exploit, if someone copies your website's homepage say, and manages to convince Google that *their* page is the original, your homepage will get tossed into the supplemental index, never to see the light of day in the Search Engine Ranking Pages again. In case I'm not being clear enough, that's bad! But wait, it gets worse:

It's fair to say that in the case of a person physically copying your page and hostíng it, you can often get them to take it down through the use of copyright lawyers, and cease and desist letters to ISP's and the like, with a quick "Reinclusion Request" to Google. But recently there's a new threat that's a whole lot harder to stop: the use of publicly accessible Proxy websites. (If you don't know what a Proxy is, it's basically a way of making the web run faster by caching content more local to your internet destination. In principle, they are generally a good thing.)

There are many such web proxies out there, and I won't líst any here, however I will describe the process: they send out spiders (much like Google's) and they spider your page, take your content, then they host a copy of your website on their proxy site, nominally so that when their users request your page, they can serve up their local copy quickly rather than having to retrieve if off your server. The big issue is that Google can sometimes decide that the proxy copy of your web page is the original, and yours is not.

Worse again, there's some evidence that people are deliberately and maliciously using proxy servers to cache copies of web pages, then using normal (white and black hat) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to make those proxy pages rank in the search engine, increasing the likelihood that your legitímate page will be the one dumped by the search engines' duplicate content filters. Danger Will Robinson!

Even worse still, some of the proxy spiders actively spoof their origins so that you don't realise that it's a spider from a proxy, as they pretend to be a Googlebot for example, or from Yahoo. This is why the major search engines actively publish guidelines on how to identify and validate their own spiders.

Now for the big question, how can you defend against this? There are several possible solutions, depending on your web hostíng technology and technical competence:

Option 1 - If you are running Apache and PHP on your server, you can set the webhost up to check for search engine spiders that purport to be from the main search engines, and using php and the .htaccess file, you can block proxies from other sources. However this only works for proxies that are playing by the rules and identifying themselves correctly.

Option 2 - If you are using MS Windows and IIS on your server, or if you are on a shared hostíng solution that doesn't give you the ability to do anything clever, it's an awful lot harder and you should take the advice of a professional on how to defend yourself from this kind of attack.

Option 3 - This is currently the best solution available, and applies if you are running a PHP or ASP based website: you set ALL pages robot meta tags to noindex and nofollow, then you implement a PHP or ASP scrípt on each page that checks for valid spiders from the major search engines, and if so, resets the robot meta tags to index and follow. The important distinction here is that it's easier to validate a real spider, and to discount a spider that's trying to spoof you, because the major search engines publish processes and procedures to do this, including IP lookups and the like.

So, stay aware, stay knowledgeable, and stay protected. And if you see that you've suddenly been dumped from the Search Engine Rankings Pages, now you might know why, how and what to do about it.

About The Author
Sophie White is an Internet Marketing and Website Promotion Consultant at Intrinsic Marketing an SEO and Pay-Per-Click firm dedicated to supplying Better Website ROI.

10 Steps To Top 10 Rankings In Google

Most webmasters go totally "gaga" for top 10 rankings in Google. And for good reason, Google is the most dominant search engine on the net and will deliver the largest amount of traffic.

Even those webmasters who are fortunate enough to get No. 1 rankings for their keywords in all the three major search engines will tell you Google is the one that will deliver the majority of their traffic. Hands down.

More importantly, those same webmasters will also inform you, getting top 10 rankings in Google often means your site will prove profitable. Mainly because obtaining targeted traffic is usually your first obstacle in creating a viable online business. In other words, if you get top ten listings in Google for good search able keywords, it is almost impossible not to earn money. 

How To Proceed?

First, you must know the rudimentary basics of how keywords work. Keywords and keyword phrases are the exact words someone types into a search engine to find what they're looking for online. If you have a site on "dog training" then your goal is to get a top 10 ranking for the keywords "dog training".

Now if no one searches for "dog training" it would be a useless keyword, you would get no traffic no matter how perfectly your site is optimized for that keyword. 

How Do You Know If A Keyword Is Good? 

To find out, you have to do some keyword research on your particular keywords. Many professional online marketers use keyword research software like Brad Callen's Keyword Elite. However, you can also use the keyword suggestion tools supplied by Google Adwords or Overture. Try here:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ 

Now if you check "dog training", you will find it receives around 4,469 searches each day. That's a lot of traffic but you must realize that it may be too good, or rather too competitive for your purposes, especially if have a new site.

Biggest Mistake When Choosing Keywords

The most common mistake most novice webmasters make is targeting keywords which are too competitive. You simply will not be able to compete or place for extremely competitive keywords. Well established sites and businesses with very deep pockets have the resources to completely dominate those keywords.

While it is not entirely futile nor a waste of time to concentrate your efforts on highly competitive keywords, you will have better success if you target low to medium competitive keywords.

Long Tail Keyword Marketing

Besides online marketers have discovered that longer keyword phrases are usually the most lucrative. These phrases deliver traffic which is better targeted and more likely to convert into a sale. "Dog hunting training" which gets around 100 searches a day will be more targeted than the general term "dog training" and if you have a site devoted to training hunting dogs then this keyword phrase may convert better for you.

Always keep this "Long Tail" keyword strategy in the back of your mind as you implement the following steps to achieve your own Top 10 Rankings in Google.

1. Make A Master Keyword List 

Your first step is to make a master list of the keywords you wish to target. Obviously these should be closely related to the theme of your site. As you can see from the example above, it is best to choose low to medium competitive keywords. Check the keyword competition by seeing how many sites are listed in Google for that keyword. Webmasters also check the Google PageRank of the sites that hold the top 10 positions. If all those sites are PR6 and above it may be hard to get ranked high for your keywords.

2. Choose Related Keywords

Once you have your master list of keywords, find long tail related keywords to target. Again, check out the competition and daily searches made for each chosen keyword.

3. Use Quality Content For Your Keywords

Creating quality content should always be your main goal. Write for actual visitors who will see and read your content. First and foremost you must have good useful content that your visitors will use themselves and recommend to their friends or colleagues. Tie this quality content in with your chosen keywords. Use one keyword phrase per page.

4. Use Keyword In Domain Name, Title And URLs

Having your keyword in your domain name will score big points from search engines. Plus, each page of content should contain your keywords in the title & meta tags for that page. Most experts also suggest you have your keyword in the URL and use hyphens to separate your keywords. Although the author has gotten good results by using an underscore and htm in URLs. Example: www.yoursite.com/your_keyword.htm

5. Do On Page Optimization

Keyword ratio is a much discussed topic by SEO experts and many suggest you should have your keyword in the H1 or headline title of your page. Sprinkle your keyword and variations of it throughout your page. Don't over do it but make sure the robot/spiders will clearly discover what your page is about. Many webmasters make sure they include their main keyword in the first and last 25 words on their pages. 

6. Use Traffic Modules

One technique that works extremely well in Google is clustering a closely related topic or subject into a distinct separate section on your site. For example, if you have a marketing site, you could create a whole section on article marketing where you would have 50 to 100 keyworded pages all relating to your subject. Writing articles, formatting articles, submitting articles, article software... place a keyword linked menu on each page to connect all your pages together.

Keep in mind, your main objective is to supply quality information to your visitors. One reason Google may favor this type of structure is because they want quality content returned in their SERPs. 

7. Try Article Marketing

Article marketing is writing short informative articles on keyword topics related to your sites. You then submit these helpful keyworded articles to ezine directories on the web, when your articles are picked up by related sites you receive quality One-Way links. The higher the quality of your article, the more links you will receive. 

Another ranking tactic to use, if you're just starting out your site will probably have a low PR rank and you will find it hard to rank for even modest keywords. That's why it's useful to take advantage of the higher PageRank of the major ezine directories. Your keyworded articles on these high PR sites will get picked up by Google and displayed in the top 10 rankings. Now the displayed URL will be the article directory site but the links in the resource box will be pointing back to your site. Over time this article marketing technique will raise your own site's rankings for those keywords. Simple but effective.

8. Anchor Text And One Way Links

Off page optimization is important in obtaining high rankings in Google. Getting quality One-Way links is very important. Anchor Text simply refers to "the underlined clicked on words" in your links. Most webmasters include their keywords in their anchor text as this tells the search engines exactly what the links are about. 

9. Tags, Blogging And Web 2.0

Take advantage of Web 2.0 by using blogs, RSS feeds and the social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg. Try AddThis.com for a simple social bookmarking system. At the very least your site should have a blog and RSS feed attached to it as this is an effective way of boosting your keyword rankings. 

Tags have become very important for getting higher rankings. Keep in mind, in Free blogging software such as WordPress, categories will automatically be seen as tags. Blogger, which is owned by Google, now has a form where you put your keywords (tags) for each post you make.

10. PPC vs Organic Search

Of course, one of the fastest ways to get your links displayed on Google is to pay for them by using Google Adwords. Your ad and links will sit side by side with the organic link results. In Pay Per Click advertising you bid or pay so much per click for your keywords and you only pay when someone clicks your links. But smart marketers also know since you're getting millions of impressions advertising your products, acquiring name recognition and branding through PPC advertising can be a major side-benefit. 

However, most webmasters would say that organic links (SERPS) will return better traffic than paid links or advertising. In most cases, this may be true because Google's organic rankings are becoming more respected and more trusted by users. They simply carry more weight with surfers.

This makes it even more beneficial to obtain top 10 rankings for your keywords in Google. Depending on the competitiveness of your chosen keywords reaching the first page listing or even the favored number one spot is well within any webmaster's reach. Just go for it. The rewards are well worth your efforts.

By Titus Hoskins

The author is a full-time online marketer who contributes his high rankings in Google as the major source of his online income. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools

Should I Put my Business Name in the Title Tag

The html title tag of a web page's html header is the single most important "on page" element when it comes to search engine optimization. That being said, is the best use of this valuable real estate served by including your business name in the title? Chances are the answer is a resounding "no!"

The title tag is an html tag which occurs in the header of a web page's code. The first thing I look at when I get a call from a prospective client is their title tag. More often than not, this tag is being used improperly, to the extreme detriment of the client.

Recently SEOMOZ.org released its rankings of the ten most important factors in search engine rankings. The title tag came in at number 1, and this is no surprise to any SEO that has been around for awhile. Google especially pays a lot of attention to title tag content, and uses title tag information heavily to ascertain the relevant keyphrases for which to rank a site. The opinion of search engine experts is unanimous on this one - keyphrase use in the title tag is the number one "on page" factor affecting search engine rankings. This is not disputed, theorized or subject to professional debate. It is a fact.

Given this fact, we must look at how to best use the title tag to optimize our site for search engines. Many sites place the business name in the title tag (or even worse yet leave it blank or with default content such as "untitled document" or "home page"). Any of these variations can be disastrous!

Let's use an example of a company that manufactures widgets. The primary keyphrase for that company would be "widgets", this being the phrase for which the company would like to rank highly for in the search engines. Now let's assume the company name is "ACME Manufacturing Company, Ltd.". Notice that the word "widgets", which is the desired keyphrase, is not extant in the company name.

So the company goes out and builds a wonderful web site to promote their widgets. However, throughout the site the title tag contains the following content: "ACME Manufacturing Company, Ltd." What is the effect of this?

First off, the effect of this is that the site will likely rank highly for the search query "ACME Manufacturing Company, Ltd.". The problem is that nobody is searching for the company name, they are searching for widgets. So all of ACME's competition shows up in the search engines for a widget query, but poor ACME is nowhere to be found. How do we help ACME rank highly for the search query "widgets"? We must optimize the title tag for the search engines by replacing the current title tag content with the desired search query: "widgets".

Generally speaking, the company name should never appear in the title tag unless you actually expect to derive most of your traffic from searches involving your company name. As this is a rare situation, avoid the temptation to put your company name in the title tag - save it for elsewhere on your page. Put your desired search keyphrases in the title tag, and leave it at that.

Following this methodology throughout your site by optimizing title tag content for each page according to the desired search query for that page will be a major step in the right direction for high search engine rankings.

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About the Author: Matt Foster is the President of ArteWorks SEO, a top 5 search engine optimization company in the world. For more information on search engine optimization, please visit http://www.arteworks.biz.

Top 10 Ways to Peeve Your Website Visitors

How did peeves become pets? Don't know. Don't really care. But all of us have our pet peeves when it comes to surfing the net for information.

Here are the top 10 according to many surveys:

1. Pop Ups
Pop ups come in many flavors: entry pop ups, exit pop ups, delayed, small, large, multiple, Flyin, scrolling, always on top, browser stopping, surf interrupting, must be cleared to move on, viagra, and the ever popular porn.
Except for an occasional squeeze page to get a free ebook or report, web surfers HATE pop ups.
So why do they continue to litter the Internet landscape? Simple. They work.

2. Extra Software Needed to View Site
Don't blame Canada. Blame Adobe.
Adobe made the Acrobat reader a must for viewing PDF files mainly because:
- It solved a need. Every page now printed out the same regardless of which printer or operating system was being used. It could even be made interactive for form completion.
- Adobe gave away millions of the free readers before publishers adopted the new PDF format as a standard for ebooks.
Acrobat users now demand PDF files in most instances where ebooks used to have various formats including "exe". Hackers have made downloading exe files from unknown sources an unsafe activity.
As standard as Acrobat now is, the same is not true for Flash, Shockwave, Deja Vu, and a host of other add-ons with various degrees of support.
I don't need to sit through a 2 meg Flash intro when what I want is information. Apparently, many others agree. You can add Flashblock to your FireFox browser and decide for yourself when to allow the Flash to load.

3. Dead Dead Dead Links
Nothing hacks me off faster than finding a spot on anchor text link that goes nowhere.
It's like having you mouth water over a menu special only to have the kitchen say they have run out.

4. Registration Required to Visit Site
Some sites think their bytes don't stink. They think you should register and login to see anything beyond the home page.
What they are doing is asking me to get married before the first date.
What's in it for me?
In this Internet day and age, a company and site has to build trust before a random visitor is going to cough up a name and email address.
Show me a little leg first.

5. Slowwww Pages
If I have to wait more than 4 or 5 seconds to begin viewing your site, I am gone - never to return.
If your servers are slow, find a new ISP.
If you loaded your pages with Flash, MIDI, audio, video, or other files that load with the page, dump them. Put up links instead. Let the visitor choose if they want to read or watch the video.

6. Outdated Content
One huge advantage of the web is the ability of bloggers and other Drudge wannabes to bypass traditional media and post news online instantly.
If you have not updated your website in 14 months, what does that tell me about your company. Certainly, you are less than a cutting edge solution for my problem.

7. Bad Navigation
Web designers prefer dazzle over function. Function is boring. Who wants a simple text link when a pop up Javascript navigation bar impresses the client?
I do.
So do the search engines.
Every web page needs recognizable, underlined text links on every page, preferably top and bottom.
Don't make me waste time trying to find the internal page I am really looking for.

8. No Contact Information
Poor contact information is a binary pair of bad navigation. How many sites have you been to where you cannot find a phone number, a street address, or even an email address? Plenty.
I think it's sweet that you put up an email contact form on your site, but I prefer to use my default email compose screen. Every web-based email form is different. I don't want to waste time learning to use your form when my email client works fine.
What are you hiding?

9. No Decent Site Search Tool
There is no excuse for this one. If you have a large website with dozens or hundreds of pages, give me an internal search box to find what I need.
Google and Yahoo! and many others will give you the tool - free - to put on your site. Use it.

10. Disabled "Back" Button
I don't want a website to dictate how I experience their site. I am a guest on your site. I don't need to come back to your page when I hit the back button. That's why I hit the back button in the first place. You don't have the information I am looking for.
In a similar vein, I don't like to see other right click functions like "view page source" disabled. I don't need to steal your HTML code, but if I want to, disabling right click will not stop me. I might want to see how you achieved a certain formatting effect. If I am impressed, you can bet I'll be back.
Pet peeves take many forms online. No list like this is complete, but any webmaster that can avoid these 10 major annoyances is a hero in my book.

About the Author: Charles Lamm is a retired attorney who can be reached via email at focus@clixforbrix.com. His articles are posted on his blog at: http://www.virtualjoefriday.com

Using Social Media Marketing to Promote Your Specialist Information Website

Before I get started, it is worth defining social media. It has become a widely used and abused term that means different things to different people.

My definition of social media is:

'online technologies and practices that people use to share their opinions, insights and experiences with each other. Information can be shared as text, images, audio or video via blogs, message boards, wikis, RSS, podcasts and social networking sites'.

At the heart of social media is the ability of individuals to interact with other people so that they feel involved and part of a community. A big part of this phenomenon is the activity of finding, sharing and recommending products, services, events and experiences to like-minded people. This is where social media crosses over with marketing.

Social media can be a great way to have your website promoted by word-of-mouth.

If you can get people to talk about and recommend your services to their peers, it is more powerful than any marketing you can buy. So how can you get started?

How Can You Make Social Media Work for You?

The good news is it is easy to start the process of using social media to promote your website.

1) Create a MySpace Page

MySpace (www.myspace.com) is the largest and best-known social network. Individuals create profiles about themselves and then invite similarly minded people to become their online friends. When someone becomes a friend, you can communicate with them and subtly direct them towards your own website.

Setting up your own page is simple and free. Go to www.myspace.com and follow the instructions. Put up a brief description about yourself and a link to a more detailed biography page on your own website. Remember, the goal of this page is to drive people to your own site so make sure you get plenty of links included without overtly promoting your website.

Spend an hour every week developing your site and building your list of friends. Invite relevant people to comment about your website.

2) Add Bookmarking Links to Your Article Pages

A big part of the social web is the ability for people to build lists of their favourite sites or articles. People with similar interests can then share their lists and benefit from other people's recommendations. If your website has free content, you should make these articles easy to bookmark or add to favourites lists. There are a lot of internet sites that now host and share bookmarks. You can add links to these sites to your article pages.

There are two ways of doing this. You can go to each of the leading bookmarking sites and download their code and links onto your site. The ones that you should include are:

* Digg - www.digg.com
* Technorati – www.technorati.com
* Del.icio.us – del.icio.us
* Reddit – www.reddit.com

However, if you go this route it can be time consuming and you will omit many of the potential bookmarking sites. The alternative is to put a link to AddThis.com on the foot of each page. This gives your users access to over 30 bookmarking sites.

3) Add an RSS Feed

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, depending on who you ask. RSS allows people to be notified every time new articles are added to your website so they can keep up to date with your content.

Ask your developer to create some RSS code for your website and then put a link on all of your pages to the RSS code page. The link should be a small orange rectangle with the letters RSS in white.

Publish your RSS feeds at Feedburner to encourage distribution and interest.

4) Email to a Friend

Enabling people to easily email an article to a friend is not typically bundled under the heading of social media marketing, but in my view it is another way to encourage people to share and recommend your content. Add an 'Email a Friend' link to all of your content pages.

5) Add a Forum

Having a Forum on your website is a great way of building a community around your subject area. Monitoring the forum will both give you a chance to understand what people are discussing and promote your expertise by adding your own comments.

The downside of a forum is it does need to be carefully managed. You need to allow people to make negative comments so they don't feel they are being censored, but you have to stamp out aggressive behaviour, personal insults, sp@m and meaningless rubbish. This can be time-consuming work, so don't bother with a forum unless you have the time to do it properly.

Non-technical people can pay to use vBulletin. More technical people can use a free open source solution such as PHPBB.

You can register your forum with BoardTracker to make it easier for people to find.

6) Create How-To or Product Review Videos

It has never been easier to create short videos that can demonstrate your expertise. How-to videos are very popular. For example, if your website is about Making money on eBay, you could create a short video on "How to Take Perfect Photos for Your eBay Listings". Make sure you have your website URL on the opening and closing sequence of your video to promote your website.

Post your videos on YouTube and Google Videos. Give it a catchy title and teaser to get people interested. Also link to the videos from your own website.

7) Share Your Photos

If you have photos related to your subject area, post them on photo sharing websites such as Flikr and PhotoBucket. For example, if your website is about steam trains, take a camera to your next steam train show and post the pictures on these sites. People searching for steam train images are likely to try these sites. They can then follow the link on the photo to your website. P.S. Remember to include links back to your own site from the images.

8) Create a Blog

Blogs are very simple content sites where short articles are listed one after the other on the home page. They are usually used to write about current events or comment on news.

Some successful content websites are blogs. Some are much more like magazines with feature articles. If your site is more feature-based, consider starting a separate blog that can be more informal and brief. Update the blog every day even if it is with just one- or two-sentence comments. Blogs that are infrequently updated quickly lose their audience.

Use the blog to drive traffic to your main website.

You can get basic blogging software for free. Try Wordpress or Blogger. For a managed service, try Typepad.

In many ways, today's social media technologies are still fairly primitive, but I can say with confidence that the phenomenon that they have created - of customers taking control of the buying process – is here to stay. Customers will continue to get stronger, so publishers, manufacturers and anyone else with customers better start listening to what they are saying.

One last point before I finish. It's really a word of warning. Once you adopt the social media marketing techniques, you are inviting people to comment about your service. You must be ready for negative as well as positive feedback. Good companies listen to the feedback and make positive changes. Poor companies ignore it or worse still, call their lawyers to fight it. If you jump into the social media world, be ready to participate, listen, learn and take action.

Thanks to SubHub:
SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profít on the web. Website: SubHub.com
Feed: SubHub Articles Feed

Methods to popularize your website

Do you have a website that is getting very little or no traffic at all? Well, I can put you on a path to changing that within the time it will take you to read this article. We will review each of the strategies you can use to promote your website, and then we will try to assimilate them into a single, uniform strategy that is both highly effective and affordable.

First of all, TV commercials, radio ads, and print advertising are very expensive. This is undoubtedly the best way to launch a business, but the costs are prohibitive. A full page ad in a prominent magazine or other publication can run as high as $50,000 per ad. TV commercials can run just as high; if the commercial runs during a popular television show or sporting event, the cost will be enormous.
So, if you do not have enough money in the coffers for traditional advertising, you need to resort to online marketing. This is not a bad thing. Offline advertising (i.e. radio, TV, print ads) is sometimes not effective. Marketing on the internet is cheaper, and if done correctly, can give you much more bang for your buck.

Obviously, the cornerstone of internet marketing is search engine submission and optimization. There are hundreds of different search engines and directories on the internet where you can submit your web site for a listing. This is fairly easy to do. Simply sign up for a monthly submission plan with a credible search engine submission service. There are literally hundreds of these submission services on the internet; you can find them by performing a search on Google.
However, be wary of submitters that claim to be able to submit your site to 75,000 search engines. Such services are scams, and they will submit your web page to FFA pages and bogus link pages that can actually get you banned from the search engines. You should only do business with submission services that submit to the major search engines and directories.

Now that we have covered submission, we need to talk about search engine optimization (SEO), which is even more important. To optimize a site, you need to maximize keyword density and optimize the positioning for the words or phrases that best characterize the subject matter of your site, and you need to use proper Meta tags so that the search engines can interpret your web pages.
If you do not know how to optimize your web site, you should search for an optimization professional on Google. Steer clear of SEO experts who want to charge $1,000 per month or more. Their goal is to bleed you dry before you figure out that they really can not help you get to the top of the rankings. Stick to providers who will optimize your site for a one-time fee.

More important than SEO is link popularity. Link popularity is the number of web sites that currently link to your site. The more inbound links you acquire, the higher your search engine ranking will be. There are more than a few ways to acquire links, but I have a certain strategy that worked well for me.

My advice to you is to write articles and press releases and submit them to article directories and press release distribution services who will then distribute your articles and press releases to other websites who will publish them and in return link back to you. Also, you can submit your site to bloggers through a popular service called Blogitive (Blogitive will get blogs to post one-way anchor text links to your site in their blog, which will greatly enhance your search engine ranking).
If you are not patient enough to wait for your search engine ranking to improve, you can attract visitors to your web site instantly by using pay-per-click advertising (PPC). With PPC, you pay a certain cost per click to have an ad for your web page run at or near the top of the search engine listings for certain keywords. This can be extremely costly and ineffective. It is not uncommon for webmasters to blow thousands of dollars on PPC advertising and make only a few sales.

The best way to promote your site, if you are actually selling something, is through an affiliate program. You need to provide an affiliate code to other online merchants so that they will place your banner on their site; every time you make a sale that resulted from an affiliate referral, the affiliate gets a commission. Some internet companies have thousands of affiliates, and get all the business they would ever need or want this way; and it costs you nothing.
To recruit affiliates, you should submit your affiliate program to as many directories as possible (there are directories where you can list your affiliate program for free). The best way to find affiliates is by listing your program on forums or message boards visited by webmasters who are looking to generate additional revenue for their online business. You will have to consult with an experienced programmer who can set up the affiliate program so that the codes used to track sales for each affiliate will work properly.

So, to summarize, you should first optimize your website and submit it to search engines. You should then begin submitting articles and press releases to article directories and press release distribution services. You should also submit your site to Blogitive so that bloggers will write a review of your site and link to it, further boosting your link popularity. You might want to join a link exchange, but trading links often proves fruitless. Also, you should set up an affiliate program. And finally, you should budget a small amount of money to spend each week on pay-per-click.

If you are persistent and use all of these methods, you will continually increase your traffic over a period of time. It will probably take approximately 3 years of performing each of the tasks outlined in this article, on a daily basis, to get where you want to be. Just stick with it and your efforts will be rewarded in the long run.

About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com/, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form.