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How do I go about getting a website?

Marketing is going to be very important to your website’s success, but you need to have good web design as well.  After all, you can lead people to your website, but if it is designed poorly, they won’t stay long. Your normal website viewer will only spend about 5 seconds on your page before deciding to move on.  You need to appeal to your clients in a method that is functional, appealing, and effective in getting your point across. This will change a lot on your specific type of business, as well as the customer base you are trying to reach. For example, if you wanted to reach older adults, you would make your site very to the point, plain, and easy to read and traverse. On the other side, if you want to reach teens or young adults, having a fun, hip website will be to your best advantage. Here are more tips on web development that can help you.

• Focus on what sells. Know what your available paths are, and which ones will work best.
• Explore the competitors websites and similar companies. Finding out what your competitors are doing and how it’s working for them can help you to eliminate options or figure out what you need to do to get one step ahead of them.
• Hire a professional website designer. Things may be fiscally tight, and you may have a low budget, however, your website should not portray this. Interview a lot of people to find one that’s cost-effective and qualified to do the work the right way the first time
• Bundle services when you can. Get a design company that will provide you with other options, such as merchant services and regular upkeep. This will often put more money in your pocket because you’re getting a package deal.

Keeping website development tips in mind will help you to create a better website, which will generate more traffic in the long run. Although it will cost money, any investment you make in the way of making your business or website better will only benefit you in the end.

If you are on a very tight monetary limit, you can use website templates and pre-designed layouts on free servers to get started. This IS NOT recommended, because people will be able to tell that it’s not professional, but it is an option if you’re starting a company with no money. It’s far better to allow professional web designers do the job, to ensure that you get the business and interest that you need, as well as a website that will stand the test of time.

Website development can range from inexpensive to quite costly, however, this depends on what you have in mind. However, it’s an investment that will be extremely in your favor, if you take the time to do it right first.

To find out more and explore all of your options, visit the experienced professionals at MasWare.

Webmaster Secrets For Top 10 Search Results in Google, Yahoo and MSN
By Jerry West

Here are three simple steps of the SEO equation to remember:

1. Choose to target search terms that convert prospects into customers and make sure there is room in the market for you to gain a Top Ten ranking in 90 days or less.
2. Optimize your page content and HTML code for those terms.
3. Actively seek external, one-way, incoming links with variations of the targeted key terms as the anchor text.

Most webmasters make a key mistake in not testing their researched keywords to make sure the visitors targeted actually convert. So, they end up with good traffic but no buyers. Test your keywords through a PPC campaign first before you ever spend time optimizing.

There are a few convenient tools around for selecting your search terms. One that I have been using since 1999 is WordTracker.

The most logical page to optimize is your homepage, but that could be a mistake. Website home pages are generally the worst converting page of the site. There is generally just too much to distract the prospect. Instead, focus on an internal page, or create one.

Your website should include three important tags in the head. They include title, meta description, and meta keywords. Stuffing your head tags with other metas and clutter such as lengthy javascript can only harm your search engine results page ranking (SERPs); clutter will never improve your ranking.

Many SEO experts stress over the importance of the Title Tag, and some even use the Meta Title Tag as a way of beefing up the ranking. Our tests show no indication of this and while I state the Meta Title tag is optional, I would advise not to use it.

Now for a list of Don’ts

• Don’t bother optimising a page that redirects. Don’t use robots.txt or meta tags to impede search engine access to your optimized pages.
• Don’t use same color text and background. This makes the text look invisible to the visitor and search engines view it as “Spam”.
• Don’t Spam keywords with immediate repeats.
• Don’t force any text to appear at 4px or under.
• Don’t use frames.
• Don’t fill your pages up with internal scripts. Where possible, use links to external scripts.
• Don’t trust automatic linking software. It’s far, far too easy to get listed in link-farms and garbage directories when using automatic submission software. You want to ensure that you have a certain level of control over who and how your site gets linked. The most valuable links you can get are from highly respected sites that are theme-related to your optimised page content.

Directories, directories and more directories. This is a good place to start. Many directories will give you a free link without the need to reciprocate. Do a Google search for directory + ‘your business category’.

Here’s a list of some high ranking directories. Start at the top and work your way down.

Free Classifieds. Search for sites that allow you to post free or cheap classifieds with basic html enabled. Get your key terms in the classified ad as the anchor text for the link to your optimised web page.

Discussion Forums. Start hunting for discussion forums with a solid community with lots of active posts. Avoid those which just have a high Google PageRank but look like a “ghost town”. The forums must allow for links in your account signature. When making the sig, be sure your key terms are the anchor text for the link/s to your site. Once registered, start posting your little heart out and be sure to enable your signature to be attached to your post. Just make sure you are benefiting the forum community or you may be labeled a Spammer and kicked out.

Press Releases. Do you think you have something newsworthy to say? Then write up a news story and be sure to include a link (don’t forget keywords = anchor text) in the body or by-line. Submit the article to related sites in exchange for prominent links. Submit to all the major web news sites. Each website that publishes the article is another incoming, one-way link with your key terms as the guiding light.

Do backlink searches on your competitors. Back link searches are search criteria which asks for sites linking to a page that do not include the page’s domain. For example, at Google a back link search for www.acmehosting.com would be link: www.acmehosting.com -site:acmehosting.com. Duplicate your competitors efforts and get your site linked where ever they’ve managed to. A great tool to use is Brad Callen’s SEO Elite.

On a finishing note, there’s one important thing to realise about Google SERPs, the “Sandbox” effect. It’s theorised that Google filters new domain names out of all searches except for their own domain name for a period of 6-9 months depending on the popularity of the site’s targeted key-words. Google PR rank and SERPs are inter-related but are not the same thing. Your site can enjoy a Google PR of 7 yet still be sandboxed and appear nowhere in the results for your targeted key terms. The only thing you can do is work on your external linkage and optimize more pages of your site. The hard work will pay off on steady incoming traffic and high ranks at MSN and Yahoo etc. When Google finally releases your domain, then you’ll enjoy similar SERPs to the other majors and reliable, incoming qualified traffic.
Article written by Jerry West, SEO Analyst for Web Marketing Now, an SEO Testing and Research agency. He is the author of the SEO Revolution, a paid membership site for webmasters and SEOs to get access to his testing information from over 500 domains and he is faculty member of StomperNet, the leading eCommerce online instructional community. See http://www.webmarketingnow.com for more articles.

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