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Why Vertical Portals are Important for your Marketing Strategy
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-09-04)
A search engine, like Google, often called a portal, is a horizontal portal because it is catered to everyone, not just a specific group of people. Within the Google portal, there are thousands of Vertical Portals. Vertical Portals are large, informational websites that cater to a specific industry or special interest. These vertical portals are online communities where people are interested in a particular topic. There is usually more than one vertical portal for any given topic.
Vertical Portals should be a part of your marketing strategy by identifying and utilizing the resources that the vertical portals offer. Vertical Portals, or On-Line Communities, are relevant to your industry as Yahoo is to the Internet. Vertical portals typically have one or more of the following characteristics such as Online Chats, News, Calendars, Vertical Banner Exchange, Classified Ads, Forums, Directories, and a specialized Search Engine to search vertical content.
Vertical Portals are important to your marketing effort because they are an excellent resource for reaching your niche market. Vertical Portals are also an awesome resource for locating paid advertising resources such as buttons, targeted banners, article advertising, press releases about your site, and news articles about your site. Now how do you go about finding these vertical portals? You will be able to identify a vertical portal when you see one while searching. If you consider websites you visit frequently on the Internet, you will probably find that you often visit a few vertical portals but you just didn't realize they were Vertical Portals. Just make sure that you understand what features are common to vertical portals as this will make finding them much easier. The 3 ways to look for vertical portals are by trading links, searching on Yahoo and Google directories, and by checking out the Alexa directory.
For more information on marketing, check out our free web design articles at www.jovillarwebdesign.com.
Why Google PageRank is important for your Website
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-08-30)
There are a number of factors that are important when advertising your website. Search Engine Optimization includes something called Google PageRank. Google PageRank is an algorithm used by the Google Search Engine to analyze links.
Google assigns a numerical value to each webpage. Google ranks from a scale of 0 to 10. The higher the PR, the more importance your website is given. Remember that each webpage is ranked, not the entire website. Each webpage carries different content and different links so it should be ranked individually.
Basically, the more relevant your page links are, Google will rank your website according to this. Inbound links and outbound links are taken into account. Inbound links, or links into the site from the outside, are another way to increase a site's PageRank. Also known as Backlinks, they are incoming links to a website or web page. Outbound links are links that take a user to an external web site.
Here are some tips for creating links:
1. A link from another website will increase your website's PageRank.
2. Ways to increase your site's PageRank is to add more pages to your site. Google loves content.
3. You should avoid link farms as Google does not like this.
4. Try to make sure your outbound links are reciprocated.
5. It is better to link from a page that has a higher PageRank. Check out site's with higher PR and contact the webmaster to exchange links with their website.
6. You can check each website's PR by downloading tools like Google Toolbar or Alexa Toolbar.
The maximum amount of PageRank in a site increases as the number of pages in the site increases. The more pages a site has, the more PageRank it will also have. The higher the PR of a page's backlinks, the more PR is allocated to that page. The fewer outward-pointing links on a page, the more PR is allocated to that page.
Reciprocal Linking Tips to Bring Traffic to your Website
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-08-26)
Reciprocal linking, or also called trading links, is a method used between two website owners exchanging links with each other to promote his or her business.
It is a simple process, basically starting by creating a web page on your site dedicated to linking to other websites. I call my web page on my site Web Partners.
How do you contact these website owners? You can send them an email requesting a link trade. Make sure your website is related to the website you would like to promote. This will increase qualified traffic to your site. Why would you want to post your link on a cooking website when your website is about cars?
Once the website owner approves the link trade request, you can check often to make sure your link is still in place. Ask the website owner where your link will be placed within their site and bookmark these pages. You can check up once or twice a year.
The benefits to exchanging links with relevant websites are that it is free to do this. There is no cost to link trading. Keep in mind that it takes some time to contact each website you are interested in but it is worth it in the end. Another benefit is improving your link popularity and also your page rank. Search engines take notice of your website and how many websites link to yours. The more sites you have linked to you, the higher up you can go in the search engine rankings. Remember that it takes effort to do this but once you get the hang of it, it will be pretty fast and simple to do. Keep a notepad of sites you want to link to and also have a description ready to give to each site.
I usually give them my website's link, keywords I want them to use and a description of what my website offers.
You can also build a directory of links on your website that is a resource for visitors to find related websites. I guarantee they will come back to your site because of the link directory you have. Reciprocal Linking may be the most effective method for establishing an increase in web site traffic.
How the Search Engines Find You
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-08-20)
Search engines find your website in basically two ways.
The first is through direct search engine submission. You do this by going to the submission page of the search engine and entering your website address and then submitting it manually. For example, go to http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl to submit your site to Google.
Here is a list of some search engines that you can manually submit your site to. Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL, Overture, Ask Jeeves, Netscape, AltaVista, Findwhat, Dogpile, MetaCrawler & All Other Meta Crawlers, and many others. Visit www.searchenginewatch.com for more search engines.
The second way search engines find you is to be found through links. Search engines index and crawl the web by sending robots to surf around looking for new websites.
A robot, or sometimes referred to as Spiders or Web Crawlers, is a program that automatically traverses the World Wide Web and requests documents by visiting sites. They can find your new site by visiting and looking for new links on your site. They will re-visit and look for more new links and then they will add it to their index.
When a robot decides to visit a site, it is dependent on different strategies it uses. They can start from a list of URLS, server lists, 'what's new' pages or the most popular sites on the Web. Some robots index the HTML titles, or the first few paragraphs of the document, some parse the entire HTML and index all words, and some parse the META tag or other hidden tags.
Where to start? Now you want the best listings on the search engine. Search Engine Optimization includes using text rather than images, Flash for important content, organize your site to focus on a topic relevant, use search engine friendly URLs, have other relevant sites link to your site.
How to Make your Website Stand Out
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-08-12)
In this article, I will list important web design elements that will make your website stand out.
* Domain Name - Make sure your domain name that you register will be short and related to your website. Make sure it is not difficult to remember and that it will be easy to spell.
* Keywords - Make sure your main keyword is placed in the important areas of your web page. Make sure your main keyword phrase is located at the top and bottom of your web page and repeated throughout the body area. Don't add too much repetition. Search engines don't like this.
* Home Page - Make sure your home page is easy to read.
* Menus - Make your web site easy to navigate. Providing simple and clean menus will help you do this.
* Fonts - Make sure your home page has a decent font size. * Make your selling points stand out. Bold header, add bullet points and short, easy to read sentences.
* Links - Entice your visitors to stay on your website. Keep them interested by having them click on links that will take the visitor deeper into your site. Your site can link to a menu, more web page content, products/services, or images. You don't want your visitor to leave your site.
* Logos - Having a logo will present professionalism and help to build name recognition and branding to your web site.
* Colors - Make sure the colors on your site are easy on the eyes but stand out enough to look good. Use web safe colors.
* Uniqueness - Of course going for your own custom web design template will help your web site stand out as well. Retro is cool too. Be creative!
* Have Fun while you're doing it. It's your website. Whatever your reason for the website, make sure you have fun while you're planning.
What Search Engines like Google Look For
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-08-09)
For a search engine to list your website, you have to optimize it before you submit it to the search engine. Search engine optimization focuses on ways to position your web pages to improve their chances of being found. Search engines rank web pages using Keyword Phrase Repetition, Meta Tags, and Link Popularity. I will discuss each of these below.
Search engines will look at the top and bottom of your web page to find your keyword phrase. Rule of thumb is to use this keyword phrase 3-4 times for every 100 words of text on each web page.
Meta tags are hidden tags on a web page's source code which uses HTML code. Search engines use these meta tags for ranking as well. There are three types of meta tags to be aware of. These are Meta Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords. Meta description is one paragraph to describe your web page. It will help to use your keyword phrase a few times in this description as well. Meta keywords are a list of about 25 keywords and phrases that are relevant to your web page.
For example, if you are running a web design company, your keyword would be "web design". For my web design business, I use the keyword phrases, "web design services". To view your keywords, go to a homepage of a website and click on "View" on your top main menu of your web browser, then click on "View Source" or "Page Source". You will see an area similar to this example:
<head> <title>Web Design Library & One-stop Web Design Resource</title>
<meta name="description" content="Web Design Library offers free web design tutorials, articles, news, interviews, web design showcase, software reviews, free web design stuff."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="web design, website design, web design articles, web design news, free web design tutorials, free web design stuff"/>
</head>
Link popularity is also used by some search engines for ranking web pages. It basically sees how many web pages link to your web page. These links are called incoming links. The more links you have on your web page, the better the link popularity.
Once you have your website optimized with keyword phrase repetition, meta tags and link popularity, you can then submit your website to Google, Yahoo and Bing and other search engines.
Free Website Design Tips
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-08-07)
Here is a list of factors to consider when designing your web site:
Cross Browser Compatibility - Make sure your site is tested on different browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
Website Navigation - Determine your entry points or which pages your customer will most likely enter from and most likely read its content. You can download Google Analytics to track your visitors and analyze your website's traffic. You can also see your demographics as well as see your entry points too.
Web site Menus - Look into clean menus and easy to find links. This will allow your visitors to stay longer and not be confused with where to find what they are looking for.
Website Load Time and Total Page Size - Huge graphics, cartoon animation and flash dramatically increase the size of the file. Unused scripts in your HTML code need to be optimized as well. Search your code and test it thoroughly. Rule of thumb, a main page shouldn't be a whole lot more than 50K. Be aware of the different kinds of graphic formats available. Research which format is the best to use for your website. GIMP, a free software image editor will work with all graphic formats and you can play around with the compression, transparency and size of your images.
Home Page - Make sure you have at least a summary of what your site is all about so your customer will know within 5 - 10 seconds whether to stay or leave your site. If you cannot sum up what your site is about, then you shouldn't have a website in the first place.
Web Design Layout - Look into CSS layouts for your web design so that will be easy to edit and that have a clean look.
Screen Resolution - Stretch layouts will make your website more professional and businesslike. Stretch layouts will fit any screen resolution because not every user has the same resolution.
Ensure Website scalability - Make sure your code and web design is scalable.
So we discussed a few web design tips to make your website more professional. I hope these tips help to improve your website.
Free Website Stuff
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-08-04)
If you offer free stuff on your website you will definitely attract visitors to come back to your site. Whether it is free stuff, free shipping or free information or tips, people love anything that is free. If you want to offer free stuff, ask your supplier for samples to give to your visitors.
If you plan to offer free information or tips, visitors who come to your site will notice because it's related to what they are searching for and they will most likely purchase from your site. Focus on what you think your visitor will be interested in when they arrive to your site. Ask yourself what do they want to read on your site?
For example, you can find free information and tips on my Web Design site, located under Resources.
Providing free information, free stuff or free shipping generates a sense of trust and builds a good repor. There are actually websites online that only offer free stuff on their website. That is the whole focus of their site.
Developing web pages that educate and inform visitors help to build more credibility with your company. Give them a reason to come to your website. Then place a link at the bottom of your information to get them to click on so that it will take them to buy something. Make one sub page on your website dedicated to offering free stuff. I guarantee it will encourage visitors to come back for more. Make the sub page easy to navigate and link to your products and services. If you need assistance on how to create this sub page, research other websites that offer free stuff. Just open up a web browser and type in free stuff.
Remember that more information you can provide for your visitors, the more credible your site will be, and the more likely your visitors will buy from you.
Free Merchant Account tips and how to get one
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-08-03)
A merchant account allows you to accept credit card payments online. In order to accept credit card payments, you are required to apply for a merchant account and online payment gateway. What you will need is a real time credit car processing gateway that will authorize and decline credit cards while the customer is on your website. The web hosting company will provide the merchant account and gateway. There are usually fees that come with this set up. Setup and monthly fees are associated with having a merchant account.
95% of all orders made online are with a credit card. The fact is that your businesses success or failure can depend on whether or not you accept credit card orders.
You must make sure that the merchant account and payment gateway is compatible with the shopping cart your site uses. All Merchant Account Providers provide merchants with their own merchant account, online processing of credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover), shopping cart links, virtual terminal, and site enablement.
Here is a list of top merchant account providers: Paymerica, CDG Commerce, Paypal, and 2CheckOut. Authorize.net is another popular source for applying for a merchant account and gateway.
To start payment processing you will need the following requirements: * Order Form * Gateway - for processing credit card information * Shopping Cart - compatible shopping cart for your ecommerce store to take online purchases * Secure Server -to prevent hackers from stealing credit card information. SSL encryption will prevent this from happening. * Merchant Account - process, authenticate and authorize transactions
Follow the list of requirements above and you will be ready to start your online business!
This article is written by the owner, Christina Ebeling, at a web development company that offers web development services in Edmonton, Alberta to clients all over Canada.
Why you Should Have your Own Domain Name
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-08-02)
Okay, now you are interested in setting up your website. In order to get it up on the Internet successfully you need a domain name. The benefits to having your own domain name are name recognition and better branding. It is also easier for your customer to remember and some search engines may rank you higher if your keyword is part of your domain name and it is related to your website.
Here are some tips on selecting a good domain name for your website. Start by selecting one that is as short as possible so that customers can remember it and come back. Make sure it is easy to spell and will leave an impression on your visitors. Also, it should pertain to your site offering.
I mentioned earlier to select a domain name that has your main keyword in it. The reason why this is important is because search engines place importance on domains that use the keywords in the domain name. For example, my website is tailored to web design services. My website domain name is www.jovillarwebdesign.com with "webdesign" as the main keyword of choice and it is related to my website's offering.
Try to select a ".com" extension as it is more popular. ".net" and ".org" are the other popular choices. You can search if your domain name is available by going to whois.com. If it is available, you can register and purchase your domain at a web hosting provider such as Web Hosting services. Some web hosting providers will include a domain name in the web hosting package. It is better to register your domain name for about 2 years. Making your domain public for this length of time can let all the search engines know that you are a real business and not a spam website.
Paypal or Other Payment Gateways?
by Christina Jovillar-Ebeling (2010-07-29)
Okay, now you have your ecommerce website design and you want to set up a payment gateway. Where do you begin? You can find these payment gateways on the Internet and see which one is more suitable for you.
First things first, what is a payment gateway and why do I need one? A payment gateway connects your ecommerce website to your merchant account. It connects payments by a secure order form with your merchant account at a bank.
I would start by researching all the different payment gateways companies and compare security, features, price and reliability.
Some differences I found when researching are mainly the fees and services offered. Some have higher fees than others and some have services such as fraud protection, eCheck processing, and risk management you should look into. Fraud protection identifies suspicious transactions with built-in fraud tools provided by the online merchant company. Electronic checks (eChecks) are another payment method that allows customers to enter their banking information online. Risk management is where sensitive data is stored in the online merchant's PCI-compliant data center, never on your computer.
Some fees to look into are the setup fees, monthly fees, and transaction fees. Most providers will charge a monthly fee and transaction fees. Some companies will waive the set up fee.
Reliability is an important thing to look at. Make sure your gateway is up 24/7 especially when your customers are ordering online throughout all hours of the day, all over the world.
Authorize.net is a company that offers payment gateways. I would also look into Paypal, especially Paypal Websites Payment Pro. Your customers won't even need a Paypal account to purchase your products or services if you go with Paypal Websites Payment Pro. This is a very good choice, plus you will save on fees as there is no monthly fee for this type of account. Websites Payment Pro accepts all credit cards and all paypal payments, and works with a number of shopping carts.
Considering security, price and reliability features for the payment gateway will help you on your way to getting your ecommerce web site ready to go live.
About the Author
This article is written by the owner, Christina Ebeling, at a web development company that offers web development from Edmonton, Alberta to clients all over Canada.
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