Google has rehashed it’s adwords tools layout. The new layout looks very similar to the Google search based keyword tool. It now has the ability to segment keyword by industry which can only be a good thing. Another added benefit is you can now see the different match types in the same list, although I would have liked them in different columns.
A new look for the Google keyword tool, let us know what you think.
A brief rundown of SEO web design by a company in LA
SEO Web design as the name suggests is an amalgamation of web design and SEO. There are some strong reasons why you should use a company that is expert in SEO as well as website design. To explain this further we need to break down what is web design and what is SEO
For the dedicated web designer, designing a website is all about the look with considerations given to how well the design communicates the message. The use of graphics and typography is there to support the core communication. Many web designers come from a graphic design background and have a basic grasp of the code behind the design and may well depend strongly on web design packages such as Dreamweaver to help them produce the end product. Many of theses designers are able to produce designs that a visually breath taking
For the SEO its all about the traffic. Getting visitors to your site they rely on statistics and conversion rates. From a design point of view it’s all about making it easier for the search engines to crawl and index your website. The skills of good SEO’s should never be underestimated as they can help a business thrive by delivering targeted visitors, identifying search trends and even new markets.
When you combine these two disciplines, what you get is a web designer that can produce great looking websites while creating a design that is optimised to produce great search engine results.
On page optimisation is easer as the site structure is designed to place the most relevant content higher up in the page. As a rule of thumb, the closer to the top of a page a word or phrase is placed the more relevant it is.
The optimisation of the web design images this is done by the use of file names, title text and alt tags this can be used to support the overall website theme
Optimising the way the pages are linked by the use of keyword rich links as opposed to generic terms like “home” or “about us”
I have done my best to lay out the basics of why SEO web design is so crucial to long term success of any website. As you can see there is more to web design then just making things look nice or just getting traffic. For a website to work it has to appeal to the senses as well as perform well. You have to strike a balance between the search engines and the user, stray to far one way and you cancel out the other.
With many of us looking for ways to get paid a little extra on top of our normal wage, taking surveys may be a good option. Getting paid to take surveys has been around for a while and may sound to some like a scam. The get paid to take surveys scam involved you paying for information on the companies that do these types of market research.
What you think is valuable and many market research companies help large corporations plan ahead by feeding back your thoughts and views in the shape of a plain old survey. Once this data is sorted and analysed it can give information such as consumer trends or how satisfied customers are with a particular company.
The amount you get paid is not set per company but is worked out on a case by case basis the amounts range from 20 pence up 20 – 25 pounds per survey
Coming next
We are going to research the top five paid survey companies
A sales page is an integral part of an online business and there are ways to make it work. There are also things to avoid.
1. Do Not Cause Information Overload Informing the reader about the product is a good thing. No one wants to read a huge list of benefits, however. The proverbial wall of text just invites a reader to skim over it without really taking it in. Divide the information with headings and subheadings so people can find what is most important to themselves and their needs. Even scanners can latch onto something of interest, which gives more of a chance of them buying the product involved. Emphasize the headings and subheadings with bold print so anyone can find the points they wish to view at a glance.
2. Do Not Write for the Search Engine It is important to use keyword and key phrases to raise internet search engine ratings, but a search engine will never be a reader and potential customer. There has to be some kind of balance between search engine optimization and engaging writing. It is a good thing that readers can find the webpage with their favorite search engines; but once they are there, there should be some convincing and interesting writing to lead them the rest of the way into a sale.
3. Do Not Fill the Page with Text Leave some white space when laying out the webpage. As mentioned before, a wall of text just causes the eyes of most readers to glaze over. They have no desire to try and read what amounts to textual rambling. Formatting like that makes it easy to lose a place multiple times and finally give up. Spaces clearly define where one thought begins and ends, and allows the eyes of the readers to rest a bit before reading more and making the purchase.
4. Do Not Focus on the Business The readers have arrived. They are already curious enough to see what the webpage has to offer, so show them that instead of greeting them with information about the company itself. What does the product or service offer the reader? Whatever that is, highlight that, and not the company itself. The point of the sales page is to sell something, not to talk about the business, no matter how amazing the business itself may be. No one makes a purchase based upon that. Write to the reader and make a connection.
5. Do Not Use Excessive Animation Flashy animation and high tech interfaces may look great on a webpage, but they may do more harm than good. Not every computer is able to see such innovations, and others do not want to be bothered with it. More complicated interfaces and displays block out a portion of the potential market. Think about the target market before employing such devices on the sales page or anywhere on the website.
this post was written by http://www.freelancewritingdesk.com/
If you are considering writing your own sales pages you should listen to the words above they are written with common sense in mind. It’s all well and good getting great Search engine rankings but if the traffic doesn’t convert your no better off.
What options are available for small businesses to get cheap or no cost marketing in the Doncaster/South Yorkshire area. In my opinion Marketing should be the number one priority for any small company. Without clients there is no business period. Getting new customers, if done incorrectly can be costly and end up costing you more then the clients are worth in terms of business.
Pros: A range of advertising opportunities starting at classified ads to adverts on the front page.
Cons: Can be costly and the adverts have a short life span.
Pros: People only look in the directory if they are looking for a product or service, so conversion to business should be higher. More popular with the older generation. Adverts have a 12 month lifespan
Cons: can be costly, if you spend less by having a smaller advert the response rates drop dramaticly. Response rates are decreasing over time as the internet becomes the first port of call for a lot of potential customers. See
Is Yellow Pages and Other Paper Directory Advertising Dead
Pros: Tight area targeting by demographics
Cons: Low response rates for most
In Doncaster we have a range of networking events with groups like the BNI and and 4Networking. We have a fantastic chamber of commerce in Doncaster extremely professional and pro active and I would advise any business in Doncaster to see what it has to offer.
Happy customers can be great for business two ways to build on your success is firstly ask for referrals do they know of anybody who would benefit from your product or service. Secondly don’t underestimate the power of a positive testimonial that you can place in your marketing material.
if you run a company that employs people, have a marketing ideas box so that staff can suggest ways to get new business. This not only get you now idears but also makes people feel that they are part of the team.
You could go one step further by placing the box in your reception and offering a prize to the customer that suggests any ideas that you use
The online world is full of opportunities for the small business to compete with the big boys all you need is a talented web designer and SEO like me . Having a website is a must for most businesses but if you have zero visitors seeing your site, its wasted money.
Pros: when done correctly can produce large amounts of business for many types of industries. can be updated in a very short time so it can display your product offerings bang up to date .
Cons: Like anything it requires work. If you just place your site online and expect business then your going to be disappointed. you need to keep it up to date or get a web professional to do it for you
SEO or Search engine optimisation is the skill of getting your website up the search engine rankings for when people search for your product or service
Pros: Gets you qualified leads as we know having a lead pre qualified makes it a lot easyer to convert them to a customer
Cons: Takes time, like wine SEO and Websites get better with age.
PPC or Pay Per Click is paid advertising in the search engines. You only pay when someone clicks on your link
Pros: Quick, you can have qualified traffic to your website within hours.
Cons: Unless you know what you are doing you could find yourself with lots of clicks but no new customers.
Pros: Cheap, the cost of DIY email marketing is only your time. If you have a good email list you can get lots of good business from it .
Cons:You need to build your list by an opt in process, meaning the recipient has to give you permission to send them the email. You have to include a way for them to un subscribe from your list. There are laws in place to stop spam so be careful that you don’t fall fowl of theses
Social networking is a way of communication with friends or perspective customers online. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow you to add friends, the friends then see your status updates (or your marketing message)
Pros: Like email if you have a focused friends list you can keep customers abreast of your latest offers
Cons: very time consuming
Yellow pages is synonymous with business advertising and has been for many years, but are its days numbered. Ten years ago you may have got some return fo
If you have ever advertised with Yellow pages, the process starts with a sales person coming to visit you to book your money making advert. For more and more of the advertisers the book is a money loosing proposition.
Normally the sales person tells you to expect lots of enquiries a week, that you will be rushed off your feet and the small monthly payments of 3 – 4 hundred pounds will be easy to meet as you will have so much business that this amount will be small change.
The reality is normally a lot different. I first advertised many years ago, fresh faced out of university after completing my degree in Media production, specialising in multimedia design.
I was eager to join the world of small business, selling my newly acquired skills to a hungry local business community. My advert in Yellow pages was going get me business the likes of I had never known. That year went slowly, I didn’t receive one call from that advert; not one single little enquiry.
I cant blame the directory completely, my advert was small but it was the only paid advert in the section. The web was all new and shiny,many businesses didn’t know about websites or thought them just a passing fad.
I even went and did it again a few years later and thought it was the size of my advert that was the problem the first time, so I splashed out on a full colour half page ad. I did get responses to that ad but twenty times less then the directory sales people were telling me the average response rate was for an advert of that size and in that section. I covered the cost of the advertising but not much else.
The thing was I didn’t know what I know now. Paper directory advertising is dieing, then it was just in decline now it’s on its way to the retirement home.
For some; paper directories like Yellow pages can be great but for these it’s normally out of hours services like emergency plumbers or services aimed at the older generation who don’t use a computer let alone the Internet. For most, it’s a dead duck.
If you want a business or service nine times out of ten the web is the place you look first not last. I, being a person who makes a living online one way or another do everything online from shopping to research to entertainment it’s all there. I suspect I may be a little extream because of my comfort level online but I don’t think average Joe is far behind me .
If you run any sort of business you need to be found online so you need to establish a web presence now if you haven’t already got one. If you main form of marketing is paper directory’s then you need to be moving at least some of your marketing spend to online marketing now , not tomorrow.
We can use Google trends to see how the interest in Yellow pages and Thomson Local had declined since 2004
Yellow Pages
Thomson Local
As we can see the Yellow pages interest has dropped dramatically over the last six years to approximately 25% of the 2004 search volume.
Online marketing is growing with the biggest gains in search volume being in SEM an acronym for Search engine marketing
SEO
SEM
PPC
So as we can plainly see the interest in online marketing is growing. I can see the growth slowing as we see with SEO (search engine optimisation) PPC (pay per click) is in a slight decline but I put that down to businesses trying to reduce costs.
Related Blog posts
Two More Studies Confirm: People Research Online, Buy Locally
To start with this post started off as a comment in response to MOGmartins post about Social Media, PR vs Traffic. Where the argument is,
whether social media sites, like facebook and twitter are of use to large corporations as traffic sources, or are they just vehicles for public relations and one to one, or one to many communications.
Now I both agree and disagree at the same time, let me explain. Social Media is about making connections with people which it does for individuals, but I don’t think it does for most businesses at this moment in time to make a marked increase in the profitability of a company.
Social media like Facebook and Twitter do produce traffic. When someone clicks through what is the users intention. Is it to buy from or use the company’s services, for the most part , no. I myself see a link posted and click on it to be nosey.
With SEM or search engine marketing when a user clicks through from Google ,Yahoo or Bing you can be sure that they are actively looking for what you have to offer. The user has been qualified by the search engine. Of course some customers are more qualified then others but for the most part a user coming from a search engine will convert to a paying customer click for click a lot better then a user from Facebook or twitter.
There is a flip side to this argument in that fan pages and twitter is like an segmented email list , it’s full of people who are interested in one way or another in what you have to offer. So per head, these interested people are going to convert quite well. when the right offer is presented. These people are waiting to see the next big thing and simply have to be told about it . A well segmented email list can be a gold mine allowing you to sell to the same person over and over again. social media I see working in a similar way.
Nobody can be certain of what the future of social media and search marketing is going to be. My view is that we are going to see a total merging of the two, we see the beginning with Google and Bing showing tweets in search results. We will to have to wait and see.
Yes social media does have an ever increasing part to play in traffic generation for businesses we will just have to be creative in how we use these channels.
When you are fairly new to the world of web design, it can actually be quite tricky to choose which fonts to use. But once you understand what “web safe fonts” really are, everything suddenly becomes crystal clear. Web safe fonts are basically the most popular fonts used by web designers to make the content of their websites appealing to visitors. They are also the most commonly available fonts on computers around the world.
If you download a really cool but rare font from your favorite free website and decide to use it for all your main headings for example, you should be aware that unfortunately not everybody will be able to view your masterpiece the way you created it.
In others words, if people who visit your website do not have the fonts you used to design it on their computers, they will not be able to see those particular fonts on their screens. Instead, their browsers will replace them with some other fonts that are already installed on their computers.
That’s why it is highly recommended that you stick to the most popular fonts so that your website can be viewed exactly the way it is by almost everybody.
There are many web safe fonts that you can use to create your websites, all it takes is a little creativity to make them look more attractive and use them to your advantage. There are basically two types of fonts you need to know about:
* Serif fonts
* Sans Serif fonts (Sans is French for without)
Serif Fonts are fonts that have fine cross lines at the end of the letters and Sans Serif Fonts are fonts that do not have anything at the end of the letters. The most common Serif Font is Times New Roman which is also coincidentally the default font for most windows-based browsers.
There are also Monospaced Fonts which are basically fonts that have the same amount of space between each letter. Here’s a list of the 23 most commonly used fonts – I personally use Georgia, Times New Roman, Tahoma for the texts and Impact for Headings which I think look really good on a web page:
Most Common Serif Fonts:
Most Common Sans Serif Fonts:
Most Common Monospaced Fonts:
Final thoughts:
To make you life easier, I recommend that you stick to the most common fonts listed above for the body text of your websites. This will ensure that everyone visiting your website can see it exactly the way you want it to be seen.
However you can use whatever font you choose for your logos, navigation and other website design elements just as long as you use them as part of an image. For example on a clickable logo or banner designed on Photoshop or PaintNet which you then insert on your webpage. Well I really hope this has helped you understand what web safe fonts are and how to use them.
web design SEO Web Design Secrets: Search Engine Optimization Tips For Beginners
SEO web design is a skill that can be learned, though most search engine optimization for beginners courses dwell too much on linking strategy as opposed to web site design per se. There are many ways for most normal people to get an improved search engine ranking, and secure a high search engine listing, and while linking is important, good on-site SEO is also necessary.
Although it might not seem like it, getting a good listing on Google or any of the other search engines is not as difficult as many like to claim. There are rules to follow, and if you play the game properly then the outcome should be in your favour. The tips provided in this article are not really secrets as such; although many people offer to divulge marvelous secrets to you, all they are giving you is stuff that people have been using for years.
So you won't get any secrets here. I have nothing hidden away that I don't want anybody to know, and if I had I wouldn't tell you about it! Would you? If you had some secrets that were so valuable that they were making you money, would you give them away free in an article like this one? Of course you wouldn't!
So here are my not-so-secret tips on getting a good listing in Google and improving your search engine ranking. You likely know a fair bit about meta tags, and have been informed that most are not used by search engines. Well let me tell you something. If you Google' Article Services you will finds my website right at the top in the #1 position for that keyword. Check the description that Google provides right under the title: that is exactly as it is in the Description' tag that I have on the site. So don't let anybody tell you that Google don't use the Description tag, because they do. So do Ask and MSN (now Live Search), and Yahoo also uses it, but not the whole thing exactly as written.
The Keyword tag is another matter. Google aren't interested in what you tell them the keywords are: they decide the relevance of the page themselves from the text and Alt tags on the page. Google no longer need keyword repetition to understand what you are writing about: they have the LSI algorithm now, that will determine the meaning of your page from the character strings it contains. The algorithm is programmed to calculate a relevance factor from the vocabulary you use in relation to the rest of the vocabulary on the page. However, back to SEO web design, and some search engine optimization tips for beginners.
In addition to the Description meta tag, the HTML tags you should use are:
1. The Keywords meta tag. Although little used it only takes a second to put in, and does no harm. There is evidence that some search engines might use it. The rest of the meta tags are pointless.
2. The TITLE tag. This is the title of your web page, and should contain the primary keyword for the page. Each page should be written round one primary keyword that relates to the subject of your website or niche.
For example, if your niche is costume jewelry, the primary keyword for your home page would be costume jewelry'. You could then have a number of 'silos' with a main page title each. The title of one main silo page could be 'simulated diamonds' and the first page title of that silo could be garnets'. All of these are the primary keywords for their respective pages. Another silo could be colored gem stones', with that as the primary keyword for the main silo page, and that for your first sub-page in that silo could be citrine'. And so on.
Each page must have one primary keyword, and it should be included in the Title tag for that page. The Title tag does not appear in the body of the article, but in the HTML between the two HEAD tags in your html.
3. The H tag. These are heading tags, with H1 being the most important. The heading for each main section in your page should be contained within H1 tags, and many pages have only the one set of such tags. Subheadings, containing secondary keywords, should be contained within H2 tags, and so on. Thus, in the example above, the heading or your garnets silo could be could be Garnets in Costume Jewelry' in H1 tags.
After an introduction to garnets, you could then have an H2 heading containing The Source of Garnets: Where Garnets Come From', then another passage of text headed How Garnets are Cut for Costume Jewelry', again held in H2 tags.
4. The ALT attribute. Use Alt = within the Img tags of your images and graphics. This lets the search engines know what the graphic is about: search engines do not read graphics, and the Alt attribute offers you the chance to use your graphics meaningfully with respect to SEO web design.
TEXT FORMATTING
That's all you have to worry about regarding the HTML tags. You text formatting can be used to emphasize to search engines what the important text on your page is. Thus, if you use bold text, underscoring or italics, they indicate the important words and phrases. Thus, use the STRONG and U html tags in your heading.
WRITE NATURALLY
Don't worry too much about your keyword density (KD), other than having to much. Too high a KD could harm you if Google thinks you are making unnecessary use of them. Write naturally for human readers, and not robots. If your text reads well and makes it clear what the subject of the passage is about, then you will be fine. In my writing I ignore the concept of KD altogether. I use my keywords as indicated above, and also in the first and last 100 characters on the page (or at least in the last paragraph somewhere).
Good SEO web design is not keyword fixated, but contains good contextually related vocabulary that the LSI algorithm can use to target the relevance of the page to the search term being used by somebody using the search engine to find information. That's all a keyword is: a term used by somebody looking for information. If you cannot work without a target KD, then I would go for a max of 1% with plenty associated vocabulary, synonyms. Related terms, etc.
Thus, if you are writing a 400 word article on the keyword losing weight', use these words four times, not twelve (1% not 3%)
None of these are web design secrets, and I doubt if there are any such secrets left any more. I suppose the only thing even approaching a secret here is that my description meta tag is copied exactly by Google in the listing for my #1 placed website. That allows you to determine how Google users see the description of your site in the listing.
I have several more SEO web design tips to offer, but these will be the subject of another article. In the meantime if you implement these search engine optimization tips for beginners, then you should soon see an improvement in your website's search engine ranking.
If you want more SEO web design tips, you will find Part 2 of this article with more search engine optimization tips for beginners on Seocious Tips 2 along with a free gift for everybody from me, Pete Nisbet of SEOcious.