Products and a Call to Action Make a Complete Landing Page

Short and to The Point

Your site is a way to market your business or products, but too much text on your home page may turn off a visitor to your website before they even know what you have to offer. Most people only scan the text trying to find what they are looking for.

Keep your audience in mind when you choose the text for your home page. Sure you want to tell them everything about your amazing products or services but you need to capture their interest first. Save the detailed information for other pages. Use keywords and focus on one or two products or services that will pique your visitors interest and encourage them to want to learn more.

Once you have caught their attention the next step is to tell them what to do. Having a call to action is essential for your home page. Asking a visitor to your site to do something will increase your sites effectiveness, even if it is something as simple as going to your service page or store.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Load Time - Make it Short!

Without jarring your mind with a bunch of technical data, let's just say that you have only a few seconds to capture a website visitor's interest before they move on. You can rationalize all you want—the flash animation is cool, the pictures are stunning, the information is critical—but if you insist on bogging down the load time of your site, you're doomed to drive people away. It's that simple. Stop fighting it. If you don't have the expertise to pare down your photos and properly design your site for optimal load time, then rely on an expert who does. HIT Web Design employs specialists in many areas, whether it is in design or programing, that know the best techniques available to get your site loaded quickly so you can create the wow factor you need to keep them hanging around and exploring your site.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Defensive Web Surfing (Scams)

The age-old cliche that “if it sounds too good to be true, it is” happens to be sound advice when it comes to surfing the internet. Too many of us want to find that “golden opportunity” or that amazing, secret niche that will make us millions. Turn off the computer and come back to earth. The proven way to success has been tried and tested for ages, and the formula has not changed. That formula involves the development of knowledge and talent, and the application of specialized skills. In a market economy, a stronger demand for different types of knowledge and skill usually directly correlates to a high level of compensation. Have millionaires been made on the internet? Of course, but it was through the application of specialized knowledge. Genius evolves through toil and labor, and occurs as the mind works to solve problems. So, the next time someone is making outlandish promises online, take a step back. The FBI scam guidelines are a good place to start your reality check. (See FBI Internet Fraud.)

HIT Web Design enforces a strict Terms of Service designed to protect internet users from scams. For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Avoiding Spam

Spammers can get your e-mail address from your website simply by scanning the unseen code behind the scenes. Spammers themselves don't actually look at your website, (they're lazy), they rely on “spiders” and “automated crawlers” to do it for them. Without taking precautions, you'll find yourself the recipient of unwanted spam. The best way to protect yourself is by creating a “Contact Us” form that requires a person to fill out the information and send it to you, rather than listing your e-mail address on your site, but you must still take precautions. Spammer crawlers can fill in those forms, then receive your e-mail when you respond. So, protect yourself with special security features that require an actual person to fill out the form. Have you ever wondered why you have to read and copy those funny looking letters before you can submit something? That's how the website security features can determine you are a real person—automated crawlers can't read the letters, so they won't be able to submit the form, thus you protect your e-mail address from falling into the hands of spammers.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

How Much of Your Website is Being Read?

Go to any landing page. You have twenty seconds to get the information you need. Ready…go! How much of the page did you actually get to? Most visitors won’t read your content word for word (especially if the content isn’t interesting).

You may need a lot of information to be included on your landing page. If that is the case, break down the text by using headings.

You may also use bullet points or lists to help visitors at your site quickly get the information they need. If you can’t put your information in bullet points or lists, but you're not quite sure what to take out, have a friend or work associate read through the text and see what you can remove or rework. If you’re still unsure about what to cut, don't worry, the writing staff at HIT will happily write your text for you.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Make Sure Your Website is Secure

With credit card fraud being so prevalent online, customers become weary when they are asked to input a credit card number. There are several things that you can do to secure your website, including your customer’s transactions.

A security certificate will help protect against unauthorized access to sensitive information, including credit card information, customer addresses, social security numbers, and customer names. Security certificates (also called a Secure Sockets Layer or SSL) encrypts information. If your site has a security certificate, a padlock icon will display in the address bar.

If you are gathering sensitive information on a form, such as dates of birth or social security information, make sure that you are using a secured form.

When you are adding a security certificate or a secured form to your website, use a company that you trust. Security certificates and secure forms are both available through HIT web design.
Information overload, spam, and security issues have caused us to take on a more aggressive and defensive approach to surfing the web. Visitors want information on products or services fast, and are hesitant to give out their own personal information.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Don't Overwhelm Visitors with Too Much Information

Imagine going to a retail store where products are not neatly organized on shelves, instead they are scattered randomly throughout the store without rhyme or reason. They have several products, and you came to the store because they have a product you want. Imagine how overwhelmed you would feel. You have to dig through hundreds of products to possibly find what you’re looking for. With that in mind, how cluttered is your landing page?

Too much information will overwhelm website visitors. Keep your landing page text somewhere between 350-500 words. Use one or two good images that help set the tone for your website.

If you use white-space, use it cautiously. While you don’t want too much information, you don’t want empty space in the wrong place. When you look at your landing page, where is the first place you look? The first place you look should be the most important piece of information on the page.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Building Your Companies Reputation Through Blogs and Forums

There are several ways to add good content to your site without taking up a lot of space on your landing page. Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide says “This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.”

Blog posts, forum posts, and emails should be of some benefit to the customer. For example, if you write a blog post (or blog article) on something that educates visitors, they are more likely to read it and pass it on to friends and family.

Don't let the task of writing copy for your website overwhelm you. HIT Web Design has a team of professional writers who are dedicated to helping our clients create the most effective copy for their websites, newsletters, press releases, blogs, or whatever other writing needs they may have.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Effective Website Copy is Easy to Read

No matter how much copy you have, make sure that the copy you are using on your site is easy-to-read. One good practice is to read your copy out loud. Are there places where you stumble as you read? If so, fix them! If customers don’t understand what you are attempting to tell them, they’re not going to stay on your website. Correcting spelling and grammatical mistakes will make your copy easier to read.

Another good practice is to keep your line length around 65 characters wide or shorter. That may mean splitting the pages of your website into two columns. When a column of text is too wide it becomes difficult for readers to find their place on the next line and appears too hard to read.

The content that you use on your site should lead the customer to purchase a product or service. The copy on your landing page should focus on leading your customer to make a purchase. Your other pages may contain additional information—something to educate the customer, but if your primary purpose is to sell something to the customer, focus on the product or service you are offering.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

What is Good Website Content?

Less copy (text) is not necessarily more effective than having a lot of copy. The quality of the copy, not the length of the copy, is what determines its effectiveness. Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide says “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here [including title tags, description meta tag, URLs, site navigation, anchor text, optimizing images, and links). Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it.”

What is good content? There are other factors that go into creating good content, but there are three that make a big difference. It must
• make sense to the reader.
• help sell your product or service.
• have keywords and key phrases that will bring customers to your site.

If you follow these three key principles, you’ll have the right amount of copy on your website.

We'll go deeper into website copy and how to make it the most effective tomorrow, so stay tuned.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Is Less Copy More Effective?

When you are creating copy(text) for your website, keep in mind that most users want information as quickly as possible. If you keep your copy trimmed down to only necessary information, visitors are more likely to stay on your site. Too much copy will look daunting to the visitor, who, in most cases, won’t stay on your site.

According to a 2006 study by Clicktale, only about 20% of visitors will scroll to the bottom of a webpage. If you need to have a longer page, try placing a picture at the bottom of the page so that only the top portion is showing. This will naturally entice the viewer to scroll down to see the lower half of the picture and will increase the chances of your text read. Try to keep your pages short enough to eliminate the need for scrolling.

There are times when long copy is more appropriate. Products or services that are complicated, technical, or pricey generally require more copy to effectively sell to visitors. If your products/services fall into one of these categories, don’t be afraid to use longer copy.

Join us tomorrow for more tips website copy.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Simplify Your Website Pages

Selling multiple products on your website? Make it simple for your customers to find the product(s) they are looking for. If you have multiple product lines, you should have multiple pages. Don’t try to squeeze all of your products onto one page! When you have multiple pages, you can have a dropdown menu that allows your customers to quickly find the product they want.

In addition to multiple pages and dropdown menus, you can add a quick-search to your website. Using a HIT product, HIT Search, customers can do a keyword search that will bring up related items that are on your site. HIT Search also provides you with valuable reports that let you know which words and phrases your potential customers are searching for. This allows you to cater your website to your actual visitors by building your website around the items they search for the most.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Guide Your Visitors

Do you know that most visitors to your site will only search your site for a few seconds to find what they are looking for? That means that you must get them what they want—fast! If you only offer a few products, make them easy to find. Include the products on your landing page or have an easy-to-see button that links to your products.

Step back a few feet from your monitor and take a look at your website. Can you clearly see the button you're asking your visitors to click on? If not, make it bigger or find another way to make it stand out.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Help Visitors Find What They're Looking For

Isn’t it frustrating when you go into a store searching for an item that you just can’t find? You search in all of the logical places, but can’t find what you are searching for. If you’re lucky, you find a store employee who knows where the item is. Trying to find a specific item on the internet can be equally frustrating. You can search through site after site, trying to find that item.

Of course, when you are searching online, you won’t spend a lot of time searching one website trying to find a product. Instead, you’ll go on to the next site, and the next, and the next, until you find what you are looking for. You just don’t have time to spend searching through page after page on one site in order to find the product you want. Your customers have the same mindset.

So the next time you look at your website, take a look from your customer's perspective and ask yourself how easy it is for them to find what they're looking for.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

What Your Website Can Do For You

Your website can and should increase your bottom line. After all, the reason you have a website is to increase your marketing opportunities and increase your profit. If you’ve taken advantage of great design and marketing tips your site is going to give you a plethora of opportunities to increase your bottom line and with a properly managed contact database increase your customer contact and repeat customer prospects. Let’s face it, the internet is definitely here to stay and will be around for a long time to come; if you don’t have a site these days it can seriously hamper your marketing and sales. The internet is and will remain an essential part of marketing and sales for the foreseeable future. The internet is a tool you can use to increase sales, reduce your overall marketing budget, it can be used as part of your customer service arsenal and actually reduce costs by providing opportunities to your customers to buy online, answer frequently asked questions and even give them an opportunity to put themselves on your mailing list. Your website is a marketing rep/customer service/sales person that doesn’t sleep and operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. If a customer wants to buy from you sitting in their pajamas in their front room at 3:00 AM in the morning then they can do it, giving your customers unparalleled convenience.

So in short, a website can;

• Increase your bottom line by
• Increasing sales and sales opportunities
• Provide you with marketing opportunities
• Increase customer contact
• Reduce your overall marketing budget yet provide better opportunities to market your goods
• Provide your customers with incredible convenience and
• Provide them with great customer service by giving them instant access to information at any time of the day or night

So exactly how much does your site increase your bottom line? That depends on you. How much do you bring attention to it? How often do you give the link out to your customers and direct them there for sales and frequently asked questions? How much your site benefits you will depend on how much you utilize it and take advantage of its customer service opportunities.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

How to Protect Your Content

There are some very easy ways to protect your website from someone illicitly copying it and using it for their own. The first step is to create a back up copy of your site and burn it to a DVD or CD. This can be used as an evidentiary backup copy in case you ever need to use it as support in some kind of dispute. This is a generally wise idea anyway as you want to make sure you preserve your site without relying on electronic copies. I would recommend making a physical copy of the site at least once a month but no less than every 3 months. Having a physical copy of it in your hand can be extremely valuable.

Another way of protecting your content on your site is to make sure it is registered at the U.S. Copyright office. This is relatively inexpensive (about $35.00) and relatively easy as well. Go to the U.S. Copyright website for instructions on how to do this. This is probably one of the must secure ways to protect your content as well as one of the surest.

These are the only ways of protecting text, besides keeping your ear to the ground and paying attention to any and all possible competitors. That can be a lot of work. With protecting images you have a few options. One of the best is adding a digital watermark. There are software programs out there that will help you do this and it is a pretty sure way of keeping track of your images online and making sure no one is stealing them for their own uses. Doing a search in Google or another search engine will be sure to net you some very useful results.

Most importantly, your content should change from time to time just to make sure everything is fresh and that your buyers have a motivation to come back. Return visits and buyers are the important thing. You want to capture your customer’s attention, hold it and turn them into raving fans and buyers of your products.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

More on U.S. Copyright Law

You’ve worked hard to build your website. Long hours spent coming up with the perfect text, taking pictures of your business, working with the designer to build the site, finding great ways to market it. It’s been a long road but worth it as it is paying off in return business now.

Then one day, someone says, “Hey, I went to thisonesite.com and it looks a lot like yours. Is that your site too?” You go to the website and find that not only does it look like yours, but they have copied your text and even taken some of your pictures. Imagine how upset you would be! Instead of going to work on their own and doing their own research and work they’ve essentially taken what you’ve created and “borrowed” it for their own profit. You would be burning up!

Luckily, you can protect yourself against this type of theft. For one thing, as discussed in Friday’s blog article as soon as you put down your text in tangible form, either electronic or written, it is protected under U.S. Copyright law. The exact definition of what is protected by Copyright is as follows: (Taken directly from http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf)

“Copyright protects “original works of authorship” that are fixed in a tangible form of expression. The fixation need not be directly perceptible so long as it may be communicated with the aid of a machine or device. Copyrightable works include the following categories:

1 literary works

2 musical works, including any accompanying words

3 dramatic works, including any accompanying music

4 pantomimes and choreographic works

5 pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works

6 motion pictures and other audiovisual works

7 sound recordings

8 architectural works

These categories should be viewed broadly. For example, computer programs and most “compilations” may be registered as “literary works”; maps and architectural plans may be registered as “pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works.”

These definitions certainly go a long ways towards protecting your site content; however you can and probably should go to extra lengths to protect your content. It isn’t hard to do so and is very much worth it in the long run. These days, if you publish to the web, you can almost guarantee that at some point someone will attempt to “borrow” your content.

I’ll have more on this important subject tomorrow.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

U.S. Copyright Law and You

When writing the copy for your site, it will be tempting to look at others who have written essentially the same thing; your competitors and others in similar industries, and perhaps to ‘borrow’ some of their ideas. It is a lot of work to come up with all new content on your own, especially if you are essentially starting from scratch with no copy of your own. It is a good thing that you research what others are doing, what is not good is to copy or take without permission any content from another site and put it on your own as if it is yours. There are copyright laws that protect website owners from just such plagiarism; besides it just being downright sneaky. If you worked your tail off coming up with unique content for your site the last thing you would want to do would be have someone else take that content and use if for their own without so much as a thank you.

But what exactly is Copyright?

According to the United States Copyright Office and their website, copyright.org, Copyright is the following:

“Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U.S. code) to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works. Section 106 of the 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:

• To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;

• To prepare derivative works based upon the work;

• To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

• To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisualworks;

• To display the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and

• In the case of sound recordings,* to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

In addition, certain authors of works of visual art have the rights of attribution and integrity as described in section 106A of the 1976 Copyright Act. For further information, see Circular 40, Copyright Registration for Works of the
Visual Arts.

It is illegal for anyone to violate any of the rights provided by the copyright law to the owner of copyright. These rights, however, are not unlimited in scope. Sections 107 through 121 of the 1976 Copyright Act establish limitations on these rights. In some cases, these limitations are specified exemptions from copyright liability. One major limitation is the doctrine of “fair use,” which is given a statutory basis in section 107 of the 1976 Copyright Act. In other instances, the limitation takes the form of a “compulsory license” under which certain limited uses of copyrighted works are permitted upon payment of specified royalties and compliance with statutory conditions. For further information about the limitations of any of these rights, consult the copyright law or write to the Copyright Office.”

This is pretty definitive as to what you can and cannot do. More tomorrow on this extremely important subject.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Focus on What You Want Visitors To Do

When a visitor pulls up your website, what do you want them to do? If you are a small business owner, the answer is obvious: you want them to purchase a product or service. How do you get them to do that? There’s a lot that goes into it, so let’s start with one helpful concept: Focus on
What You Want Visitors to Do.

Should visitors to your site:

• make a purchase?

• fill out a form?

• click on a link?

• contact your company?

If you aren’t sure what you want your visitor to do, how will they ever know? Starting with the very first line of copy on your website, your content should lead your visitor to the goal you have in mind.

Make effective use of your homepage. If you want a customer to make a purchase, then your home page should focus on the products or services you are offering. If you have multiple products or services, you will want to make sure your customer can purchase multiple products or services as easily as possible: this means you will want shopping cart functionality on your website.

If the purpose of your website is to generate sales leads, don't put a form on your "Contact Us" page and hope visitors stumble across it. Instead, make it a dominating feature on every page. You’ll also want to make sure that the copy on the page further persuades the visitor to fill out the form.

If you want your visitor to click on a link, then don’t bury the link in a large paragraph of text. A colorful “Click here for more information" button is an easy way to get your customer to click on a link and end up where you want them to be.

No matter what you want your visitors to do, your contact information should be in an easy-to-find place on every page. What if your visitors have questions about a product? What if they can’t get a form to submit correctly? Do everything you can to make it easy for your visitors to do what you want them to do.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Continuation On Color And It's Importance To Your Marketing Message

Continuing on the theory of color and how it can affect your viewers and sales, there are three colors that go along with the primary colors. When you mix red and blue you get purple, when you mix yellow and blue you create green, and when you mix yellow and red you have orange. These colors can be significant and important in the message they convey to the users of your site.

Purple in the past, and still to this day, represents royalty and nobility. Many think of it as a creative color, a rich color representing depth of thought or wisdom. It is often a good color for creative sites or websites that encourage education or have something to do with education. It is often used in various shades for winery sites for its obvious association with the wine grape.

Green is an often associated with nature, plants, healing, and spring time. It is a soothing color that is easy on the eyes. It is generally associated with vitality and productiveness. Because it is so easy and pleasing to the eye it is a good color to use in abundance on a site design. It is a great color to use for any website that has to do with nature, natural processes, farming, landscaping and anyone who works with the outdoors.

Orange is one of the warmest and most inviting colors. It carries with it the warmth of yellow and the vitality of red making it a wonderful color to represent energy. It is a good color to use to represent fun, vigor and cheerfulness. Orange is an appropriate color for a site that wants to convey a fun message; it's a great compliment for green in representing vitality and nature. It is often used for restaurants and food vendors. Orange is associated with fall as well.

This is just a general guide to color and I hope it serves to inspire you to learn more on your own about how to use color to attract and hold the attention of visitors to your site. Color is very important in marketing and this is something your graphic designer can help you with. Don’t make the mistake of just going with your favorite colors – your favorite colors may be entirely wrong for the message you are trying to get across or will be most effective in marketing your product. My recommendation to anyone when looking at colors for their site is to go out and look at the most commonly used colors on their competitors sites and websites that are associated with the product and/or services that are related to theirs. This will give you a guide to go on when picking your own color scheme.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

The Importance of Color in Your Website

When creating your website there are a lot of considerations, not the least of which is the actual design and color scheme itself. This can affect your sales, how people see your company and how they use your site. There is an entire field of study called color theory or the psychology of color, but you don’t have to go to years of school to pick the colors for your logo and/or website.

I’d like to introduce you to the field of color awareness by briefly going over the reasons behind color theory. First off, there are physical reasons behind why color affects us the way it does. I don’t want to get sidetracked on this as it isn’t necessary to understand why we see colors the way we do, it is only important to understand how they affect us and how they affect the way we buy. I do want to point out that most of color theory is what they call “soft science” in that it isn’t really provable by scientific method nor can it be explained by mathematical reference. That doesn’t make it any less true. Statistics in sales often “prove” something beyond a shadow of a doubt.

First we will look at the primary colors. Because there are only three primary colors, all other colors come from those, making the primary colors some of the most significant. The three primary colors are Blue, Yellow and Red.

Blue, the color of the sky and water, is associated with coolness, serenity, stability and solidity. It invokes a sense of permanence and strength due to its association with the sky and the sea. This would be a good choice in colors for a financial institution or a mortgage company.

Yellow is almost always linked with the sun. This is pretty universal throughout the world, so this color conveys the same message in almost every culture. It is generally associated with energy, happiness, optimism, warmth and heat. Yellow captures people’s attention better than any other color because of its brightness. It is usually a good choice for schools, daycares and creative enterprises.

Red is the color of blood, so can be linked with vitality, life and passion. It is an aggressive color in many ways and is a hot color because of its association with flame and blood. It can also be used to convey danger. This makes it an exciting color and one that is associated with thrills and energy. It is often used in association with fast foods, certain restaurants and anywhere people want to associate vitality and thrilling energy.

More tomorrow on this very important subject.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Converting Visitors to Buyers

You’ve worked hard at creating your web site. It is now complete, live for everyone to see, and now you need to do some business. You want the site to pay for itself and become a benefit for your business. So you’ve worked equally hard to get people to the site, bring it into the public eye and make it visible to the world. However, all the traffic to your site means nothing if you aren’t converting those visitors to actual paying customers.

How do you accomplish this? Through a process called conversion. Conversion is the process by which you take browsers, or viewers, and turn them into a customer; someone who pays for your goods and/or services. Your conversion rate is the ratio of visitors to your site compared to how many of those visitors are actually buying. Without this all important conversion, the work and money you have spent getting those visitors to your site is wasted. So how do you change the viewer to a customer?

According to Forrester as of August 2007 the average conversion rate in e-commerce is 2.9%. Your target then is to match this or exceed it. Increasing the conversion rate of your online business makes sense in a lot of ways. You’re maximizing your efforts in marketing and making those dollars make more sense for you as well as increasing revenue without spending further marketing dollars or manpower. There are some simple ways to make sure you are doing all you can to maximize your potential in conversions.

First of all, make sure you’re providing great content in the site. I’ve talked a lot about that in earlier blog entries and can’t emphasize enough how important great written content is. Make sure your content is grabbing your visitor’s attention and that it tells them exactly what it is you want them to do immediately. Don’t make them guess. Along the way, think about ways to build customer loyalty – that way those marketing dollars not only get a onetime customer but build a future relationship that keeps bringing the customer back again and again. Some kind of reward for the customer to return usually works – maybe a coupon for a percentage off on their next visit to your site.

In short –

• Write and implement great content for your site
• Grab your visitor/buyers attention and hold it
• Make it easy for them to know exactly what you want them to do on the front page
• Find ways of building your customers loyalty

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

SEO Versus Paid Search Engine Ads

The best way to make sure your site has great ranking in the search engines is so simple it seems like it is too good to be true. Simply write the content in such a way that it is of most benefit to the customer/viewer you are trying to target. That’s it!

With that said, it does take some thorough research. You need to figure out what your customers/viewers will be searching for when they look for a website that has to do with your business, and then write the content accordingly. This should be fairly easy as hopefully if the customer is in fact searching for your type of business simply using the keywords about your business in the content of your site will go a long ways towards creating a site that is friendly to the search engines, and will help you get the positioning you need. Another great way of helping your ranking is to have sites that are ranked highly link to your site. Do not fall into the trap of thinking you can cheat the search engines, even with reciprocal links. Avoid linking to “bad neighborhoods” (sites that are known for spamming the search engines) or scamming links to your site in any way. It can ultimately lead to your being banned altogether. However, legitimate links are always helpful.

Another benefit of great content is an increase in your conversion of site viewers to actual buyers. If your site doesn’t make someone want to buy from you, getting traffic to the site ultimately means nothing. I will touch on this subject more in future blogs.

In talking about search engines as a marketing strategy, I would not be doing anyone a service by saying that relying on search engine traffic for your business is a good thing. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms and if they suddenly change something that causes your ranking to drop, sales can plummet. This is something that is completely out of your control and can in itself be disastrous. Instead of just SEO, I would recommend a more conventional method by employing SEO as well as paid advertising on the web and search engines, such as Google Ads. The paid advertisements under the keywords of your choice that you bid on can be extremely lucrative and can often be worth their weight in gold.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Creating Quality Site Content - Avoiding Mistakes with the Search Engines

You need desperately to market your site and have a limited budget. The natural alternative for you is the search engines. If you have a high ranking in the various search engines you have a better chance of getting traffic and customers to your website. There are a number of ways to achieve this, one of which is to do what is called search engine optimization (SEO) and get what is called ‘organic’ traffic to your site – in other words, traffic from natural site ranking. This can be a tough thing to do and takes a lot of work. It takes so much work and is such a tricky process there are companies that specialize in that and nothing else. But again, we’re back to you having a limited budget, and hiring someone to do SEO can be expensive. So the natural alternative is to do it yourself, but, again this is a lot of work, though worth its weight in gold if it helps your business succeed. What you do not want to do is try to cheat the results and have your site rank high by doing what the search engines consider to be dishonest. This is commonly called ‘spamdexing’ or ‘spamming the search engines’ and get your site banned from them altogether, and that can be a disaster.

The following list is directly from Google and can be seen in its entirety by going to Google and looking up Webmaster Guidelines or by going to http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&src=top5.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

I’ll have more tomorrow on the right way to create a user friendly as well as a site that is friendly to the search engines.

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.

Marketing Your Website

You’ve created a site – now you need to market it. If you don’t tell people about your site no one will know it is there. A website is just like a physical location. If you build a store on top of a mountain, no one will know about it. The same goes for the web. If you build a site, no one will know it is there unless you make a splash, bring attention to it, shout it out to the world.

A good way of doing this is all the usual, conventional, practical methods of advertising such as print, radio and television, as well as lesser yet effective methods such as magazines, billboards etc. That costs a lot of money however and some people just don’t have that budget. I would still recommend looking at these methods and trying at least some of them on a limited basis, depending on your budget. However, there is another method; one that is not as effective or as lucrative as other methods, but works none the less.

Search engines.

Now, if you are like most businesses you are going to have a lot of competition out there. All of your competitors want to be found under most if not all of the same search terms you do. This can lead to some pretty fierce fighting for position on the engines, especially Google as it currently holds the title of champion in the search engine arena. According to comScore Media Metrix Google accounts for 74% of all search engine traffic, Yahoo has 14%, MSN 9%, Ask has 2% and all other SE's share the remaining 1%. With the amount of searches going on every day in the world, even 2% with Ask is a large number, but no one can hold a candle to the top dog, Google.

This means you need to optimize your site, for the most part, for Google. That doesn’t mean you ignore the other engines, but with 74% of the traffic, Google is obviously the lion’s share and it only makes sense to do it with them in mind.

How do you optimize a site for the search engines, or more relevantly, Google? Well, there are a lot of ways to do it. What you do NOT want to do is what they call “spamdexing” or “spamming” the search engines. Doing so will be considered a scam and will get you banned from the search engines altogether. This is disaster and to be avoided at all costs.

More tomorrow on how to optimize and how to avoid spamdexing

For more information, please visit http://www.hitwebdesign.com or call 1-866-211-0743.