by: Maricon Williams

In the past, businesses and other entities are busy mounting their own website but now, the hype is all about redesigning them. This change has shifted the interface of web design services to a different level and the focus is now on redesigns.

Website redesigning is involves a slight distinction and considerations between mounting and developing new sites. Say for instance, those that have existing sites have more or less enough knowledge on what sites and site formulas work. They have already a grasp about what they consider as assets in their site’s form and function. Recognizing these assets can pretty well contribute to a more prosperous redesigned site.

Other businesses may take a few months to decide in favor of a redesign but mind you, planning a redesign can be as easy as 123! It’s unbelievable but it’s true. Here are the three basic redesign planning tips:

1. Problem Identification. As i have stated a while ago, more or less you have already formed an idea why your site is not doing that good in the World Wide Web. This is because of certain factors. These factors must be avoided in coming up with a redesign. Remember the maxim - learn form your mistakes. Well, this is basically the main idea behind problem identification. This is done to preclude similar mistakes that have transpired in the past. In recognizing these mistakes, the site will intentionally be improved. Aside from mistakes, we should also consider the good points of your existing web design. They can be re-applied or made stronger and better.

Thus, before you plan the details of a re-design, analyze first. Identify the problem areas as well as the good areas. You may ask some of these questions in order to get the desired web site:

a. Is your site functional? If it gives the needed information of the viewers or the target market and they get it quickly and clearly then, the site is said to be functional. It pays to have organization, this is because it will refrain the viewers from transferring from one site to another.

b. Does your site clearly point the ‘call for action’. If you are into selling products, your site must have triggered the viewer’s decision to buy the product. At a glance, they must be convinced and the cobwebs at the back of their heads must be rebutted or deleted.

c. Is your site an epitome of a professionally-made site? Are the appearance, layout, images and content appealing? If not, better have it redesigned in a way to make it catchy, informative and serviceable.

2. Layout the redesign plan. The next thing to do is to establish a workable layout for the redesign. Establish plans how to solve the mistakes in web design. Each issue must be identified to serve as guidelines. Also, problems and mistakes must be given due solutions.

3. Define your Goals. Aside from giving solutions to the mistakes and problems you have encountered in your existing web site, be sure to establish and define your goals to guide you with what to do in the redesign.

The aim or the overall purpose must be made clear and flagrant otherwise your redesign will just turn out to be a waste of time and money. Good luck!

About The Author
Maricon Williams

Please visit Web Development Services Pros site at http://www.webdevelopmentpros.com for comments and inquiries regarding this article.

By David Andrew Smith

I have written before about the benefit of articles and how they provide one way links back to your website and therefore improve the importance of your website and thus its ranking in the search engine results. The articles you write have the chance of spreading slowly around the web and ending up within ezines or on other websites or blogs. All of which provide links back to your website. So once you have over thirty articles out there the links can grow exponentially. Just consider what can happen if you have one hundred articles published? Two hundred articles?

The magic figure is said by some experts in this field to be 250 articles, it is then that this exponential growth in links and traffic to your site can be truly seen. I do not have personal experience of this yet as my own figure sits at 35 and this number is already having remarkable results as reported in a previous article. If you average 10 articles a month which is what my own aim is, then after 2 years you will have reached this magic figure of 250.

At the same time your website will have aged a further two years which will also benefit it and it will be viewed as one of the more important web sites.

Patience is the key element in promoting your website. If you want your site to climb up through the rankings then you must have patience. Do not be swayed into parting with money on the promise of instant high rankings. They can be achieved but will not be permanent and on Google in particular this is becoming increasingly more difficult to achieve as the algorithm becomes more complex.

Read the rest of this entry »

by: Steve Gillman

Keyword research is a necessity for doing business online. The best site in the world needs to have decent keywords, or it won’t be found. If fishing enthusiasts are searching for “fishing,” they’ll never find your site on “angling.” However, maybe you can’t compete with “fishing” either. Too many quality sites are already in the search engine results. How do you find keywords that will get you that traffic?

Optimization experts advise comparing demand to supply to find good keywords for your web pages. My experience, though, is that many of my pages with “good ratio” keywords never show up in search engine results, while others that I shouldn’t be able to compete with, are right there on the first page of results. This is because it isn’t just quantity, but the quality of the competition that matters. Supply/demand ratios just don’t give the information necessary.

Better Keyword Research

Here is a better and easier way to do your keyword research. First, Find keywords at the Yahoo site (formerly Overture): http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch. Click on “Keyword Selector Tool,” to see how much traffic a keyword phrase had last month. Get together a list of words and phrase with decent demand. This depends on the nature of your site, but for my own sites, I won’t optimise a a page for a keyword with less than a few hundred searches per month.

Next, go to http://toolbar.google.com, and install the free Google toolbar on your browser. With this you can see the “pagerank” of any web page. This is a ranking between 0 and 10 that Google uses to help determine which sites show up in the results when a search is done. See what ranking your own pages have. This tells you (roughly) how well you can compete against other pages for given terms, assuming you are doing okay with your on-page optimization too.

This also is a guide to the page rank you can get on any new pages you create. If you have a pagerank of three on several of your site’s internal pages, you can probably have the same (with a little time) on new pages. You do this by internally linking to the new pages, especially from the homepage and site map, as well as from any other relevant pages.

To complete your keyword research, type your potential keywords one by one, into Google or another search engine. Click through to the pages in the first ten results, and note the pagerank of each. If a couple of them have a page rank that is lower than that of your existing pages, you can probably compete on that keyword phrase. Create pages that are optimized for these keywords.

If the first ten results have a page rank of 5 or higher, and your own pages are 3, you can’t compete (yet). Sometimes you’ll search keywords with 3,000 searches per month, and 300,000 results, yet the first ten results will have pageranks of 2 and 3. Others with 30,000 searches and 10,000 results will have only pagerank 5 or higher results. Obviously, demand/supply ratios are not all that matters. This is a better way to do keyword research.

About The Author

Steve Gillman didn’t even know what HTML was when he registered his first domain name. Soon afterwards, he was making a good living online. To learn how you can do the same, visit http://www.TenMoney.com.

By Ryan Bauer

Building a website is only half of the battle. The other half is the tough part, getting people to visit. A quality website is worthless without a steady stream of people that can make use of the information (and possibly make you money, depending on the type of website in question).

Never fear though, because we have some great ways to bring traffic to your website. Before you know it, you’ll have more visitors than you know what to do with!

The first point is the obvious one. You’ve got to have a website worth visiting. Quality content that is updated consistently is the key. Ask yourself, if you were just a normal visitor, would you want to visit this website? Is there anything you would find of use? If the answer is no, start by changing that first.

-Linking Up-

Getting links to your site is a great way to achieve quick, quality traffic. It can also be quite difficult, since you have to convince a webmaster that your site is good enough to show their visitors. An easy way, without dealing directly with humans, is to go around and submit your website to free directories. A simple Google search, with some creativity, will uncover thousands of free directories that have categories for nearly everything. These directories are awesome ways to get traffic to your site, as well as influence the search engines a little bit.

The other way to get links is the old fashioned way. Fire up your email client, and send out some emails to the owners of websites you feel would be willing to link to you. Don’t spam sites, but write quality emails to the owners asking if they would be interested in linking to your site. The best kind of websites to email are those with “links” pages, as they are the most likely to add you, since there is already a place for your site to go.

-The Search Engines-

By far the number one tool that people use to find information, search engines are definitely something you want to have on your site. Focus on the big three – Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Forget the rest. The others won’t bring you enough traffic to make it worth while.

The best way to tame a search engine is to get it to see plenty of links to your site. Not spammy ones, because they will discount your site for that, but direct links to your site from high quality websites. Remember, if you want to rank high in search engines, you have to start by going out and gathering links. There is no other legitimate way.

Manually submitting your site to a search engine doesn’t do much, as if you have any number of backlinks at all, the spiders will find your site with no issues. If you don’t have enough links for them to find you, then there is no way you will rank high anyway.

Be sure to have clear titles for your website. Don’t use the same title for every page on your site, make each one a unique, descriptive title for each individual page. This is very important.

Don’t panic if you don’t rank well at first. Most engines, especially Google, have “sandboxes” that they put new websites in for the first few months. You probably won’t rank well until after that period is over.

-Your PR Rating-

Google uses a system of rating websites called PR, short for Page Rank. PR is a score, between 1 and 10, that is given to an individual page based upon the number and quality of links pointing to that web page. When a page with a PR rating links to another page, it “passes on” some of its PR to that page. For example, if I have a new web page, with no PR rating, and a PR 6 page links to it, that page may eventually have a PR rating of, say, 4 or 5. Google uses the PR rating of a page to help decide where to place it on search results for a particular keyword. Keep in mind, however, that PR is not the only factor used in deciding where you will rank with search engines, it is just one of many.

You can view the PR rating of a website by downloading the free Google toolbar.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Hans Hasselfors

So you got your website up and running. You hired an excellent web designer to craft a perfect home page and satellite pages that will really draw in the visitors and inspire them to buy. You have a beautiful catalog of products with detailed descriptions. You have a section dedicated to the services you provide with praises from past customers. And you have the best online shopping cart service out there so that you customers can buy from you with no hassles and next day shipping. That’s great! Now where are your customers?

Driving traffic to your website is a much discussed and much misunderstood venture. There are a million theories out there that claim to drive tons of new visitors to your site daily. There are services that say they will increase your traffic by an enormous percentage if you will only pay them their small fee over a period of fifty years. There are so-called experts who will place your pages on all the best search engines on the net. They claim that with this kind of blanket exposure, your traffic numbers will explode within days.

But the only sure-fire way to draw productive traffic to your website is through targeted marketing. The important word to notice here is “productive.” You can draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site every year by hosting a giveaway of some kind. Services that search the internet for freebies will have people clicking a link to your site like crazy. But these people are not there to buy anything from you … quite the opposite. They are empty clicks. There is nothing productive about this kind of traffic. People looking for free stuff will rarely make you any kind of money. And that’s what you’re after, right?

Read the rest of this entry »