Web design focuses on appearance and aesthetics. SEO focuses on text quality and quantity.

Web designers don’t really like to clutter their designs with text. They prefer to see the images stand out on their own. SEOs on the other hand don’t like images that much. Sure, an image can be optimized for the search engines by adding relevant alt attributes and titles, but this is not enough for a site to be properly optimized. Page copy still plays the most important role in website optimization for SEO.

As a business owner you are caught in the middle of this conflict. For your website to convert you need both design and optimization. There is no middle way. You cannot have a little bit of this and a little bit of that and still be competitive. You cannot have just one of the two either. Without optimization your site is invisible to the search engines, hence to your potential customers. On the other hand, without a good design your site, although not invisible, will get nothing but hits. Web users are picky and if they find nothing of interest on your site they will just surf to the next site.

When you pay for web design don’t automatically assume that by paying thousands of dollars on a layout you’ll be a hit on the Web. The Web is a highly competitive place. There are already thousands entrepreneurs who, just like you, invest in design and hope to become the new “it.” Without online marketing (SEO being an important part of the discipline) all these entrepreneurs will remain in the shadow, with their beautiful websites closed to the world.

SEO is the key to that virtual door you need to open for your customers. It is important that you consider this tool when you first conceive your site. Web design and SEO don’t need to be enemies. There are enough professional agencies that employ both web designers and SEOs who work together to develop a good business website, a site that is SEO ready, accessible and readable with any browser. You just need to take your time, research and send a few inquiries. Then balancing content with visual appearance shouldn’t be such a difficult task. Aside graphics and artwork you have to choose proper font types, in a readable size, with colors that harmonize with the layout of the site and so on. If your site is not SEO ready from the first stage of the project you’ll face additional costs after you launch. SEO ready means a site that is properly coded (errors in the HTML code might stop some search bots from crawling and indexing your site correctly), with good navigability and good internal linking structure.

On the other hand, SEO and appearance are not the only traits of a good site. Brand conscious companies should look at the broader picture … instead of debating what is better online entrepreneurs should ask themselves what works best to convert visitors into clients.

Studies show that an over optimized page might hurt the user-experience of people with disabilities. For example, many SEOs stuff the image alt attributes and their alternative titles with keywords. Blind and other visually impaired people who use screen readers to access the Web and read the pages cannot see the images and, instead of listening to a relevant image description, they\’ll hear… nonsense.

Usability and accessibility are equally important as design and optimization. Strangely enough images are better for usability. They give focus to the design and when properly optimized they provide for less cluttered website content. The problems appear when the images slow down the loading times, but with the use of CSS loading times should not be a big concern.

As search engines prefer fast loading sites it is easy top understand why good coding and optimization are so important. Poor coding raises many other problems aside loading times and might increase costs when you need website updates, especially when your website administrator is not the one who created your site.

It is a fact that links have always been a vital part in the Internet navigational process. Depending on the links and also on the content of the site that the link leads to, Internet users decide on the worthiness of coming back to that site or not.

One cannot fail to notice the latest trends imposed by web 2.0 - the emergence of a new writing genre designed to cater for the new needs and tastes of internet users and also the transformation process that search engines undergo.

Broadly speaking, users go from page to page selecting only the most important information or just the information that is easier to spot; they need to be able to make a quick assessment of the page content, get the information they are seeking and go to another page.

Usually, web authors employ hypertext links to create or reinforce concepts: a list of related links can serve as the focus of a site. The problem posed by links has little to do with the web but is rather related to the concept of hypertext. A collection of links does not have the same effect on the reader and is not as legible as conventional linear text.

In the case of linear text, readers have to work harder in seek of needed information. Links also become a technical problem, because most web pages have a certain rank on search engines due to links. Links are to be used as a reinforcement of, not a substitute for content.

What is worth mentioning when tackling the link issue is that designers are supposed to use relevant link labels, give consistent click ability cues and also differentiate links that have been clicked from those that haven’t.

1. Use relevant link description
Users’ confusion must be avoided at all costs. In this respect, they should be able to look at every link and be able to predict to some extent the destination or the website they are about to visit. A negative example in this case is using the label - Click here-, which is rather confusing and does not provide any kind of information about the link destination.

Another relevant case is that of embedded links — when employing embedded links, the link text should accurately designate the link’s direction. Users have a certain tendency towards ignoring the text surrounding embedded links; consequently, it is recommended that you should not create embedded links that use the surrounding text in order to provide hints about the link’s destination.

2. Be aware that textual links
do have certain main characteristics like: underlining and color.
The second trait is not as important as the first one, i.e. underline can be eliminated in some cases like the one when an area functionality is absolutely obvious - for instance, we could think of a site menu where everybody expects a content summary as a presentation.

Thus, you should provide users with sufficient clickability cues. Trying to put the cursor over different parts of the page is time consuming and not quite “affordable” with a view to gain more traffic. At the same time, it’s worth keeping in mind that there area certain clickability expectancies regarding different regions of a web page; for instance, items on the center, left, right side have a high probability of being links.

3. Use different colors for visited and unvisited links
Links that were clicked must differentiate one way or another from the ones that were not; the best way of doing that is the color contrast; links are supposed to stand out on the computer screen as much as possible; in this respect, bright, vivid colors are preferable - links should differentiate from linear text in any case.

Conversely, links that were already clicked should employ a rather pale and “washed” color. The effect of using different colors but both at the same level of chromatic intensity might result in a failure to establish a concrete content relationship between those links, users won’t be able to tell visited from non-visited links.

Even though some compromises would be acceptable (like using other colors), using blue for text is an exception. Blue is a color with the most notable perceived affordance of clickability.

4. Colors for text are to be avoided
It is recommended that colors should be used for hyperlinks only. Nevertheless, there are generally recognized and allowed colors for certain words such as red for “error” or green for “ok”. Technically speaking, when referring to document colors, it is advisable that you specify all of the colors (BGCOLOR, TEXT, LINK, VLINK, ALINK), to ensure an enjoyable and legible composition. Find out more about choosing the right colors for your web site.

The main reason reinforcing this idea is that some users may have certain colors set as default, so if you don’t specify all the colors of a document, they may end up with an illegible document. In addition, even when using a background image, you should still specify BGCOLOR, because the user may not have the image loading on.

5. Don’t use “special effects” when the cursor hovers over a link
As previously clarified, underlined text is the most obvious hint that the user deals with a hyperlink. Still, there are some particular cases when you might not employ underlined text for hyperlinks without major loss in usability. For instance, you could indicate clickability only when the user hovers over a link - let’s say that a text gets underlined only after being hovered, as a sign of clickability.

Nevertheless, using bold effects is not advisable due to the prospect that the text might realign. On the contrary, other effects like link titles could prove quite successful in creating a useful website (in terms of navigational usability). Not until recently, users had a lot of trouble because they weren’t aware of the direction of certain links. In order to respond to the users’ needs, some browsers included in their features a slight preview of the link direction. The effect of this inclusion was a notable reduction in users’ disorientation. Therefore, you shouldn’t miss them when providing a hyperlink; also, they are quite easy to add.

6. Ensure that the text is big enough and that the links are not too close together
Internet users should reach a certain destination voluntarily, not because of the fact that due to link size they missed to click on the link they wanted. This rule might be skipped in the case of legal information in which people are not so interested. At the same time, this advice should be given due consideration in case some of the people targeted belong to the third age.

7. Be sure to make important content accessible from more than one link
Setting several ways to access the same information will certainly help users to find what they need. Different users might attempt different ways to find information, depending on their own interpretations of a problem and on the layout of a page. Some users find important links easily when they have a certain label, while others may recognize the link best with an alternative name. Read more about how can you gain site accessibility.

8. Employ text links rather than image links
By and large and as mentioned before, text links do have a greater perceived affordance of clickability. Text links usually have a faster download speed, are preferred by users, and should change colors after being selected.

Even judging from a technical point of view, it is usually easier to place a link’s destination in text, rather than using an image. In many situations, users demonstrated considerable confusion concerning whether or not certain images were clickable.

9. Employ sensible link lengths
Hyper links should be long enough to be understood by users and short enough to minimize wrapping. Generally speaking, it is advisable that links do not have a grater length than one line. As far as this issue is concerned, studies showed that when users scan prose text, links of nine to ten words do have best performance.

10. Try to warn visitors in case they leave the page
It is best for internet users to be able to realize when they are going to leave the site and head for another. Generally, users expect, when given a link, to head for a new page that belongs to the same site. In case this does not happen, they will become confused. So, the bottom line is that, when building a site, people should take into consideration the prospect of giving visitors warnings when they would leave a certain site.

11. Provide links on your website to helpful information
It would improve navigation on your web site, if you were to give hyperlinks to further definitions, explanations or descriptions. So the main purpose of these links would be to clarify certain concepts so that less experienced users can successfully use the web site.

12. The problem posed by reserved characters
This is a rather technical problem: certain characters are reserved and need encoding in a hexadecimal format in order to be used as URLs. Some browsers may show these characters properly anyway, but this is not indicative of the fact that these characters should be used without encoding in any browser.

For instance, spaces are seen as special characters and consequently, they should be encoded. By and large, it is recommended that you should avoid the use of characters that may require encoding. At the same time, another problem that might cause some trouble is that of URL case sensitivity. It is recommended that you make them case sensitive from the beginning to avoid changing them when you move from one server to another.

And…
…don’t forget that this could turn into a major downside for your site if this rule is missed. You should keep in mind that grouping related links in a certain section is of vital importance.

It seems that when visiting a web page, most screen reader users expect at least the main site navigation menu presenting the main sections of the web page before the content of the page.

There is little evidence to support the idea that screen reader users would rather have the content presented first. It is highly desirable however, to present the content of the page before extraneous information, such as advertisements and related links, as well as the page footer.

Viral Marketing For Your Business!

Creativity.

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

Yahoo Search Marketing

Overture or now known as Yahoo because of Yahoo’s takeover, was the original inventor of the use of the P4P or Pay for Performance. Overture saw that the internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in the arena.

To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo Search Marketing provides a service that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted.

Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume this could still be a substantial figure for your company.

Getting a consistent substantial flow of website visitors is every company’s goal. Many methods are devised and utilized to ensure that there would be more people to boost the sales and to be aware of the existence of such a product or service. Website visitors are potentially the life blood of your internet based business.

Yahoo Search Marketing utilizes the same principle as Google’s Adwords. In fact, they are very similar to each other that they use keyword and keyword phrase searches and to determine which ads to show per search. When a person types in a keyword or keyword phrase to search for anything, the search engines gives out the results in a page. Then at the right side of the page, you will see selected ads that have paid for their ads to be viewed with certain keywords and keyword phrases searched.

For example, Lets say you run a car parts retail/wholesale site. You choose keywords that can prompt or trigger your ads to be shown in the page when a keyword is searched. When a search engine user types in Honda Accord, your ad may come up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. You don’t need to fully optimize your site with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

While some labor so hard to make their site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search, you get the chance to be on the top of the list or at least in the first page of a search result increasing your chance to be clicked on. With that, you drive traffic and website visitors to your site a lot faster.

You will have to pony up some cash when using this service though. There are different ways Yahoo/Overture will charge you. It may be in the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or in the many times your ad is clicked on. Others offer many other services like having your ad show up not only in the search engine pages but also with some third party sites.

Third party sites support ads that have the same theme or niche as them. With more areas your ad is shown, you increase the chances of people knowing about your site or product. With more website visitors you increase the sales of your site which makes your investment with your ads a wise one.

With so many competitions in the internet based businesses, it is necessary to take a huge leap forward from the pack by advertising. Yahoo/Overture will be a great place to start. Many have utilized their services and have reaped the rewards of this decision. It’s a marketing strategy that will increase your website visitors as well as increase your sales resulting to profit.

It takes money to make money, while there are some methods that are basically low cost or free, using a marketing service such as what Yahoo/Overture offers will provide results faster and on a larger scale. Many businesses have learned this the hard way, don’t be counted with them.

Google Adwords Traffic

The biggest well known secret in generating wealth in the internet based business or e-commerce is Traffic. Everybody knows it; every site wants it and every site needs it. The point of websites is to be visited and viewed. Many elaborate designs, money and countless hours of developing a site to make them beautiful and attractive are utilized. Without traffic, it is for naught.

With traffic comes a potential customer which basically means sales which in turn means profit. While many sites have collapsed in the past with the downturn of many internet based business, many smaller sites have generated good money by concentrating on a certain niche and some subniches.

This is a reason why e-commerce site laser target certain groups of people and drive them to their site to showcase their sites and products. Precision marketing is essential so that you could count on all the traffic on your site as potential customers.

Using Money to Make Money

It’s a common business notion that if you want to make money, you have to spend money. One good way of spending money for business gain is through advertising. Advertising brings in the people because through advertising, they know that there is such a company or product in existence. With the right type of advertising, you can see the spurt of traffic growth to your site. With a high volume of traffic, even if only a small portion or percentage turns out to be buying customers it is still a good average of profit generating income.

Right now, there is no other advertising scheme that would be worth every cent than using Google’s Adwords. The surge in popularity of Google’s Adwords is very evident as you can see so many sites sporting this ad scheme.

In using Google’s Adwords, you pay a certain fee depending on the number of keywords your ad is keyword sensitive to. Each time a person does a search in Google, the keyword or keywords use generate ads in the side of Google which are generated by the keywords they have assigned for their ads.

This method laser targets the traffic a site wants for their site. This also ensures that you are readily visible in the first page of a search result. Paying Google for this ad scheme ensures that your target group of people sees your ads. You drive your laser targeted traffic to your site which provides for their needs and wants. You can also be sure that you can meet their demands and needs.

Aside from Google, you can also be featured in their other search networks, these includes sites like, AskJeeves, AOL Search and Netscape. These sites also show Adwords ads that react to searches done by visitors. There are also content networks, non-search engine sites that feature Google Adwords, which will also carry your ads. But this is subjected to the niche the site features. Your chosen keywords will determine which content network shall feature your ad. The frequency of your ad shall also be determined by your allowed budget.

Laser Targeting your Traffic

To get a good number or estimate of the traffic to buying customer ratio it is good to laser target your traffic. Knowing that your traffic are all potential customers and are interested in your products and company provides you with a more accurate statistics. This will show you how effective your utilizing of Google Adwords is.

Drive laser targeted traffic to your site by using keywords or keyword phrases for your Goggle Adwords that pertains to your company and to your products. There are many online internet tools that can help you in choosing keywords and keyword phrases that are currently in demand that could help drive laser targeted traffic to your site.

With your Google Adwords ad, you are ensured that every click to your ad is a potential customer that is precisely looking pr interested in what you have to offer. Make sure that your Google Adwords ad has the right keywords so that you can drive you’re laser targeted traffic to your site.

Using Google Adwords to help boost the drive to increase laser targeted traffic will prove to be very beneficial as many other companies can attest to. The benefits are high with the cost relatively justifiable.