Web design and promotion
Banners have been a major part of the World Wide Web world since its early days. Copywriters burn the midnight oil looking for new designs that will grab the visitor’s attention and compel him to click on their banner. This article discusses some of the most successful banner designs. Read more
By Debbie Campbell
Websites that make their customers work to read them are not the best way to get business. Minuscule fonts, text in colors that make it hard to see against the background color, and lines that are piled on top of each other are problems, but they’re easy to correct. Let’s jump right in and look at five easy fixes:
1. Format your text using CSS.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go – use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler.
2. Make the font size big enough to read.
Consider your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it’s never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn’t have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana.
3. Make the text contrast with its background.
The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colors if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there’s not enough contrast.
4. Give the lines room to breathe.
Don’t stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I’ll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line.
5. Break text up into chunks.
No matter how good a writer you are, people don’t want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that really interest them, or use bulleted lists to change the pace of the writing and slow down the scanning.
And finally (not one of the 5 Easy Ways to Improve Legibility but still quite important) check your spelling. Nothing irritates me more on a web page than spelling errors – it simply makes you look like you don’t care enough to get it right. Use that ubiquitous spellcheck tool.
Making your website’s content more legible is easy. It doesn’t take a lot of time, mainly common sense. The payoff will be text that’s more readable, customers that stick around long enough to get your message, and improved credibility with your visitors.
Copyright 2006, Debbie Campbell
http://www.pageresource.com/zine/cc_5easyways.htm
There are two ways to figure out what your approximate PageRank is. One, you can download the Google Toolbar (the PageRank feature is not turned on by default, so you’d have to enable it after installation).
The other way is to use the Google PageRank Calculator page on this website. It’s quick, free and requires no registration. Check it out. If you have a PR6 or higher, I’ll be very impressed.
Quick recap: Organic search is like free advertising. It’s worth the investment to try and get a high ranking by the major search engines. To rank high you should do two things: First, make sure your site has the right relevant content for the types of searches your potential clients are conducting. Second, try to get the highest PageRank possible. To do this, you need to get as many inbound links from as many high PageRank web pages as possible.
There has been a lot written and a lot debated about Google’s PageRank, but on one point there is near unanimous agreement. PageRank is primarily determined by how many other web pages are linking into you. Google considers this kind of inbound a link a vote of confidence. But, here’s the trick: Not all inbound links are created equal. Web pages with more credibility that link to you have more “value” to your PageRank than those with less credibility. How is this credibility determined? Why, by their PageRank, of course! So, let’s take an example. Lets say you have your Uncle Charlie link to you from his blog to your small business website. Let’s also say that Uncle Charlie’s blog has a Page Rank of 3 (this is being a little generous because all Uncle Charlie writes about is his dog Sparky and he has limited inbound links). This link from Uncle Charlie will certainly help you – a little bit. It will help you more if you can find 100 such Uncle Charlie websites with a PageRank of 3 and get them to link to you.
However, if you get a single link from HubSpot.com (the sponsor of this blog), it’ll help you more than a 100 Uncle Charlie websites. Why? Because HubSpot.com has a PageRank of 6 and a link from it is much more valuable. I divide up PageRank into these broad categories:
0-3: New sites or sites with very minimal links
4-5: Popular sites with a fair amount of inbound links
6: Very popular sites that have hundreds of links, many of them quality links
7-10: Usually media brands (NYTimes.com), big companies or A-list bloggers.
Now, it’s important to note that PageRank is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale. What this roughly means is that the difference between PR4 and PR5 is likely 5-10 times than the difference between PR3 and PR4. So, there are likely over a 100 times as many web pages with a PageRank of 2 than there are with a PageRank of 4. This means that if you get to a PageRank of 6 or so, you’re likely well into the top 0.1% of all websites out there. If most of your peer group is straggling around with a PR2 or PR3, you’re way ahead of the game.
First, let’s establish a simple example which we can use to frame our discussion. Let’s assume you are the partner in a boutique strategy consulting firm. Lets further say that your specialization is advising technical founders of high-growth, venture-backed companies on how to be better at selling. Now, you could probably identify a number of search phrases that your potential clients might use when interested in this particular topic. Users may search for something like “technical sales consultant to founder”. Or, they may just start by looking for content (instead of consulting) and search on “successful technical selling”. In either case, Google has an algorithm that figures out which websites of the hundreds of millions out there should be displayed in rank order on the results page. These are the organic (i.e. non-paid) results. You want to rank high on these results. [Author’s note: If you do actually search Google on “successful technical selling”, you’ll find that my OnStartups.com blog ranks #1].
Though Google’s algorithm is extremely sophisticated, it boils down to something like this:
Search Ranking = Relevance * PageRank
Relevance is basically the measure of how your website (or more accurately one of your web pages) matches the search phrase the user has entered. Measuring relevance is a relatively sophisticated process, but it boils down to some fundamentals like the title of the page, words on the page and how frequently they occur, etc. So, if your home page has things like “technical selling”, it drives up the relevance for this particular search. The reason my blog article is ranked #1 on Google for “successful technical selling” is in no small part because of the title OF ONE OF MY ARTICLES (“Successful Selling Tips For The Technically Gifted”). Basically, Google figures out what your page is “about” by looking at it’s content (and by looking at other sites with similar content that are linking to yours). It then uses this to figure out how relevant you are for a particular search phrase.
PageRank is an independent measure of Google’s perception of the quality/authority/credibility of an individual web page. It does not depend on any particular search phrase. For the public (you and me), Google conveniently reports this as a number from 0-10 (10 being the best). So, assuming for a second that your web page and your competitors web-page has the same relevance – then whoever has the higher PageRank gets the better ranking – and shows up at the top of the results page. This is why PageRank is so important. Your relevance is based on your content (if you’re a consulting company specializing in technical selling, your relevance for stainless steel monkey wrench searches is going to be understandably low). Your PageRank is what counts.
With over 300 million searches made on search engines everyday, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can bring thousands of new customers to your website. Art Dimension, one of the leading SEO companies in North America, provides search engine optimization services tailored to your budget and marketing objectives. We provide a reliable and cost effective way of making your website highly visible to maximize its traffic potential.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and AOL via search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully utilizing a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users.
The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers” or “Search Engine Optimizician”, terms adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, URLs, and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.
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Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and left to right (for left to right languages), looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit a site. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals. A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive traffic to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site’s conversion rate.
In Internet Marketing, conversion rate refers to the number or percentage of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.
Successful conversions are interpreted differently by individual marketers, advertisers, and content creators. To online retailers, for example, a successful conversion may constitute the sale of a product to a consumer whose interest in the item was initially sparked by clicking a banner advertisement. To content creators, however, a successful conversion may refer to a membership registration, newsletter subscription, software download, or other activity that occurs due to a subtle or direct request from the content creator for the visitor to take the action.
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Our Search Engine Optimization techniques and submission process is GUARANTEED to get your website quickly positioned in the top 10 on the leading search engines.
Periodically, the search engines and directories change their algorithms, sometimes minor changes, sometimes more profound – to maintain a high degree of relevance in the results. We work very hard to keep up to date on which techniques work best.
We combine reliable, dependable Search Engine Optimization techniques with correct submissions to the major search engines in order to help our clients achieve their Search Engine placement goals.
Good cost-effective search engine optimization offers a far higher return on investment, than pay per click advertising. Effective search engine optimization combines link building and on page optimizing techniques, when implemented correctly search engine optimization will help your site rise to the top of the search engines using various search engine optimization research techniques.
So let Art Dimension take your website to the top of the page and your business to the top of its industry.
