Toronto Website Design & Web Design: August 2007

Monday, August 27, 2007

Website Accessibility - Proper Navigation

A very important point to consider while designing a website is proper navigation. You must ensure that potential clients or customers are able to find the information they are looking for without too many clicks. As a quick rule of thumb, visitors to your site should be able to visit all your pages by using, at most, 3 clicks.

Read The Full Article Here:
http://www.ekonline.com/web_design_articles/article4.html

Friday, August 24, 2007

Choosing An Effective Website Colour Combination

An aesthetically pleasing colour scheme can make or break your website. After all, in advertising, colour accounts for 60% of advertisement's acceptance or rejection. Therefore, colour plays a pivotal role in determining whether or not a potential customer will choose to conduct business with your firm. A web designer needs to ensure that all of your website’s colours work in harmony, while keeping the client’s identity consistent with other marketing efforts.

Read The Complete Article Here:
http://www.ekonline.com/web_design_articles/article2.html

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Keeping Your Website Simple is Most Effective

Most web designers make the mistake of using extravagant, but slow-loading graphics and Flash animations. These elements may make a website visually impressive, but neglects a large percentage of Internet users who have dial-up connections. Potential clients and customers are not going to wait 30 seconds to a minute for your home page to load up; they’ll soon be using their browser’s “Back” to get back to Google’s search results and find a competitor who has a more user friendly website.

Read The Whole Article Here:
http://www.ekonline.com/web_design_articles/article7.html

Monday, August 20, 2007

How to Choose a Domain Name for Your Business

A website’s domain name (also know as a website address or URL) is an important consideration when developing your online presence. Choosing an appropriate domain name is the first step in the process of building online credibility. Remember to choose carefully because this online address may be where your business resides for the rest of its operating life.

Read The Rest of the Article Here:
http://www.ekonline.com/web_design_articles/article1.html

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Secret is Out - How Google Ranks Websites

All the secrets and information is about to be unleashed. The mystery is over and the secrets are open to showing you how your website is ranked through Google

Links have always played significance in determining sites value. Links pointing towards your site help evaluate the value of a document. The more links pointing towards something of significance is shown as a greater value. Though, search engines continue to add some additional standards to always keep ahead of the game.

In the precise years, the amount of incoming traffic or links have reached higher results, but a additional twist has been rather or not the incoming traffic is quality and benefit searchers. This kind of action was becoming very popular, with a lot of black hat seo tricks which made it harder for searchers to find what they were looking for. And the end result was poor quality for search engines.

Due to this kind of action, a trend of long lastly domain names and sites playing more of a factor in quality and links. Search engines have picked up on this idea, and are starting to track the age of a not only a domain, but always so what content the site holds. This factor is stop the idea of building a website one day, and the next day to have hundreds of links the next. Search Engines are looking for more natural link building instead of automatic computer generated links.

The idea of age with the mix of lasting good quality history of content and links are helping fight against the spam sites. Spam sites can be built in seconds with hundreds of links, and could be up and running fine one day and the next day they are completely gone. The less life or age of a site that has been up and running on the Internet is not very interesting to the search engines these days.

Search engines are monitoring how long the site has been up and running, the quality of good content, is it helping people information that they are looking for, and the process of adding valued links. Over time and as your website grows you will also want to continue building different titles for your links.

Over time search engines will frown upon the same old text in a link. The idea behind this is the fact that no no is actually adding or changing new titled links. For example, hotel rooms is repeated over and over, and is not changed over time this will decrease. Search engines are looking for the new and fresh content, so the idea of changing titles or link anchors is highly recommended through the years. Ideally, it's suggested to add keywords and keyword titles in your link anchors using some of the 5 -7 keywords. This helps keep clean, focused traffic and ranking.

So for the keyword hotel rooms we could add other keyword titles such as:
* cheap hotels
* discount hotels
* hotel reservations
* hotel rates
* hotel deals

This helps keep things focused on hotels and hotel rooms while adding a great mix of different keyword titles. To be successful these days and at
the top of search engines you must stop thinking today of instant links, link spam, and creating instant traffic and start thinking long term slow building process.

Major Roles are Still Niche of Keywords

The placing of keywords through out quality content is the best way to go. Picking the proper keywords to be placed on your pages, links, and tags are still a very vital play in your websites success. Again, freshness is mostly what search engines update so with this in mind continue to check and change keywords throughout your site. It has been suggested by several search engines that 5% to 7% keyword density per page. Also, don't get to many keywords per page, it's all about targeting and focus one or two similar keywords.

Continue to Update Regularly

The question here is when was that last time your site has been updated or changed? If the answer is over a month than you have your work cut of for you. The original idea again is long term process, so it's not making site with all this content from the start and just letting it sit and do nothing. It's slowly adding and building information over time.

The search engines are looking for a website that is fresh and that will stay fresh. So for example you update your site with 20 new pages at the beginning of every month, but don't touch until next month. This type of behavior is picked up by the search engines and may not be keep your site stable. Though, where a site is adding content on a weekly or daily and is keeping content steadily coming this could be seen by search engines as stable. Slow and steady wins over the search engines.

Experts have stated in the past that trying new keywords or updated content goes a lot farther than hit or miss changes to your website. Put yourself in a Internet user, do you continue to visit the page that never changes are you visiting the sites that update with news, information, and etc. Which one do you feel is more appealing to visitors and search engines? Though, the idea of updating and changing your old pages makes it fleshing to your visitors.

Now don't get us wrong and go changing all your old out dated website pages. While your website is drawing pretty good traffic and continues to increase that's a great sign that you’re doing the right thing. What's not broke don't fix it. Though, if you have notices this page or that page slow decreasing than it might be time to do some keyword adjusting or a fresh update.

Domain Age

This is a new and fresh idea that domain age is becoming more appealing to search engines. The idea is coming from long, quality, process of building a great site.

Search engines are looking and liking more and more consistency even in the domain name. With this suggest don't be completely afraid to change your websites domain name. Though note that this is a new factor that search engines are going to be looking for more. Also, look into special rates of long term domain registration, and this could save you some money as well. Lastly, note that changing hosting has no effort on any search engine ranking or anything.

Word Press Tip

Here are two easy and piratical ways of building quality links while using word press.

1.) Link to Me Text box plug in - this is a simple word press plug in which gives visitors the option to link to your website, this is a great way to get you more links and even higher ranking in the search engines.

2.) Setup Links Manager so that your blog roll links will change. That's right, this is a simple step to take in adding uniqueness to your blogs.
Adding these two features on your word press blog will continue to build that process towards link building that the search engines are looking for.

CTR

CTR or click through rate, plays another aspect of what search engines record and add into the overall ranking of your website. To fully understand CTR is number of times visitors actually click through to your website. This type of information or the CTR helps determine how you come to visit the website. Meaning did the current visitor type in a keyword from a search engine and than click to your website, or was it from a link from another site, or etc. Also, CTR is always looking for new and fresh content and what is being visited the most.

Visitors Behavior, Traffic Record, and YourselfVisitors coming back around or not are always checked. Search engines are always checking how much time is spent on your website, where did your visitors come from, are your visitors clicking through sites or ads, and bookmarking your site. Along with what popular searches or keywords are your visitors typing in to come to your website.

Traffic is recorded telling search engines which websites and pages are drawing your visitors.

But “yourself” also plays a key role in determining how successful your website will be towards the search engines. For examples, does the site information match up to the information that you added on the domain registration? The geographic of our site could help your focus target.

Have you ever had or checked into making sure your IP host address is safe and not being shared with any slammers. That's right, more and more slammers are coming along and if they happen to be on your IP host address this could penalize your site as well.

Looking professional is a must in aspects of spelling, grammar, organization, and good solid code or CSS design are all a must for success.

What's Hot and What's Not

Search Engines are becoming smarter and smarter, and now even following what's hot and what's not in our culture, our searches, and etc. Such as, What's Hot right now is "American Idol" and yes still "Sanjaya", or it's now currently the NBA playoffs. Though these are only fads or trends in our culture. So if your website is dealing with spring or summer fads or treads, note that come winter your site could be a little slower. Yet, incorporating keywords that will add quality to your site, and are of trend or fad could add popularity and character to your website, but just don't over do it and keep them up to date with current trends.

List of Site To Submit Your RSS Feed

www.aspin.com/
www.bloogz.com/
www.daypop.com/
www.daytimenews.com/
www.devasp.com/
www.dummysoftware.com/
www.feed24.com/
www.feedage.com/
www.feedbomb.com
www.feedcat.net/
www.feed-directory.com/
www.feedfury.com
www.feedooyoo.com/
www.feeds2read.net
www.feedsee.com/
www.feedsfarm.com/
www.feedsubmitter.com/
www.free-rss.page2go2.com/rss-add.htm
www.genwi.com/
www.goldenfeed.com/
www.help.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/my/cgi_rss_submission
www.jordomedia.com/
www.millionrss.com
www.morenews.be
www.plazoo.com/
www.postami.com/
www.rssbuffet.com/
www.rssfeeds.com
www.rssfeeds.com/
www.rssmicro.com/
www.rssmotron.com
www.rss-network.com/
www.search4rss.com/
www.strategicboard.com/
www.technorati.com/ping/

9 Ways to Increase Traffic To Your Blog

The following article from:

http://www.invesp.com/blog/sales-marketing/
9-sure-ways-to-increase-your-website-traffic.html

• Get with the program: start blogging! So if you haven’t noticed yet, everyone is blogging. Big companies, small companies, and professionals at every level have taken on blogging, and so should you. Don’t think that your line of work or your organization doesn’t require a blog; if you have a website, you need to blog! It’s such a great way to drive a natural traffic to your site. People will begin to link back to beneficial posts and may refer friends to check out your site. Don’t underestimate the power of a blog.

• Don’t write regular posts: Too many bloggers think that posting short 100 words blogs is enough to get readers interested and to keep them coming back. I have to admit I was guilty of that when I first started blogging. Although there are no rules about the length of a post, what matters is that your posts are intriguing enough to create a faithful reader base. Most successful blogs will publish at least one lengthy and well researched post per week. Some call these lengthier posts “pillar posts” because they are a pillar to establish a great blog.

• Establish Strong Social Media Connections: Well there isn’t much point to blogging if you haven’t established strong connections with other bloggers, forum members, and users of social media sites. Why is this so crucial? Because great content is not enough; you have to market that content. And social media marketing is probably when of the best ways to market your content online. So remember:

The more you comment on someone else’s blog, the more likely it is that they will comment on yours.
The more you participate in forums, the more you encourage people to visit.
The more you link to other blogs within your own entries, the more bloggers will link-back to you, thus helping you generate more and more traffic to your site.

• What about Articles? Usually blogs can range from 200 words – 1500 words. Those entries are very valuable for ranking well within search engines because of the new content you’re offering. However, writing SEO articles is a valuable technique as well. SEO articles are keyword rich, useful content that can be designed to target specific words and phrases that you would like to rank for within search engine queries. This can help generate a lot of natural traffic for you. Additionally, you don’t always have to publish these articles on your site: consider article submissions or notable online magazines. The amount of link-backs you will receive, in addition to the recognition of publishing on a worthy site will help double and triple your traffic in no time. Article publishing sites use to work very well couple of years back but I believe that search engines discount the authority of these sites to a great extent nowadays. So the real value is not in these sites themselves; it is one someone picks up an article from these sites and publishes it on his own site or forum. I know we got couple of good clients when our articles were published on web pro world.

• Make it easy to subscribe: Once you have an RSS feed to your site, you can easily expect people to subscribe to your blog, thus generating more traffic. Of course, be weary of partial vs. full feed because this will impact whether or not people will continue to subscribe to your blog.

• Give them a reason to come back: Offering a valuable resource such as a whitepaper is a great incentive to get people coming back and referring others to your site. If you have the capability to write a whitepaper that is going to offer valuable information to your community and/or client base; than write one and offer it as a download. If you are just starting out, offer your whitepapers for free. Most websites require visitors to subscribe to your site before downloading whitepapers. That can work very well in building up a mailing list.

• Can I trust you? Nobody likes to subscribe to, our visit a site that seems fishy. If you want to get more people coming to your site, you need to show that them that you value their privacy. This can happen through simply stating the importance of their privacy, become a member of authentic groups, and placing the icons of your memberships throughout the site.

• Winning something: If you want a surefire way to get you publicity throughout the web, then hold a contest and offer prize money or some material reward. Our $400 blog contest generated tons of link backs from other bloggers as well as a ton of traffic to the site. People love it and will come flocking to your site, write about you, and give you lots of link love.

• Widgets and more…: There’s no secret that if you offer something valuable on your site, traffic will come. And online tools do just that! You’re offering something free and useful to online visitors, and as a result you become bookmarked, referred to, linked to, and even mentioned throughout the web. But please, no more calculators and calendars. If you want good ideas for tools, visit any forums and see what people are actually looking for!

So, let’s come up with an action plan:

If you have not started blogging, then plan on installing a blogging software in the next three days!
Come up with a list of 20 blog topics that you can write about. At least 5 topics from your list will be lengthier posts of 1200 words or more.
Select two online forums which you will start participating in regularly. At a minimum, you should post in each forum once a day. Your comments should be meaningful and enhance the discussion on the forum.
Select 10 different blogs that write about something that interest you and start reading and commenting on them regularly. Just like forums, no spammy comments. The goal is to establish real relationships with bloggers.
Come up with a list of lengthy articles that will be of interest to your client base. Plan on publishing one article per month.
Come up with a list of authority sites in your field that accept article submission. Contact these site to understand what editorial guidelines they have for publishing articles
As you go through forums and blogs, be on the look out for ways to create tools. If someone is complaining about a problem that does not have a real solution, that might your first tool.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

PageRank Being Replaced???

According to sources close to Google, the reason for a huge delay in the PageRank update this quarter can be attributed directly to the new algorithm used to judge the quality scores of websites. This new algorithm is taking longer than normal due to server overload.

Its also being reported that after receiving numerous feedback regarding the “uselessness” of PageRank from webmasters they will be releasing a new set of variables that ranks websites and assigns the number we all know as PR.

The information I’m receiving is the new name will be “WebRank” moving forward rather than the typical “PageRank” that most people know it as. The variables that I’ve been told place more weight on:
1. Content
2. Links to the Site
3. Relevant Sites Linking to

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

SEO Glossary

The following is a glossary of SEO related terms:

Adwords - This is the Pay Per Click advertising program offered by Google.

Adsense - Contextual advertising by Google. Website publishers earn a portion of the advertising revenue for placing Google sponsored links on their site.

Algorithm: The search engine program that ranks sites based on certain criteria. Google has over 100 different ranking criteria that sites need to meet.

Automated Submissions: Services that use a web based tool or software to submit sites to search engines, free for all pages, and directories. CM SEO does not recommend using these services, these submissions can be viewed by the receiving party as spam.

Bid for click: A search engine under which you bid for your site to be ranked under a keyword. See Pay Per Click (PPC) and Paid Placement (PP).

Code: The background code that runs a web site. As well as HTML, this can include, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, JSP, Coldfusion and more.

Click popularity: a measure of how often a listing presented by a search engine is clicked. Some search engines and directories will rank a site higher on their results pages if the site proves to be popular among searchers.

Cloaking: also known as "stealth," involves serving a specific page to each search engine spider and a different one to human visitors. In most cases, frowned upon by search engines.

Comment tag: html code that describes or documents content. Most search engines ignore the content of comment tags.

Dead link: An Internet link which does not lead to a page or site. This usually occurs when a server is down, the page has moved, or it no longer exists.

Domain: A sub-set of internet addresses. Domains are hierarchical, and lower-level domains often refer to particular web sites within a top-level domain. The most significant part of the address comes at the end - typical top-level domains are .com, .net, .edu, .gov, .org.

Directory: directories are built from submissions made by website owners, and generally arrange site listings hierarchically. Yahoo! is the best known example.

Doorway page: a web page created solely to achieve high ranking in search engines for particular keywords, and perhaps for a specific engine. Today's doorway pages should contain valuable and useful content related to your site, and be fully linked to the site, and so are often referred to as "information pages."

Dynamic html: web pages generated on demand by data in databases or using similar technology. Can create ranking problems because a search engine's spider may not retrieve relevant content.

FFA Site: A so-called "free for all links" page, which is created for the sole purpose of compiling links. Submission software or companies that claim to submit your site to hundreds or thousands of "search engines" actually use these for most of that number. FFA sites are essentially worthless in terms of generating traffic, and links from them will count nothing towards your site's link popularity. Basically, they're a waste of time.

Frames: Some sites have pages that are made up of multiple HTML pages. Typically the navigation will be on one page and the content on another. You can tell if you scroll down the page and the navigation remains static. Frames are bad for a sites search engine promotion

Hand Submissions: A service to develop appropriate titles and descriptions for submission to directories, search engines, and advertising sites. The submission is often unique for each directory, being sure to be compliant with all guidelines. CM SEO always offers hand submissions and has great success in getting relevant listings in appropriate directories.

Hidden text: Text that is visible to the search engine spiders but not to site visitors. Used to add extra keywords in the page without actually adding content to a site. Most search engines will penalize Web sites which use hidden text.

Hit: In the context of visitors to web pages, a hit (or site hit) is a single access request made to the server for either a text file or a graphic. If, for example, a web page contains ten buttons constructed from separate images, a single visit from someone using a web browser with graphics switched on (a "page view") will involve eleven hits on the server.
In the context of a search engine query, a hit is a measure of the number of web pages matching a query returned by a search engine or directory.

Home page: The main page of a Web site.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language): The coding language that all Web sites use to exist on the Internet.

Hyperlinks: Hyperlinks are used to link one or more documents together.

Impression: A single display of an online advertisement.

Inbound link: Links that direct users to another Web site. When a user arrives at a site from another site, that link is known as an inbound link.

Informational page: a content-filled web page created to focus on particular keywords. Differs from a "doorway page" in that is wholly integrated into the site and is useful to human visitors, while a traditional "doorway page" is aimed only at search engines.

Invisible text: using a font color the same or close to the color of the background of a page, in an attempt to allow the content to be indexed by search engines while not being visible to humans. To search engines, this is spam.

IP delivery or IP-based delivery: the technique of serving a particular page in response to a page request from a specific IP address. Used in cloaking; a search engine is identified by the IP address it is using, and a page customized for that search engine is served.

Keyword: A word used to find pages when conducting a search.

Keywords: Due to abuse by many Web sites in the past, search engines have reduced the importance of the keywords meta tag when ranking a Web page for keyword relevance. Many have actually decided to not consider the keywords tag altogether. While it has reduced in significance, it is still an important meta tag to include in your Web pages.

Keyword density: Keyword density is the ratio of a keyword or key phrases to the total number of words on that page. Keyword density is one of the most critical aspects of successful search engine optimization.

Keyword phrase: A phrase used to find pages when conducting a search.

Keyword frequency: Keyword frequency is the number of times keywords occur in the text on a given page. Search engines want to see more than one repetition of a keyword in your text to make sure it's not an isolated case.

Keyword prominence: The general location of a keyword or phrase in relation to the overall text on that page. You'll want to make sure your important keywords appear early in your Web site copy and that they draw attention to themselves.

Keyword research: Researching the most relative and popular keywords for a given site.

Keyword Spamming: Deliberate repetition of keywords in a page by using invisible or tiny text to increase keyword density. This is banned by search engines.

Link popularity: Search engines often use link popularity as part of their ranking criterion. In simple terms, link popularity is the measurement of the number of other Web sites that include a link to your Web site on theirs. Each search engine, depending on their specific algorithms, determines it differently.

Link analysis: a measure of the quality and relevance of the set of links pointing to a given site; contrast with link popularity.

Link Farms: sites created and maintained solely for the purpose of constructing links between member sites. Should be avoided as a violation of most search engines' policies; their use won't build your site's link popularity, and may result in a ranking penalty.

META refresh tag: automatically replaces the current page with a different one within the website, or possibly offsite. In general, use of refresh tags is discouraged or penalized by search engines.

META tag: html tag in the header section of a web page, intended to offer content to search engines. Among them are the keyword and description tags, but these days most true search engines de-emphasize or completely ignore META tags.

Mirror sites: Sites designed as duplicates of an original site, but are hosted on a different server. Link cloaking and doorway pages, the creation of mirror sites is a recognized spam tactic and violators will be penalized by many of the major search engines.

ODP - Open Directory Project: The largest human edited directory on the Internet. The Open Directory provides listings for free but only for qualified sites and because editors are volunteers, wait times can be lengthy.

Outbound link: A link to a site outside of your own.

Page Rank: See also Link Popularity. A numerical rating of a site developed by Google as part of it's algorithms for determining search engine listings. To view page rank requires installing the Google tool bar in your browser. Yahoo also utilizes Page Rank calculations.

PPC: Pay Per Click. This is an advertising option in which the advertiser has typically a small textual ad on a search engine site and pays only if a user clicks on the link in the ad.

PFI: Pay for Inclusion. This is a fee charged by a search engine to be spidered on a periodic basis to be included in the search engine results. Yahoo has a service that is a combination of PFI and PPC.

Reciprocal link: An exchange of links between two sites.

Relevancy: how closely related a particular page is to the search term requested.

Re-index: How often a search engine updates its index. Google updates its index once a month.

Reputation: related to link popularity, a page will score highest for reputation when it is linked to by pages from other sites which themselves are highly ranked. Well-known sites recognized as "authoritive" are given high reputation scores on their own; it's for this reason that a link to your site from something like cnn.com would be very valuable.

Search engine: A search engine is a database system designed to index and categorize internet addresses, otherwise known as URLs (for example, http://www.yourdomain.com).

Search engine marketing: encompasses several forms of marketing products and services on the internet through management of information presented by search engines and directories. Included are such elements as site optimization, and the purchase and placement of advertisements.

Search engine optimization (SEO): These are the techniques used to improve a Web page's results in a search.

Search engine positioning: the process of managing a page or site's positioning in the search engines.

Selective delivery: the technique answering browser's page request with a specific page selected via an automated process based on some piece of information gained from the browser. For example, reading the browser's language setting may allow a page in that language to be served. Similar to IP-based delivery.

SERP: A "search engine results page," the page of site listings that a search engine returns in response to a user's entry of a search query. Often used in discussion of the way such a page is laid out, for example: "Overture listings are the first sites presented on Yahoo's SERPs."

Spam: as it applies to search engines, any attempt to submit or place deceptive information, or to "trick" the search engine into placing a page in an inaccurate position.

Spider: A software program used by search engines to crawl the Web, storing URLs and indexing the keywords and text of pages. Spiders are also referred to as crawlers or robots.

Stop word: common words, or words considered by search engines to be irrelevant, are left out by search algorithms. Examples are "and," "the," etc. Generally, a stop word in a query is treated as a "wild card;" that is, the returned results usually won't be exactly the same as if the word had been left out of the query entirely.

Theme: a relatively recent change in search engine ranking algorithms, theme-based engines essentially try to determine what a page is "about" — and to compare it to other pages that seem to be related to the same topic — and rank it highly for certain keywords that are determined to be related to that page theme.

Traffic: The actual visitors to a Web page or Web site.

Unique Visitor: A real visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site. If for example, someone visits twenty pages within a web site, the server will count only one unique visitor.

URL: The Uniform Resource Locator is used to specify the address of Web sites and Web pages.

Word stemming: a practice used to some search engines in which searches will return results for words based upon a particular stem. For example, a search for "develop" might return pages containing the words "development" or "developer."

Toronto Website Design & Web Design