10 Tips To Effective Search Engine Optimization, Submission And Promotion

 

1. Make sure your website is tested for good load time, dead links and cross-browser compatibility. Netmechanic.com is a good website to do this.
2. Optimize you web site pages by making sure your top keywords appear in your title, meta tags and content.
3. Make sure you provide quality content that have something unique to offer and that have keywords or key phrases people might search to find your site.
4. If you sell products, give something away free (The word “free” is one of the top most searched words on the internet).
5. Build quality links to your site pages from other well ranked sites on your target search engine.
6. Make a list of your top keywords and key-phrases and track your listings/ranking in the top 10 search engines and analyze it periodically.
7. Submit to top directories there are many directories out there that list websites in their related categories – Just find the top ranked ones and submit your pages under related sections.
8. Make sure your web site looks attractive and easy to use with clear navigation and easy to read layout and fonts. This is especially useful for directories as manual approval is required for them.
9. Keep up to date with the latest in SEO by reading through articles, forums and related guides – remember SEO requires a lot of time and patience. You have to keep working on it.
10. Keep your website focussed to cater to your visitors needs – don’t throw in a free-for-all links program or forum to just attract traffic – in the long run this will pay-off as you website will be recognized for what it is.

10 Tips on designing a fast loading web site

 

Tips and tricks on effective web design

The Number 1 rule that every web designer should follow is to create a fast loading web site. You might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. While designing a web site always think about how long it will take to load. Try out our tips to build a great looking web site that also loads fast.

1. Minimize the use of images -

 The key to a fast loading web site is to minimize the use of images. Images do enhance a page but don’t make 80% of your web site only images. Instead break it down as much as possible to simple HTML. Notice the popular sites like Yahoo, Google, Ebay, Amazon etc., they have very few images because the load time is more important. Very often simple designs are the best.

1. Optimize images for the web

 - Once you have decided on the images that you need on your site, make sure that it is optimized for the web. They should be in the gif or jpeg format. You can also minimize the size of the image by choosing the number of colors you need, from the color palette. The less the colors you choose, the less the size of the image. You can also use online tools like Gif Wizard to optimize your images or to get a recommendation on how to cut down the size of an image.

1. Use Tables creatively

- You can get some great looking designs by using tables creatively . Tables load very fast because it is just HTML code. Tables can be used in the homepage, menus or anywhere you like. Check out our homepage and our menus to see how we have used tables in our site.
Read more on Using HTML Tables Creatively

1. Cut down the use of animated gifs

- Don’t use animated gifs unless it is necessary. Animated gifs take a long time to load and can also be very irritating. But since they catch your attention you could use small animated gifs to draw a visitor’s attention to a particular section of your site.

1. Design simple icons -

 Instead of using big, bulky images use simple and small icons that add a little color and draw the attention of a visitor. We have used small icons in our homepage to highlight the main sections of our site.

1. Use background images instead of big images whenever possible - Use background images whenever possible. This is usually a very useful tip for headers and footers. Instead of using an image of width 580 which is a uniform design you can use just a part of that as a background fill. This reduces the size of the web page as the image is small. The code will look like this : <tr background=”/images/header_backgroud.gif” width=”100%”>
2. Try out CSS Styles - Have fun with CSS styles to get some cool text effects. Again, a CSS Style is simple HTML code so it loads very fast. You can create cool rollovers using CSS Styles.
   Rollover the text on the right menu to see how we have used CSS Styles to get a simple but nice text effect.
   Check out our CSS Styles tutorial for more cool tips on CSS Styles
3. Use Flash sparingly - There seems to be a lot of hype about Flash but I recommend that you minimize the use of Flash on a site. Don’t make entire sites using Flash. It may look great but it takes hours to load and can really put off visitors. If you do want to use Flash use it within an HTML site and make sure it loads fast.
4. Design most of your site in HTML - As much as possible try to design your site using HTML. You can create great designs by just using HTML code. Use tables, CSS Styles and simple fonts to design your site. Minimize the use of animated gifs, Flash, bulky images etc.
5. Keep checking your load time - Last but not least, before you decide on the final design of your web site, check its load time on NetMechanic. This site gives you a free analysis of your web site which is extremely useful. We kept using it to improve our site till we got a report that said good loading time!

We learnt these tips while building our web site. We’ve enjoyed sharing them with you and hope that you found them useful.

Hits Explained

If you think the term hits means the number of people who visit a website, you’re wrong.

You’re not alone. Most people have no idea that hits are meaningless. A “million hits” does not mean that a million people visited a website. It doesn’t actually tell you anything at all about the volume of traffic — the real number of visitors could be close to a million or it could be less than a thousand. There’s just no way of knowing.

This page explains in simple language what “hits” really mean. See the links on the right for more detailed information about web statistics.

What Are Hits?

A hit is a request for one file from a web server. For example, if you request (i.e. visit) a single web page which contains only text, the web server will send you that page as a file. This process is called a hit.

1 File Request = 1 Hit

In the early days of the Internet, hits were a reasonable way of tracking how many pages were viewed. Each page was one file, so hits equalled page views (more or less).

The problem is that in today’s Internet, each page is typically made up of multiple files. Each time you request a page you receive a whole bunch of responses — each of which counts as a separate hit.

1 Page Request = Multiple Hits

It is quite common for one visitor to generate dozens or even hundreds of hits during a single visit.

Clearly hits are a gross exaggeration of the number of visits, but it gets worse. Because websites are designed so differently, there is no common baseline for determining how many hits an average visitor generates. If a website uses 25 icons in their navigation menu, it will generate a lot more hits than a site which uses a single image file. This makes hits absolutely useless when it comes to reporting traffic volume.

How Can Visits Be Measured Properly?

Unfortunately there is no accurate way to measure visits but there are certainly much better ways than hits. The standard method is to use a software application which analyses lots of different statistics and makes an estimate of the number of individual visitors.

The number of visitors is called “visits”, “unique visits”, “uniques” or “sessions”. There are other terms as well but these are the most common. We recommend using the term “visits” as it is intuitive and descriptive, and more likely to be accepted by the general public.

Why Use Hits if They Are Inaccurate?

It’s a legacy problem. As hits slowly became less accurate, no-one wanted to stop using them because everyone else was still using them. It is hard for one webmaster to say they get 100 visits when another webmaster with the same traffic is reporting 10,000 hits.

There are three types of people who still use the term hits:

1. People who don’t know what it means.
2. People who want to make their website seem busier than it really is.
3. Server administrators, who actually do have genuine reasons for knowing the number of hits (it’s technical).