Every visitor to your website is a potential customer, and whether a “conversion” on your site equals a filled out Contact Us form or a completed online purchase, more conversions equals more business.  So how can you increase conversions on your website? Here are 5 suggestions to try:

1. Make It Clear.
Is your call-to-action getting lost in the clutter of your website?  Make sure that the button or link that leads customers along the path to conversion is one of the most prominent elements on your pages. Try to eliminate distracting bright colors that should be reserved for your call-to-action. Avoid clutter – white space is your friend.  Make sure your call-to-action is the boldest and most attention-grabbing element of your page design.

2. Put It Above the Fold
“Above the Fold” is a phrase that is taken from the newspaper world referring to the valuable, headline news real estate found above the fold of the newspaper.  In web-speak, this refers to the space on a web page that is viewable without having to scroll.  Keeping your call-to-action above the fold helps to ensure that everyone will see it.

3. Red Doesn’t Always Mean Stop
Conventional design wisdom says that the color red sends the message “stop” to viewers.  But Performable.com decided to test that theory on their site by changing their green call-to-action button into a red one.  Conversions on the red button were 21% higher!  That kind of increase warrants at least a test on your own site.

4. If It Moves, It Grabs Attention
This one is a little trickier, since you want to avoid overdoing the spinning, blinking lights (see item #1). However, a subtle bit of movement or animation added to your call-to-action (or somewhere close-by) can help draw your customers’ eyes.

5. Add Human Interest – with Photos of Real People
Having more photos of faces (particularly smiling) is a consistently successful way of catching your visitors’ attention and increasing conversions.  Many different sites have tried adding images of people with measurable success.  For instance, MedaliaArt.com added photos of artists in place of photos of their paintings and made double the amount of sales. CalyxFlowers.com tested images of people with their flowers.  In their test, visitors who saw images with people were 14% more likely to add something to their shopping cart.

Quite often when creating site content a lot of craft and care goes into your copy. Then we simply hope the user will follow the copy to our desired action with a “Click Here” or “Sign Up”. How can you strengthen this call to action? You must persuade the user to follow the set of steps you want them to. It is a difficult craft to master. After all, what is my incentive to sign up, click here, or register?

It all starts a little higher up

Your copy plays a large role in how effective your call to action is. Your copy should explain the point of your product or service quickly. People want to scan and understand. Make sure you explain your offer or incentive clearly – if the user is interested they will want to be clear before taking action. Make sure you use simple words and actionable phrases that remove any objection a user may have. Leave them with no option and in a clear path to take action. It may help you to create bullet points, as this always appears as actionable items, like a to do list.

Keep your sentences longer and your paragraphs shorter. Highlight keywords to help them stick out and with the user. It will help the reader scan and detect what information they find most useful to taking action. Remember that each user will be different, but you can craft a personal message. Try to picture your audience, but speak to the individual. Asking yourself some simple questions about your audience can tell you a lot about the individual.

• Are they familar with your company?
• Do they use the internet often?
• Is this a new product or service, will they be familiar with it?
• Will they be familiar with the type of incentive?
• Are they familar with your industry?

It may seem like answering yes to those questions makes writing the copy easier. But the no’s help you just as much. It gives you a road map for just how much information to give the user. If the answers are yes, you are likely to get away with less information about your product or service on the page, or information about your company or industry. If there are more no’s, then more information will be useful as the user doesn’t want to explore your whole site for more information. Remember: give the user no objection to taking action.

Are you selling them on taking action?

At the end of the day we are all here to make money. Your point of action may be to sell a product or service, but in reality you have to sell them on taking action first. Create an atmosphere of action – people are in a hurry, so make your action noticeable, short, and visually clear.

How to be noticed

Placing your call to action is important. You want to be near related content and placed on the page where the user will see it immediately upon page load and perhaps a little scrolling. Remember that most users will read a bit before taking action. So, where do you put this? This is going to be the fuzziest part of the process. There is no right answer, instead it will depend upon your page layout and things like the user’s window size. Look at your overall layout and identify an area that has prime location based on your copy. Some A/B testing can definitely come in handy for this. Here are some handy tips:

• People read in a “F” shape, across, then down and scan across, and down some more.
  • Use this to lead the reader’s eye to your call to action.
• People identify contrast with importance.
  • Use difference in color or shape to draw the eye to action.
• Imagery only helps as an enhancement.
  • Your action must be clear without the aid of visuals.

Keeping it simple

Your call to action should be short. Aim for five words. If you think it can’t be shortened without losing emphasis, have another set of eyes take a look at it. There is always the option to A/B test two messages. But, how engaging can you be with five words?

Use some things people enjoy to your advantage.

• Be popular, people see success in numbers.
  • “Over one billion served.”
• Provide a safety net, everyone loves a guarantee.
  • “Money back guarantee, you will love our product.”
• Just ask, your user will answer honestly.
  • “Does your golf game need improvement?”
• Be unique, are you an orignal? Showcase it.
  • “No other TV has better color reproduction.”
• New, New, New. People love the next big thing.
  • “Introducing the latest technology to save you MPG’s”
• People can handle the truth, in fact they love facts.
  • “Every week 140,000 hard drives crash in the United States.”
• Use humor.
  • “Let’s get the conversation flowing about our plumbing systems.”
• Give a command.
  • “You should follow us for great news”

Being clear

Making sure that your text is easy to understand and actionable is important. But presenting it is just as important. Creating whitespace around the area is valuable and creates that important contrast. Using colored links or creating a button shape are also great. Using an icon or associated imagery is great if it enhances the message, rather than creating confusion or distraction.  Keep it visually engaging, rather than visually interesting. We want the user to take action. Provide them with the clear path to do so.

If you find that your call to action is lacking try adding to it. The additional length may help you.

Let’s look at : “Does your golf game need improvement?”

v.s.: “Does your golf game need improvement? You should order our guide!”

The additional call to action can strengthen the original. Using A/B testing here again can help you create the perfect storm of action. Testing can help you find the best performing set of copy and action requests, and the investment in testing will reward you greatly.

If you have any questions on creating a stronger call to action, you should get in touch with us!

Every website communicates information to users through text. Headlines grab our attention while cluing us into what the following paragraph is about. Supporting text tells us a story about a good or service being offered, and why we can’t live without it. Given the weighty job that text performs on a website, it makes sense to take care in sculpting its appearance. The following is a quick walkthrough of the different tweaks that web designers (and do-it-yourself website updaters) can use to add readability and impact to website text.

Use an Appropriate Line Length

Paperback books, magazines and newspapers all have distinct column sizes for text to live in. On the outside of those columns is negative white space called a margin that gives your eyes a place to rest while reading from line to line. Having an overly wide text column can create fatigue on the reader as there is not ample space to rest. Conversely, having very narrow text columns also makes sentences seem confusing as the reader has to jump from line to line constantly. Determining an optimal line length for text is more of an art form than a science, and usually is a trial and error process. However, keep in mind that in general the larger the typeface (or font), the smaller you want your number of characters per line to be.

Choose the Right Font Family

Different typefaces (fonts) carry meaning, and should be picked with care. While sans-serif fonts are easier to read on screen, they may not be the best choice for your company’s message. Font choice should try to match your already established branding look and feel, along with effectively displaying your headlines, sub headlines, body text and call outs effectively. Learn more about font choice.

Use a Readable Font Size

The standard font size for print is 16 pixels (1em) which seems large when compared to most websites where 12px text seems to be the norm. It is important to embrace your audience and make sure that your website text is easily legible for them. An older audience (age 40+) will require and expect a larger font size than a younger demographic.  Do a little research into our visitors to make sure you are accommodating their needs. For general body copy guidelines, 10px is too small for most users to read,while 24px seems more like a headline.

Control Line Height

Line height is the vertical space in between lines of words. Line height is usually referred to as leading, a term from actual printing presses where slabs of lead were inserted in between sentences to set the height. Line height aids in readability by having paragraphs, headlines, and sub headlines grouped together with space.

Use Contrasting Colors

Contrast is key to having text stand out and be easy to read. Traditionally, black text on a white background has been seen as the highest, and thus best level of contrast. However, screens are different from printed paper, as they create light and thus seem much brighter and more contrasted. A newer trend is to use a dark grey color on a white background to lessen the stark contrast. Whatever color palette your work from, it is important to have contrasting colors so that all users can see and read your text, including users with old, low-contrast monitors, or visitors with vision impairments like color-blindness.

In this installment of our “Improve Your Website” series, I’d like to focus on one of the invisible elements of your website that can have an impact on your site’s success. I’m talking of course about the creation of an XML Sitemap, which is one of several SEO best-practices employed by web developers in the know to help your site get fully indexed by the search engines, ultimately helping your ranking and traffic numbers.  First I’ll give you a brief overview of what the heck they are, and then we’ll talk about some of the benefits and how to add one to your own site.

What Is an XML Sitemap?

Let’s take a look at the official Wikipedia definition first:

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

The webmaster can generate a Sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. Since Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask use the same protocol now, having a Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have the updated pages information.

As you can see, an XML Sitemap is geared solely toward search engines. Your site visitors will never see your XML Sitemap; it is invisible to your traditional customers and is viewed only by search engine spiders or bots. It greatly improves the ability of the major search engines to index your site, basically hand-delivering pages to get indexed.

What Are the Main Benefits?

If you have an older site that was built before creating XML Sitemaps was standard operating procedure for web developers, you might be saying, “My site is already indexed, why do I need a Sitemap?” Indeed, search engines can and will index your web site without the benefit of an XML Sitemap. However, having an XML Sitemap is like hand-delivering your pages to a search engine tied up with a bow.  It includes additional information that search engines typically “guess” at, like page importance and how often each page gets updated.  Plus, the fact that you are taking the time to generate an up-to-date XML Sitemap signals to search engines that you are serious about your website and getting accurately indexed, which in turn motivates them to rank you higher than someone who doesn’t adhere to best practices.

Most of all though, keep in mind that search engines don’t index your site once and that’s it.  They will return periodically to re-index your site and contents. They look for new content and meta data, interior and in-bound links, and more. Then re-rank you against competitive sites.  If your site has changed, they’ll return quicker to re-index you next time, to make sure their search results are as accurate as possible.  However, there’s no set formula or schedule, and if you have recently re-designed your site or made a major content update after a long period of no activity, submitting an XML Sitemap to the search engines is like a prompt for new indexing that typically takes less 1-3 business days. If you don’t submit an XML Sitemap for indexing, your guess is as good as anyone’s on when the search engines will re-index your content.

So How Do I Add an XML Sitemap?

This is something you can do yourself with a little tech savvy and time.  Or you can engage one of our designers to take care of the task for you. Typically, the whole process will take a web designer around 30 minutes, but it may take you longer the first time around since it potentially requires setting up three new accounts.

Do-it-yourself Instructions:

1. Use a free program to generate your XML Sitemap (like, http://www.xml-sitemaps.com), then save the file. If your website has more than 500 pages (which can happen on sites with inventory or other dynamic content), you’ll probably need to buy a program.
2. Upload the new file to your website using FTP access. If you do not already have a username and password, contact your web host’s technical support. The file should be copied to the root directory.
3. To submit your XML Sitemap to Google, you’ll need a Google Account.  (You can create a free account if you don’t already have one.) Using Google’s Webmaster Tools, you’ll first need to verify that you are the owner of the site by adding a second file generated by Google to the root directory of your site. Once they verify that you’ve uploaded that verification file, then you can submit the URL of your XML Sitemap for indexing. For more info see: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
4. To submit the file to Yahoo!, you’ll need to follow a similar procedure. For more info and to get started with Yahoo! see: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
5. To submit to Bing, you’ll have to prove you are owner of the site once again.  You can get started here: http://www.bing.com/webmaster

Photos can play an important role in delivering your website’s message, whether you are trying to persuade the visitor to buy your products or services, or simply trying to educate them on important information. By using photos thoughtfully, you can support the text on your page and deliver a stronger message.

Using photos to tell your story

There is a reason why people say “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Sometimes a photo can convey a message faster than text. This is important for websites, because you only have a few seconds to convince online visitors to stay and browse your website more. The faster you can present your information, the better!

Can you guess what this website is for without being able to read it?

Take a look at the image above. Even if you can’t read Japanese, it’s apparent from the main photograph that this is a website about education. The photo of three people studying in a library delivers that message before you even have a chance to read about the university. And since the subjects in the photo represent their target demographic (young adults), the photo also immediately reassures the visitor that they would be welcome at the university, and would fit in with the rest of the students.

Here is another example of using photography on a website:

Moo uses photos to explain what they do

MOO is a printing company that prints your photos on different types of cards. On their about us page, they chose to explain what they do with a small graphic: Your photos + our company = a stack of custom printed cards with your photos. It’s a simple way to explain their business, and much more memorable than a few paragraphs of text that explains the same message.

Using photos to grab attention

Photos are great tool for grabbing a visitor’s attention. You can place photos on your website near important information and links to draw their attention to that area. If it’s an interesting photo, that will make the visitor want to read more.

The CNN.com website uses photos to highlight featured articles

The new CNN.com website uses images to highlight important stories on their homepage. You can see how the stories with photographs catch your attention more than the links without images — simply because the photos are visually more interesting than paragraphs of text.

Using photos to break up text

It’s no secret that visitors want to read less online. Articles based on “Top 10 lists” are becoming increasingly popular, and some even choose to get news in a format that limits text to 140 characters. People browse websites quickly, and generally don’t want to spend a lot of time reading long passages of text.

The Nook product page on www.barnesandnoble.com

So what do you do when you have a lot of information that you want to present?

You can make a long article look less daunting by adding photos throughout the page. The photos help divide the text into smaller pieces of information, which makes the page look less time-consuming to read.

Barnes & Noble uses photography to spice up the product page for their new e-Reader, the Nook. There is actually quite a bit of text on this page (over 450 words), but instead of listing all the features in one long article, they divide it up in smaller sections with product photos. By breaking up their information this way, it looks like there is less text on the page, which means it looks easier to read. The photos also help to illustrate each of their features, which make a more memorable and attractive features page.

Using photos in your own website!

So if you have a photo-less website, now is the time to change that! Whether you have a website for your service business or trying to sell products online, using photography will create a more pleasant experience, and will encourage your visitors to spend more time on your website.

One of the most important parts of creating a website is designing it to be user-friendly and easy to navigate. With the billions of websites on the internet, users have plenty of choices when it comes to online shopping, entertainment, or anything else they are looking for. If they don’t like something about your website, they can easily find an alternative with only a few clicks of the mouse.

Here are a few tips on what you should avoid on your website, so your visitors don’t look elsewhere:

1. Spelling and Grammar Mistakes

This might sound like a no-brainer, but the internet is filled with misspellings and bad grammar. It may not be as important in a personal email or in an online forum, but it’s important for a business to represent itself professionally. Take a few minutes to reread your text or use a spell checker before updating your website.

2. SHOUTING

In addition to using correct spelling and grammar, be sure to use uppercase and lowercase letters properly.

It is very difficult to read large portions of text that are written entirely in capital letters. The shape of lowercase letters are designed for instant recognition to make reading easier. By typing in all caps, the reader has to put in more effort to read your website. Typing in all capital letters is also commonly seen as yelling.

3. Underlined Text

It has become an internet standard to style links as underlined text (most commonly as blue underlined text). Because of this convention, website visitors can instantly recognize which words on your website are links, like this text here.

Did you try to click on that last bit of text? It looks like a link, but you don’t realize that it’s not until you hover your mouse over it. When words that aren’t links are underlined, your website visitors become frustrated.

To avoid confusion, links should be the only underlined words in a website. There are many other ways to emphasize words without underlining them. Try using one or more of the following ideas to make important text more prominent:

• Make the text larger
• Change the color of the text
• Make your text bold
• Use italics for emphasis

4. Splash Pages

A splash page is a simple, introductory page that appears before a visitor can reach the actual website content. Often this page requires the visitor to perform some type of action, such as clicking “enter” or choosing whether to view the website in HTML or Flash.

Although there are a few instances where a splash page is needed — such as choosing your language for an international website, or confirming your age for an adult or alcohol-related website — adding a splash page will irritate your visitors. Internet users have very little patience, and making them wait through an animated intro or making them click through unnecessary pages only hinders the user from finding the information they are looking for.

5. Music & Sound

Do not force your website visitors to listen to music. Many website visitors find sounds and music on a website annoying, and will immediately go elsewhere. (Don’t believe me? Check out the thousands of Google results for the phrase “I Hate Websites With Music”.)

Here are some other considerations as to why you should not use sound on your website:

• The user is already listening to their own music
• The user is in a library or office where sound is discouraged
• The user likes to open multiple tabs when browsing the internet, and has to search through all the tabs to find where the noise is coming from
• The user simply does not like the song that is playing

If you do choose to have sound on your website, at least make sure there is an obvious way for the user to turn it off so they can continue to browse your website noise-free.

Your Turn!

As internet users, we all have come across websites that we find annoying or difficult to use. Share your website pet peeves in the comments below!

Not every font that is installed on your computer can be used on your website, because not everyone that views your website has the same fonts installed on their computer as you. In an effort to keep websites looking similar between different browsers and operating systems, web designers can choose from certain fonts that are “web safe” and reliable.

To make your website accessible to all users, it is highly recommended that you only use the following “web safe” fonts. To help visualize both Windows and Macintosh font renderings, I have placed the Windows version in black next to the Macintosh version in blue.

Serif

Serif fonts are one of the oldest font designs and feature serifs or “feet” to finish their strokes, like in an uppercase T. While serif fonts are regarded as easier to read in print because the serifs lead your eye across each letter, they are not recommended for website body copy. They are usually used in websites to convey authority and age, like in many newspaper and legal websites.

Web Safe Serif Fonts

Sans-Serif

Sans serif have no serifs, sans is French for without. Sans serif fonts are recognized as being easier to read on websites, and thus are the most popular choice for body copy.

Web Safe Sans-Serif Fonts

Monospace

Monospace fonts have the same exact width for each character and space, usually based on the width of the uppercase “M”. Monospace fonts are used on the web to display code snippets so that it is recognized as different from the body copy.

Web Safe Monospace Fonts

Calling Website Fonts

Through CSS, you are able to call a primary or intended font along with a substitution, and finally a font type so that your web site can display as designed even when the proper fonts are not available:

font-family: { "Times New Roman", Georgia, serif }

Translation: Display Times New Roman, if not found, then display Georgia, if not found then display the default serif font.

Here is a complete list of web safe fonts to choose from:

• Arial
• Arial Black
• Book Antiqua
• Comic Sans*
• Courier New
• Georgia
• Geneva
• Impact
• Lucida Console
• Palatino Linotype
• Tahoma
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana

* Please note: listing Comic Sans above was in the spirit of full disclosure. NetSource’s designers do not intend to endorse the use of Comic Sans in any way…

Testing your website pages, especially landing pages and sales pages, is one of the simplest things you can do to tweak your web site and attain higher conversions. In addition, you can learn more about content creation, as well as your customers’ interests, through testing than by any other method.

Back in the days of mail order marketing, testing sales letters and catalogs gathered more useful information about new ideas than most other methods of research. In the Internet era, testing has become an order of magnitude less expensive – and can deliver data that’s even more statistically reliable. Using a method called “split testing” or “A/B testing”, you can serve up different versions of a single page to segments of your website visitors to see on which page they spend more time,  fill out the form, click on the “more info” button, download a file, or more. And through the use of affordable testing software and statistics packages, you can get full reports and analyses.

What Should You Test…?
You can test whole-page concepts to find out what emotional triggers your market responds to. Simply test two or three versions of your sales page that each focus on a separate theme or idea about your product or service. Perhaps one focuses on price and value, while another emphasizes customer service and reliability.  The page that pulls the most conversions will give you the answers you are looking for.

What should you test? The simple answer is: Everything.  Everything on your pages and in your sales message contributes to your conversion rate. This includes your headline, opening paragraphs, body copy, your offer, post scripts, background color, font, font colors, images and every imaginable component of your page in between.

Volumes of information have been written about what to test and how to test your web pages. This work is extensive, so when you begin to test, I suggest you concentrate your first efforts on the three areas that have been shown to have the most impact on your sales pages: the headline, the first few opening paragraphs, and your offer. Today, I’ll focus on the easiest testing ’subject’: Your site’s headlines.

Website Headline Testing
Headlines can have the most impact on your conversion rate and response of these three above mentioned components. A number of user studies indicate that nearly three-quarters of your site visitors will never read past your headlines – unless you make those headlines appealing and relevant. It doesn’t matter how wonderfully you may have written the rest of your sales page – if the headline doesn’t do its job of getting people to read on, your entire website will be a failure.

In order for your headlines to be effective, you have to discover the biggest core desires within your market. The best headline tests are based around the different motivations that drive people to become interested in your products or services.

Testing different headlines around different concepts will tell you which one is more appealing to your target audience. Once you have the key concepts and motivations tested and you have discovered which one works best, you then go to work tweaking your headline in more persuasive ways.

Test as many headlines as you can think up for your web page. In fact, you should never stop testing different headlines on your page. A simple 10% increase in your conversions could result in hundreds or thousands of dollars more in business sales. Testing your headlines could bring an increase of 50%, 100%, or even 200% or more in the response to your online message.

…or How a Blog is Like a Puppy

Blogs are the new “it” internet technology. All the cool kids have one. And everyone seems to be buzzing about all the great things they can do for you:

• Build organic traffic from search engines
• Establish you as a trusted authority in your field
• Build buzz for new products and developments
• Serve as a communication tool between your company and your customers

All of that is true, but if you don’t consider all the responsibilities that come along with your brand new blog, it may just come back to bite you…

Warning #1: Don’t forget to feed your blog
This is the most important thing you need to remember, so I’m going to repeat it: Don’t forget to feed your blog. What I mean, of course, is make sure you feed your blog a steady diet of new articles and content. Nothing is worse for your image online than an empty site, because essentially you’ve tempted a visitor with information, then wasted their time with a useless click. When people see that you haven’t added anything new in 6 months (or more), they assume you just don’t care and will move on. In addition, search engines only like blogs when they have actual content.

Warning #2: Pay Attention to Proper Nutrition
By proper nutrition I mean keywords and key phrases. In order to get the most out of your blog’s search engine benefits, be sure to work from a master list of keywords and phrases that are valuable and relevant to your offerings. Then make sure the content you feed your blog (articles) are chock full of keywords. No, I don’t mean keyword stuffing… don’t overfeed your blog. But wherever possible, make sure the text of your articles focuses on particular keyword themes.

And by all means don’t feed your blog empty calories by posting unrelated content. Keep all of your postings relevant to the keywords and phrases you are trying to optimize for.

Warning #3: Every Blog Needs Love and Attention
As I’m sure you’re beginning to understand, the building of your blog is just the beginning. Once it is launched, your work has just begun. Someone will need to maintain the blog in order to get the most out of your investment. That might be someone in your organization, or it could be your web developer or marketing team. If you are planning to update your blog yourself, make sure you are being realistic about the time and energy you have to spare, then set a schedule and stick to it. Be sure you have a plan beforehand and are ready for the responsibility, both in time and recurring expenses.

Here at NetSource, we maintain our blog and feed it a steady diet through a concerted team effort. Each designer and programmer writes one article per month. Our sales associates contribute items on a more frequent basis. We have a single editor who proof-reads and schedules articles. We have a second team member who writes all of the website launch press releases. In all, the team likely expends around 6 hours in any given month toward the upkeep of the blog.

In closing…
Before you build your blog, be sure you’ve set out your expectations and have established your plan for ongoing updates. In this way you’ll ensure a happy, healthy and productive blog for years to come!

In this installment of my “Top Ten” tips to better Search Engine Optimization, I’ll be reviewing “10 Things to Avoid When Optimizing Your Website”.

SEO isn’t easy! Let’s just call it what it is, Hard and Time Consuming. A major mistake that a lot of people make, in an attempt to make things easier, is looking for short cuts to optimize their website. Many of these shortcuts provide short-lived result, but can harm your rankings in the long run (or even get you black-listed from search engines!). This is where I like to refer to a couple of old sayings to help remind people to stay focused:

-          “If it’s worth doing… It’s worth doing right!”

-          … and, “If it’s too good to be true… then it probably is!”

Keep your eyes on the prize folks! Don’t let other people take advantage of you and your business. Avoid bad neighborhoods, link exchanges and farms, don’t keyword stuff and… well… just keep reading, and Good Luck!

1. Avoid Bad Neighborhoods

Basically, a bad neighborhood is a website that uses any unethical techniques to help increase their ranking in search engines in general. So don’t link to websites that utilize any of the tactics that I’ll be listing in this article, and don’t let them link to you.

Caveat lector: While you have control over who you link to, it is often difficult to get your site removed from a link farm if it has simply added your site on its own. If you find that your website has been added to a directory of questionable character, check to see if there is a “Remove Link” button, or try sending an email to the site owner. Beyond these options, your choices become much more expensive and time-consuming.

2. Don’t Use Link Exchanges or Farms

You may receive an e-mail from another company asking if you will provide a link to their website in “exchange” for them providing a link to yours. Nine times out of ten this is a “Link Exchange,” and it provides no purpose except to try and increase the other site’s Page Rank and Link Popularity. Unless the other site has relevancy to yours, this is deceiving and malicious in intent.

Link Farms have the same purpose only on a greater scale. Links farms target companies with relevant content (real estate agent websites are a big user of this technique), and ask them to include a list of a number of other “out of state” companies that are generally in the same field. In return all of those companies will return a link to you giving you multiple links (farm links) from a number of different websites with relevant content. There was a time when this could work, but that was long ago (in a time far, far, away). This technique is viewed as deceiving and with malicious intent.

3. Don’t Keyword Stuff

Keyword Stuffing is self explanatory, but for those of you that are new to SEO… let me explain further. Keywords are words that you will expect people to find your site with when searching with a search engine. For example, if you have a website that is selling “chocolate truffles” you don’t want “chocolate truffles” to appear in every other sentence. That is Keyword Stuffing… don’t do it!

4. Don’t Use Cloaking Techniques and Doorway Pages

Cloaking and Doorway Pages are similar, but I’ll attempt to explain, in a nutshell, what they do:

-  Doorway Pages… are “keyword stuffed” pages that are set to redirect to another page. This other page is the real page that is meant to be seen, but is poorly optimized. What happens is that the search engines end up indexing the keyword stuffed page. Before you go thinking this is a great idea let me explain that search engines are “hip” to this and have been for years now, although they may sometimes not catch it right away they eventually will and when that time comes around you can expect to be banned from their index. (Note that Doorway Pages are NOT Landing Pages.)

-  Cloaking… is when your website detects who is visiting your website (search engine bot or real person) by the IP address. If your site detects the IP to be a search engine bot then it redirects it to a keyword stuffed page. Otherwise it will take the real person to the real home page of the website. Again… once you get caught you can count on being dropped from that search engines index.

5. Don’t Use the Same “Title” and “META” tags throughout your Website

When you are developing your website hierarchy it should be obvious that each page will tackle a different topic. Therefore it should go without saying that your Title and META tags should be unique from the others across the site as well. Unfortunately this is a big oversight that a lot of people make, because they don’t want to be bothered with the tedious task of keyword research for every page, and then developing more copy for the META description tag as well as the perfect Title Tag and META keywords tag. Well I’m here to tell you folks… it’s worth the time. But don’t make the mistake of using this as a place for keyword stuffing… keep the stuffing for the turkey and use these places to lay down your targeted keywords to help search engines better index your website’s pages.

6. Don’t Use Hidden Text

Ummm… Don’t use hidden text. What’s hidden text? Hidden text is when you put text somewhere on your website that is the same (or similar) color as the background color it’s sitting on top of. For example you place white text over a white background. Why not you say? Well think about it… you won’t be able to read it because it’s white on white. So you can’t read it, but guess what… the search engines can. So what some people do is use this technique to keyword stuff thinking that because visitors can’t see it then it must be ok. Right? Wrong! Once again the search engines are well aware of this Black Hat Technique and it’s only a matter of time until they find out if you are doing it.

7. Don’t Use Frames

Yeah… Don’t use Frames! For those of you still living in the 90’s, don’t you think it’s time to update that website? There are many reasons not to use Frames, but I only need one. Search Engines have trouble indexing pages with Frames… That’s enough for me… Don’t use Frames!

8. Don’t Forget to Optimize Your Images

Make sure to optimize all of your images for your website. One of the factors that search engines take into consideration is the overall download speed of you website. One of the main contributing factors to this is the size of your photos. There was a time in web design that anything over 30k was considered suicide, but nowadays with faster internet connections it’s considered great to be under 200k (80 – 150K is optimal).

9. Don’t Forget to Check the Download Speed of Your Finished Site

Hey! Check your download speed to make sure you are within the limits that you pre-determined for yourself. There are many free tools available on the web to test this, just Google “website speed test” and pick one. This isn’t simply courtesy for your potential website visitors (which is a good enough reason to me), but search engines also penalize web pages with excessively large file sizes and slow download speeds.

10. Don’t Believe Everything You Read About SEO…Except for this of course!

No, really. Everything I have listed here are things that need to be avoided at all costs if you want your website to rank high in the SERPs. But don’t just take my word for it. Do some research and find out for yourself. What you’ll find is that there is a lot of information out there that people will claim helps you, but until you try them it’s hard to know if they’re right or wrong, “Black Hat” or “White Hat”. That’s where NetSource Technologies comes in to play.

NetSource has spent years developing “White Hat” procedures that will help your websites reach specifically targeted audiences on the internet. Audiences who are relevant to your products and services will always bring your website a higher ROI. So if you find that Search Engine Optimization is a little too much for you to grasp, let our experts at NetSource Technologies Inc., take care of it for you and sit back and watch your ROI increase.