Creating an Effective Online Portfolio: 40+ Tips, Tools & Inspirations

Creating an Effective Online Portfolio: 40+ Tips, Tools & Inspirations

Creating an Effective Online Portfolio: 40+ Tips, Tools & Inspirations

Nowadays, everyone is getting rid of the paper trail. Everything is now done digitally: commerce, accounting, advertising, marketing, shopping and even design. Every freelance graphic designer should now own an online portfolio. If you don’t have one, or worse, if you don’t know what it is, you have absolutely no chance of making it in the world of graphic design.

This article will teach you how to build a solid and effective online portfolio, guide you through the best online portfolio tools available , and then show you a few awesome portfolio themes and sites for your inspiration.

Read the full article here!

http://designerwebsites.us/

Responsive Web Design: What it is and How to use it

Many of the clients now in days want the new version in their mobiles of their web sites. We have been increasing year after year for example we went from the Blackberry, iPhone, the iPad, netbook, kindle all screen resolutions have to be compatible too. In the next few years we are most likely to have more and more inventions. It will never stop.

The new devices that are coming are so hard to keep up. When will it stop? For many of the websites is really hard to get the web site in the mobile. Many companies are just asking them selves if they should stop the competition and just loose visitors.

The design changes according to what kind of device their using. For example the iPad wouldn’t look the same as blackberry. In other words the websites should know how to function with each device.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/

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Successful Tips about how to Create Engaging Social Media Content

There is many ways to be involved in social media, but not all of them may be easy.

You see many people just want too be in the social media to be around the crowd, but not all of them are willing to commit to what they promised. You see when you promote your brand you want to make sure that what you are promising will be true. Make sure you are loyal to your fans/followers.

  1. Know the voice of your brand – You want to make sure that you give your costumer a funny, recognizable, bro- ish posts that will make your brand successful
  2. Know your target market – You want to know who will be interested in your advertisement. People want weird cool things, on specific cities and nationwide.
  3. Solve Problems – Their people out their that they may need the help or the guide so you should help them so they wont have a hard time. That’s they key that leads to customer service success in social media.
  4. Time is of the essence – You should be able to write back to your client when they ask you a question. The reason is because you want to be aware of the chatter going around you. There’s app’s that you can use which are completely free such as tweet deck, hoot suite or even Facebook and twitter.
  5. Use your head – Excel can be very helpful for the social media this way you will not bored your fans with posts updated at the same time.
  6.  

Think outside the box. Find your voice and run with it. Success will follow soon

http://www.jacobtyler.com/creative-blog/2011/01/11/find-your-voice-tips-for-creating-engaging-social-media-content/

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Strength in Emails

Where do you mostly spend your time in on the web? If you think it might be some social site it isn’t. Chances are that you mostly spend more time on your email more than anything.
It has come to Google and Yahoo! attention that they should spend time on social networks. Google and Yahoo! already have a lot of the stuff that Facebook and other social networks have. So why not just make it a social network?

Yahoo! plans to create an inbox 2.0. This version of the inbox automatically determines how often the relationship is between the person who is emailing and instant messaging. It will sense how often you interact with the other person and will put it as a more important message than the others waiting for you.

Source: http://www.smartbiz.com/article/view/2323/1/58

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Even Forbes gets a Penalty from Google

The Forbes website has recently been notified by Google as having “possibly artificial or unnatural links…pointing to other sites.”

The act of Selling Links is a black hat SEO practice looked down upon by Google. The purchaser of those links gets to buy “Link Juice,” – the increased probability of getting more clicks from users, generating increased ranking in Google search results by having a presence on an established site.

Forbes admits to selling links through a partner for some time in the past, though they have begun making significant changes and removing those links in late 2010. Some of those changes include a revamped site architecture, and no purchased or “artificial or unnatural” links on their pages.

Source: SE Round Table

Web Site Marketing Strategy Hints And Tips

Your web site marketing strategy is the essential factor that determines the success or failure of a business web site. This is true whether your web site is an extension of an offline business, or you run an completely online business. Web site marketing is unlike any marketing you may have done using other media.

However, marketing your web site on the internet shares many common core marketing foundations that underlie your marketing efforts regardless of the media you use. I am a strong believer that for a small business, all marketing should be based on the old direct marketing mantra of attention, interest, desire, and action. In this article I am going to discuss those aspects in terms of how they are crucial in marketing your web site on the internet.

Regardless of the media you choose, nothing will ever happen if you don’t attract the attention of prospective buyers. This is one of the very basic tenets of successful marketing. On the internet, this concept is evaluated by the traffic that you receive on your web site. But there are a lot of factors that affect how much traffic you get, and only part of it is the actual content of your web site. There are two ways you can get attention in any media: you can earn it or you can buy it.

All the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) show up two different types of results when a customer uses them.

The most relevant results based on the search algorithms used by the engine are called ‘free’ or ‘organic’ since they are the natural result of running a search.

The second type of result are actually paid advertisements, and they can be very difficult to distinguish from the results that are actually relevant to you query.

It is important to keep in mind that no matter how good the engine, the results are still hit or miss. It is a computer program sorting web pages based on mathematical formulae, not live people helping you select the best results, so as a person hoping to be indexed, you must be willing to put the time and effort into checking how you rank on the major engines and tuning your word choice to optimize that. If you can’t make it onto the first (or second at the very least) page of results, your traffic will drop dramatically! Most people don’t bother to wade through the hits on the pages after that. Even second-page ranking will hurt your ability to attract new users.

One of the most effective ways to increase internet traffic is buying some form of advertising. One of the most pervasive forms is banner advertising. Originally, these were very popular forms of advertising, but as they became more prevalent, their effectiveness waned. They can still be effective as long as you have a clear marketing strategy and are able to track your advertising statistics.

Text advertisements are probably the most common form of internet advertising today. Google has paved the way, and if done correctly, your internet traffic can multiply quickly by using Google ads. MSN and Yahoo also offer text advertisements on their sites. One downside to text advertising is that the cost can add up fairly quickly, depending on how many hits you receive for your ad. Each time a searcher clicks on your text ad, the provider charges you a set amount. Another way to increase traffic to your site is to buy traffic from someone who has an e-mail contact list or has a lot of traffic on their site already.

Any approach to publicizing your website or portal must begin with the aim of grabbing attention of the web surfers and internet addicts. To grab attention, you must deliver your message to surfers on websites they frequently visit. You can publicize your website by doing the hard work yourself or by availing expert help, or a mix of both.

Doing it yourself means you will have to commit your time, energy and money. It might sound daunting but ultimately proves to be cheaper as well. Availing expert help can get your results without eating your time. To set the cash registers ringing, it is suggested that you develop your own mix of both ways suited to your own needs and resources.

About the Author: You can get more information about Business Marketing at http://www.BizRave.com. Eric Menzies writes about Search Engine Marketing Firms and other topics.

Deciphering Web Analytics

By Matt Jackson (c) 2007

Want to optimize your online sales? Improve your understanding of your target market demographics? Need to improve your marketing ROI? What right minded webmaster or online entrepreneur doesn’t, right?

Your web analytics are your gateway to measurable success and provide a lot more information than most people give them acknowledgment for. Yes, they track the number of visitors you receive and indicate your most and least popular pages. However, they also guide you towards your best performing keywords, the countries that provide you with the most active visitors, and essentially provide you with a blueprint of the exact steps each visitor takes on your website.

Armed with this kind of information you should be able to improve the overall perförmance of your website and your online business. You can also improve your marketing efforts, enabling you to concentrate on the more effective, and ignore the least effective.

Keywords, Search Engines, And Popular Landing Pages

For many sites, the search engine is the leading producer of traffíc. An SEO campaign can produce excellent levels of highly qualified leads with comparatively little spend. The key to a good SEO campaign, though, is to continue the optimization process.

Good analytics packages provide detailed information that is vital to your SEO campaign. You can view a líst of the keywords that visitors have used in order to find your site. This information can be used to identify those keywords that are providing the most traffíc and any that can be improved upon.

By reading the referrer of each visitor it is also possible for most analytic programs to determine the search engine that directed visitors to your site. Again, it is possible to use this information in order to improve your optimization efforts, with a little online research.

Landing Pages And Referrer Pages

A good avenue of pertinent information is the líst of landing pages and referrer pages. The landing page is simply the page that a visitor first lands on when they reach your site, while the referrer is the page that directed them to your site.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that all of your traffíc emerges on your home page. At least, for most websites this shouldn’t be the case. Each page on your site is a potential source of search engine traffíc, and if you have well categorized pages then PPC campaigns should also be page dependent.

Alternatively, if you use any kind of advertising, it will pay to keep track of how each campaign performs. The referrer statistics will help you determine this very fact. If you have links all over the Internet, then this can point you to the more beneficial of those links so that you can attempt to gain more, similar ones.

Visitor Experience

How your visitors reach your site shouldn’t be your sole fascination. Once a person reaches the fold of your domain, you should attempt to learn whether they had a positive experience, and, if not, then why not. Fortunately, web analytics typically provide some very good statistics to help you with this.

Visitor and page load statistics. Whenever a page is loaded in a browser it is logged as a page load. However, any single individual can open numerous pages or may even open the same page numerous times. The unique visitor figure is the number of individual people that have accessed your site.

Visitor paths. You can track the actions of a visitor from the landing page to the exit page. This includes every page they visit in between, the amount of time they spend on each page, whether they make a purchase or click any links while on those pages, and more. This information is crucial to determining any problem areas on your site. If a particular page is leading to a lot of people exiting your site, then address it immediately. These statistics can also provide you with hot spots you weren’t previously aware of.

Translating The Results

Translating the results need not be any more complicated than actually reading them. Doing so, though, can seriously improve your profits. Here are a few guidelines that can be used when next viewing your analytics.

Lots of Visitors But No Conversions

A lot of people place too much emphasis on driving traffíc to their site, and not enough emphasis on actually converting those visitors to customers. If you find that the pages of your site are frequently being visited, but surfers are leaving without becoming customers then you need to take action quickly. Typically, your site content may need improvement or the traffíc you are gaining is not targeted to the topic of your website. Look at visit lengths and paths to determine which is the case for you.

Visitors are Leaving From a Specific Page

Again, this can usually be combated with improved content on that page. If the content of an individual page is poor, but the rest of your site is good, then you will usually see that your visitors are navigating happily around your site until they reach this one page. Look for broken links, inappropriate content, or just poorly written content.

Traffic From a Specific Source is Particularly Inactive

If you look at your referrer statistics and note that one source of traffíc is sending a lot of inactive visitors to your site there may be one or more explanations. Review where the visitors are being directed to and ensure that this page is well optimized for conversions. Also do some digging on the referrer’s end. A banner or link placed on an irrelevant page is unlikely to yield the positive results you are looking for.

These are just some of the ways that analytics can help you and your website. Experiment and look for trends. Question anything that you notice until you find the most reasonable answer, and then take action accordingly.

About The Author
Article by Matt Jackson. WebWiseWords, website content that sells.

Is Google Too Big?

With its empire expanding, the search giant can have an unprecedented breadth of knowledge about you. Can we trust it with so much data?

From search to e-mail, from calendars to spreadsheets and text documents, more and more of what PC users read and create flows through one firm: Google.

Google’s pending purchase of online advertising giant DoubleClick (the deal awaited Federal Trade Commission approval as we went to press) will give it access to yet more information: the Web browsing histories collected by millions of DoubleClick cookies. Combine that data with what Google already knows through its homegrown services–Google Apps, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Desktop, and many others–and the company has the potential to know more about you than any one entity ever has. (See the chart, “What Google Knows About You.”)

The question is, can you trust Google with all that information about you? And even if you trust Google, what about other groups that may try to access all that information–government agencies, hackers, and rival businesses, to name a few? Privacy and security experts say that the risk is significant, even if Google sticks to its famous “Don’t Be Evil” motto.

According to Harvard Business School assistant professor and researcher Ben Edelman, companies face many risks when they use online software services such as Google’s, namely loss of privacy, lack of physical data security, and lack of control over data retention. Who can access your Google-hosted data, and when, and under what circumstances? Google itself has full access to your files, which are unencrypted. In fact, searching and indexing stored data are essential if Google is to continue serving its contextual advertising.

Doubleclick Deal

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the FTC, which must approve the deal, asking it to investigate the ability of Google to record and profile the activities of Internet users, whether they are personally identifiable or not.

The FTC appears to be taking the matter seriously, requesting additional information from both Google and DoubleClick. The European Union’s privacy agency and the New York State Consumer Protection Board are also concerned about the purchase’s effect on browsing privacy.

A Google FAQ page, however, insists that the acquisition, far from endangering privacy, will improve it, and that the company remains committed to respecting users’ privacy preferences.

Another danger in switching to hosted services like Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Google Calendar is that of losing access to your data. What happens when the office DSL connection goes down? And how would you make last-minute changes to, say, a critical spreadsheet while you’re flying coast-to-coast? The recent launch of Google Gears, which will let you use online apps from Google and other companies without an Internet connection, promises to overcome this limitation, but the service likely won’t become widely available for several months. Until then, your data is off limits when you’re offline.

“You’re accepting dramatically increased [file management] complexity–maybe for good reason–in order to get the benefit of having Google engineers keep everything running for you,” observes Edelman. He says that businesses need to consider not only the benefits of outsourcing server management but also the drawbacks of having to keep local versions of documents synchronized with the Google-hosted versions.

Despite the uncertainty of Google’s plans for your personal data, the company itself is probably the least of your worries. Instead, warns Edelman, hackers or your business’s competitors could try to infiltrate your Google accounts via forged documents or other illegal methods.

Warrant Search

The government, too, might like to see what’s in your Gmail inbox and your Docs and Spreadsheets files, including when you created, accessed, or deleted the data. Since you identify yourself whenever you sign in to your account, Google could use logs for the originating IP address of account activity, combined with ISP logs, to help confirm that it really was you who updated that spreadsheet or wrote that e-mail.

Google must comply with search warrants and subpoenas in civil or criminal cases that target your data, just as you would if you stored your data on your own servers. The difference, however, is that Google has no obligation to inform you that it has received such a warrant and has turned over your files to the authorities. “You lose both factual and legal control over your documents if you use an online service like Google,” says former Department of Justice computer crime unit head Mark Rasch, current managing director of technology for forensic consulting firm FTI in Washington, D.C.

“Google Apps makes [the situation] even worse,” Rasch adds, explaining: “This is not just communications, it’s all my documents and spreadsheets that are subject to subpoena, search warrant, or civil discovery. The hard part is that Google is under no legal obligation to notify me, and in particular kinds of investigations, they’re going to be prohibited from notifying me.”

Being left in the dark about these types of searches can also result in serious liabilities should your files contain sensitive client data and communications. “Let’s say I’m a lawyer, and I’ve got privileged information that I store using a Gmail account,” Rasch continues. “The government seizes that Gmail account and reads my files. Under the law, I must assert the attorney-Client privilege, or I have waived it,” he explains.
In short, if Google chooses not to inform you of such searches, you have waived that privilege. Only strong encryption–a technology Google currently does not support–offers real privacy protection for documents kept online, according to Rasch.

Harvard’s Edelman recommends using Google services just for specific business documents in which collaboration among geographically dispersed teams is unusually important. “I wouldn’t move my whole business onto Google Apps,” he counsels.

Google Apps and similar Web services certainly have appeal for many small and medium-size businesses. When San Francisco’s SFBay Pediatrics, a midsize practice, went looking for an interoffice communications, scheduling, and calendaring system, CIO Andrew Johnson considered “a slew” of products, including Microsoft Exchange and other systems that he would have to install and maintain in-house.

He selected Google Apps Premier Edition (the ad-free commercial version of Google Apps) because of Google’s good reputation and his staff’s familiarity with Gmail. Also, the Google services free the practice from setting up a significant IT structure. “We don’t want to spend the time tracking down server issues, maintaining servers, and paying up-front costs,” Johnson says.

So far, SFBay has had a positive experience with Google Apps, which it uses for such tools as a shared phone-call log that receptionists, nurses, and physicians can view and update. Though core features are still being rolled out, Johnson has configured SFBay’s Google Apps account to comply with the privacy rules of the Department of Health and Human Services’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) regulations. “We’re taking it in little baby steps,” Johnson adds.

Secret Life of Files

Last year it successfully warded off a Department of Justice subpoena demanding millions of search queries. (This request, the company countered, was excessive and an invasion of user privacy.)

The search giant also recently announced that it would begin deleting IP address information–which can be used to identify users–from its logs after 18 months. However, these steps may not be enough to reassure the most security-conscious users of Google applications.

“Even if you trust the service to do the right thing with the data, which I tend to do in the case of Google,” says Lauren Weinstein, cofounder of People for Internet Responsibility, “it doesn’t mean that someone won’t come along and make demands for access to that data that wouldn’t occur if the data was on your own machine.”

Weinstein worries that if companies such as Google don’t take a stronger role in protecting user privacy, less-savvy groups, including legislators, judges, and federal government agencies, may feel obliged to step in with solutions that could hamper all online services. “Not being evil is good, but it’s not good enough,” Weinstein says.

“What you really need to do is not only not be evil, but you’ve got to try to keep other people from doing evil with your magic. And that’s a harder step to take.”

Author: Scott Spanbauer
PCWorld

Making Sense Of Website Statistics

Every website owner wants lots of traffíc directed to their website, but this can sometimes involve spending a lot of time and monëy. Fortunately, most website owners can íncrease their return on ínvestment simply by paying closer attention to their website log files. Most website hostíng companies have special software installed that will process these website log files and display the information in an easy to read format. From this information website owners can get an understanding as to how many people are visiting the website, where the visitors are coming from, where they are entering and exiting the website, the average number of page views per visit, and many more interesting facts. These statistics will allow you to better analyze the effectiveness of promotional campaigns and give you some insight as to how you can tweak your website to íncrease your return on ínvestment.

“Hits” Explained

There seems to be some confusion regarding the terms used to describe website visitor traffíc. We usually hear website owners speak in terms of “hits” to their website. Hits don’t accurately describe the number of visitors viewing the website – they are actually just any sort of HTTP request made to your server. Not only are requests made for website pages, but also for all the images and other files associated with viewing a single page. Therefore, one page view could actually result in dozens of hits, and, if a single user visits many pages on your website, this visit could generate hundreds or even thousands of hits. This can excite some website owners, but this number is not a reliable indicator of how many people have actually visited the website.

The term that website owners want to focus on is the amount of unique impressions that are generated by their website. A unique impression will measure the number of actual people visiting the website based on their IP address, browser, and operating system. No matter how many “hits” a visitor registers on your website, the server will record the session as one unique visit. Thus, the number of unique visits gives us a much better idea of the amount of traffíc the website is generating.

What to Look for When Analyzing Website Traffíc

Number of Unique Visitors: We’ve already determined that the best measure of true website traffíc is the number of unique visitors. What we want to look for is a trend in the average number of unique visitors. On a day to day basis, there may be a good amount of volatility in the number of unique visitors, but we want to pay attention to the trend of the average number of visitors per month. Optimally, we’d like to have the number íncrease on a monthly basis.

Entry Page Statistics: From these statistics we can learn which page people are using to enter your website. Most visitors will enter from your home page, but you may notice that up to 50% of your website traffíc originates from a page other than your home page. It’s important that your website have an easy to use navigation structure to ensure that visitors can find the information they are looking for, even if they don’t enter through your website’s main page.

Bounce Rate: The bounce rate can be defined as the percentage of people who visit your website and immediately leave. Don’t get worried if your bounce rate is high – most websites have a bounce rate of about 50% or so. If the bounce rate is unusually high, you can experiment with your website to try and retain more visitors. Maybe you need more enticing graphics, less text, faster loading pages, or a more engaging design.

Exit Page Statistics: These statistics will show you where people are leaving your website. When you know which page is losing the bulk of your website’s visitors you can experiment with some changes in an attempt to retain more visitors.

Average Time & Page Views Per Visit: Website visitors are very goal oriented and task driven. Upon visiting your website, most visitors will merely scan the page to quickly determine whether or not it contains the information they are searching for. By analyzing the average amount of time spent on your website and the average number of page views per visit, you can determine how engaging your website’s content is. The key to retaining visitors and increasing the number of page views is to have relevant and interesting information on your website. Remember – content is king!

Top Referring URLs: This statistic lets you know where the bulk of your website’s traffíc is coming from. This is important if you’re pursuing a website marketing campaign or search engine optimization campaign because you can easily judge the campaign’s effectiveness by looking to see how many visitors each marketing method is generating.

Top Search Words & Phrases: This information will let you know which keywords and phrases visitors are searching for in Google and the other search engines in order to find your website. With this information you can gauge the effectiveness of a search engine optimization campaign, or get an idea of how your website’s keyword density should be altered to position it for the keywords and phrases that you’re targeting.

Browsers, Platforms & Screen Sizes: This information gives us some insight as to the type of software and hardware your visitors are using. You should ensure that your website looks the same across all browsers and operating systems. In addition, you must pay attention to the screen size and resolution in which your visitors are viewing your website. The goal is to ensure that no visitor has to resort to the horizontal scrolling bar to view your website – this is a major turnoff for most people.

Country of Origin: A good website stats program will also let you know the geographic region of your website’s visitors. This is important if your website only has appeal in a particular region. For instance, if you own a retail store that caters to Southwestern Ontario and you notice that 90% of your website traffíc is coming from the U.S., then it can easily be determined that you need to re-think your online marketing strategy.

The goal of website traffíc analysis is to assess how well or how poorly your website is working for your visitors. From these statistics you can figure out what the problem is and try out some possible solutions. The problem often lies in the website’s visual appearance, layout, navigation structure, or keyword optimization. When making modifications to your website in order to remedy these problems, it’s best to only make minor and gradual adjustments, and then assess the progress over the next month or so to truly understand if your changes were for the better. Also, remember that sites with a greater number of visitors will have more accurate web statistics. Sites with smaller numbers of visitors are more prone to have their averages thrown off by a few anomalous visitors.

Author: Paul J Coulter

Increase Search Engine Traffíc With Quality Content

Every web site owner wants to íncrease search engine traffíc. It’s free and the visitor is targeted to your subject matter, product or service. What more could you
ask for in search engine traffíc? The downside is that you need to understand search engine ranking methods and that is quite a challenge for many.

The number of opinions and “experts” on ways to íncrease search engine traffíc is overwhelming. And regardless of what anyone might tell you, they’re all guessing. The search engines themselves don’t divulge how their methods work for one simple reason. As soon as anyone figures out the method, there’s a mad rush to implement changes based on the method.

In a perfect world, where there were no scoundrels, this might not be a factor.
Everyone would organize their web site information so that a visitor could easily find what they are looking for, and life would be good. But we certainly don’t live in a perfect world and scoundrels are everywhere.

So we are at the mercy of the search engines to help us sort through the clutter to find what we want. And that’s the value that the search engines provide, accurate and meaningful search engine results that are related to the search terms or phrases. So it goes back to the quality of content, that’s the only common factor in all 3 major search engines’ ranking methods.

Each of the big 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) search engines use a little different method and technology to arrive at any given web site’s ranking under specific search terms. As mentioned above, no one knows exactly how each method works. But you can test different strategies and methods to see how they impact your rank.

And therein lies the only true method of determining what the search engines might look for when ranking your web page on specific search terms. I’m sure most of us are aware that most processes can be expressed in mathematical equations. I’m not sure if that’s the best method for search engine ranking, but it is the most popular for the search engine ranking process.

And consider the fact that when someone has determined (or thinks they have determined) one of the factors used in search engine rankings they beat it to death. Every discovered aspect in the past few years has been exploited immediately to the point of the search engines abandoning the tactic. As soon as the search engines see that someone can beat the system, they change it.

That’s one of the big reasons you see constant change in ranking methods. Since there is a tremendous amount of revenue at stake for all concerned, i.e. sales of products and services for the web site owners, plus the advertising revenue for the search engines, any advantage is huge.

If you would have tested and tracked all the changes and methods in search engine rankings for the past few years, one constant factor would stand out. This is also one of the most misunderstood and often overlooked elements in search engine ranking for a specific term.

So what’s the one thing that the search engines can’t change about their mathematical algorithms? You got it, CONTENT! The search engines can play with the process, methods, or means to judge web site content. But, if web site owners stick to the basic philosophy of providing meaningful content, in relation to the search term, the impact of changes are far less, if even felt.

And that is where many web site owners run afoul of getting good search engine rankings. Many jump on the bandwagon with every new revelation in search engine strategies based on the latest changes. It’s the old forest and trees scenario, Internet style. Even if you get a slight advantage from all these “new” tactics, it will be short lived. As soon as the search engines catch on that you are working the system, they will change the system.

So the best way to íncrease your rankings for a particular search term is to provide meaningful information or content based on that search term. Here a few guidelines I’ve found that help:

  • Make sure you focus on the subject matter (don’t try to satisfy too many terms with one web page).
  • Get inside the searcher’s head – figure out what they want and give it to them.
  • Be specific and provide details – don’t generalize and be descriptive.
  • For a sales page use benefits and features to fully explain the problem and the solution.
  • Update your information often – setup a schedule to update and add more content.

There are many sub factors that can have an impact on how well the search engine bots can determine the value of the content. The search engine bots are software programs that go out and “read” your web page and then provide the information to rank your web pages on what they discovered.

You’ll find many “experts” who will give you a hard líst of items and how to present this information. And I don’t disagree with suggestions to include the search term in your web page in key areas like title, description, and font designations like H1. That helps the search engine software bots to determine the content.

Author: John Dow