Service Sellers Masters Course (793Kb) by Ken Evoy

This 10-DAY course focuses on helping you, the Service Seller, succeed. It leads you, step by digestible step, day by day, through a flawless process from developing a Site Concept, to brainstorming hundreds of profitable related keywords, to building a themed site that establishes credibility and inspires trust, to generating motivated, targeted traffic that wants to contact you and, to nurturing ongoing relationships through a high-value e-zine. PDF file.
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Some Things To Consider When Evaluating Your Website

You have either put a lot of effort into your website or you have paid someone else a lot of money to put the effort in for you. Either way, whatever the purpose of the website, you want to get the most out of it. The question now becomes, how you can tell if your website is likely to succeed.

Why?

The first thing to do is to ask yourself why you have set up the website. Are you trying to sell a product or provide information or something else? What do you want to happen when a visitor lands on your pages? “For a man without a destination no wind is favourable” (An old saying attributed to many). If you do not know exactly what you want to happen, how can you expect the visitors to your website to know and do it? You are the one who ought to have the site set up to direct people to their destination. If you don’t know what that is, then all is lost.

Your visitors probably know why they visited your site. You too must know why they came and help them do what they came to do. If your website does not provide what they need they will move on to another one. Just because you are getting all the traffic you could hope for does not mean that your site will succeed.

Your Website’s Conversion Rate

You will need to measure your success rate. There are a number of ways to do this. One is the Conversion rate. Simply put, the conversion rate is the rate at which you convert visitors into buyers. Or if you are not selling it is the rate at which you convince people to do whatever it is you need them to do. It could be to sign up for your newsletter of subscribe to something else, etc. If you have one hundred visitors to your website per day and you convert two, your conversion rate is two percent.

It is a reasonably good measure of the quality of your website. If your site is not converting, you will know that you need to make changes to the site. However, it could also mean that you marketing or advertising campaign is sending untargeted traffic to your site. In other words sending visitors who are not in the least bit interested in what you have to offer.

SEO & Traffic Generation

The whole point of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is traffic generation. The idea is that you optimise or fine tune your website so that it gets to the top of the search results when people enter a search term that is contained in your website. You do this to get traffic. If your site is not properly optimised people are unlikely to find it. Unless of course you have found some narrow niche that nobody else has heard of, which will not bring a lot of visitors. SEO involves using the correct keywords in the correct way and arranging the contents and menus in the right way and most important of all is link building.

To rank highly, at the time of writing, the single most important thing to do to rank highly in the search engines is to increase the number of links to your site from quality websites which have content related to the subject of your site.

Content

It may sound obvious to most people but, the content of your website should be based on the subject of your product. For example if your website is set up to sell computers then it should contain articles about computers and computing etc. not gardening articles. If you have articles on unrelated subjects they will only serve to confuse your visitors and undermine your website’s and your own credibility as a sourct of products and information about computers or whatever your website is promoting.

The content should be keyword rich but not saturated or you may show up on spam radar. The content should be broken up into manageable paragraphs and properly laid out with headers for each section, making it easier to read and navigate.

Navigation

Getting the visitors to your website is only half og th battle. You then must give them what they want. What do they want? Well, the first thing they want is to find their way around your website without pulling their hair out in frustration. These days there is far too much competition on the internet for that to happen. They will move to another website at the first sign of difficulty.

Arrange all the links and buttons in a way that is easy to read and understand. Do not over fill each page. If there is too much choice people do not make a choice they just get confused and… you guessed it. They move to another website.

The first page they land on, usually the index page should be interesting. It should be obvious to them that they have landed on a page with the content they came for and the way to navigate to that content should be very clear. Do not try to give them everything on the front page.

Ease of Use

How easy is it for your visitors to accomplish what they came to do? Do they need to fill out pages of information or can the do their business in a few clicks? If people have to figure out the puzzle that your website is they will move on unless you have something so attractive and necessary that they will stay at all costs. If you have a product like that then you can not charge enough for it.

It is always a good idea to have a professional web designer look over the site and point out any obvious flaws. I say obvious flaws because not all corrections are obvious and are often discovered through trial and error. You should keep tweaking the website in a continuous attempt to improve it. There is always room for improvement. Though it is also said that you should not fix something that works. I think that the best thing is to make gradual changes and if they are not a major improvement, at least they will not be a major disaster.

If you are not confident enough to do the coding and graphics etc. for your own site, there are many professional web designers out there who live for it. So don’t let it stop you from getting you name, product or information out there.

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About the Author: Steven Collins is a web designer at Desktop Web Design.

 

How to Make your URLs SEO Friendly

Originally published at Avangate.com, April 27, 2007

Without search engine optimization many websites stand the chance of not being fully indexed by search spiders therefore risking not being ranked high enough (if at all) in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The resulting poor conversion rate makes the website a dead weight, demoralizes your staff and could threaten your business.
URL Rewriting
This situation is quite easy to avoid by performing some cosmetic operations to the site. One of these operations, URL rewriting, is considered by some rather difficult and a bit time-consuming but can be extremely effective and rewarding in the long run.

Why It Is Nice to Have Clean URL’s
There are two very strong reasons for you to rewrite your URLs, the first of which is related to Search Engine Optimization. Search engines are much more at ease with URLs that don’t contain long query strings.

A URL like http://www.example.com/4/basic.html can be indexed very easily whereas its dynamic form, http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic, can potentially confuse search engines and cause them to miss important information contained in the URL and you to miss those anticipated high rankings.

With clean URLs, the search engines can distinguish folder names and can establish real links to keywords. Query string parameters continue to be an impediment in many search engine’s attempts to fully index sites. Several SEO professionals agree that dynamic (or, dirty) URLs are not very appealing to web spiders, while static URLs have greater visibility in their electronic eyes.

The second strong reason for URL rewriting would be the increased usability for web users and “maintainability” for webmasters. Clean URLs are much easier to remember. A regular web surfer will not remember a URL full of parameters, and would obviously be discouraged by the idea of typing the entire URL. This is less prone to happen with clean URLs. Easily remembered URLs help you create a more intuitive Web site and make it easier for your visitors to anticipate where they can find information they need.
Webmasters tend to find that maintaining static URLs is a much easier task than working with dynamic ones. Static URLs are more abstract, and thus more difficult to hack. The dynamic URLs are more transparent, allowing possible hackers to see the technology used to build them and thus facilitating attacks.

Also, given the length of dynamic URLs, it is very possible for webmasters to make mistakes during maintenance sessions, resulting in broken links. Also, when static URLs are used, the links to the site’s pages will still remain valid should it be necessary to migrate a site from one programming language to another (e.g. from Perl to Java).

Dashes vs. Underscores
Websites that still use underscores for their URLs are becoming scarcer and scarcer. Some say that people who still use underscores are “old school” while dashes seem be used far more often these days.

A usability related reason for using dashes rather than underscores is the elimination of the confusion created between a space and an underscore when the URL is viewed as a link, or when printing such a URL.

More to the point, the chances that a combination of keywords contained in your Web site is included in the SERPs increase exponentially when using dashes.

For exemple: a URL that contains “seo_techniques” will be shown by the search engine only if the user searches for seo_techniques (this kind of search is rarely performed); whereas searches for “seo”, “techniques”, or “seo techniques” gives your URL containing “seo-techniques” a better chance of being displayed on the SERPs. The dash will help you more than you can imagine, by greatly improving your visibility on the Web.

How to Rewrite URLs
The principle of URL rewriting is actually setting a “system” on the host server that will allow it (the server) to know how to interpret the new URL format. What actually happens when one decides to rewrite the URLs of a website is called masking the dynamic URLs with static ones. This means that the URLs that previously contained query strings with elements such as “?”, “+”, “&”, “$”, “=”, or “%” will contain the more search engine friendly “/” (slash) element, presenting themselves in a simplified form.
To help you with cleaning your URLs here are some rewriting tools and engines, some free of charge, others fee based.

Online / Open Source Tools

• free online URL rewriting
• open Source URL Rewriter for .NET / IIS / ASP.NET
• open Source rewrite-module tuned for ASP.NET 2.0
• mod_rewrite

This is the most common non-fee-based rewriting engine. It is a module from the Apache HTTP Server that allows the easy manipulation of URLs. The use of this module requires the enabling of the RewriteEngine on your Apache server. Then, rewrite rules must be defined, (you can even set conditions for each rule), thus allowing the rewrite requests as they come in.

In terms of SEO, mod_rewrite can be helpful if you have complex URLs that contain more than 2 parameters. In other words, if one of your dynamic URLs is accessed, the mechanism behind mod_rewrite will “translate” it into a shorter, friendlier, static-looking URL.

Fee-Based Tools

• ISAPI_Rewrite
  The Internet Server Application Program Interface (ISAPI) is another URL manipulation engine that functions in a similar way to Apache’s mod_rewrite, the difference being it is designed specifically for Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Server).
• IISRewrite
  IISRewrite is a stripped down implementation of Apache’s mod_rewrite modules for IIS. It is a rule-based rewriting engine that allows a Webmaster to manipulate URLs on the fly in IIS.

URL Examples
Here are some examples of how URLs can look before and after rewriting:

Example 1:

• Dynamic URL: http://www.companyname.com/products/items.php?id=x&model=y&variety=z (before rewriting)
• Static URL: http://www.companyname.com/x/y/z.html (after rewriting)

Example 2:

• Dynamic URL: http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic (before writing)
• Static URL: http://www.example.com/4/basic.html (after writing)

Conclusions
URL rewriting can put you on the right track in the race for high organic rankings when combined with other SEO techniques. Be aware that rewritten (and, presumably, better looking and more effective in terms of search engine ranking) URLs cannot substitute or make up for a poorly designed Web site.

Don’t expect miracles. Nevertheless, when you decide that your site needs a makeover and start rewriting your URLs, make sure that:

• You keep them as short as possible (to increase usability),
• You use dashes rather than underscores (to give your site a better chance of ranking as high as possible in the SERPs),
• You use lowercase letters rather than uppercase ones (to avoid those case sensitive situations),
• The technology you have used cannot be detected in any of your URLs (to prevent possible hacker attacks).

Adriana Iordan is the Web Marketing Manager at Avangate.com She spends a great deal of her time writing articles, improving and promoting websites. Adriana manages the team offering internet marketing and usability services to Avangate clients and the online promotion of Avangate.com’s websites.

 

More Freeware SEO Tools for the DIY Webmaster – Part 2

In Part 1 of this article , some of the better, freeware keyword, sitemap and ranking tools available to webmasters were listed. Part 2 covers meta tag generators, link popularity apps, link checkers and general SEO tools. Again, all of these tools can be found in the SiteProNews Webmaster Tools Directory along with new additions as we find them.

Let’s start with a look at meta tag generators. Since meta tags lost their SEO relevance several years ago, most of the freeware programs in this category are either no longer supported or haven’t been updated for several years. But, then again, not much has really changed in meta tag usage so the apps listed below should still be useful.

Meta Tag Generators

1. BHead 4.1.1 (1.0 MB) is an advanced meta tag generator that can create your entire HEAD section, including CSS style sheets. Generates the code for all popular meta tags and also has an option for custom tags. Keywords and description can be imported from files. Comes with a basic Style Sheet editor that includes a color picker. Other features include spell chëck, search replace, syntax highlighting, etc. For Windows 9x/NT/ME/2K/.

2. Metty Meta Tag Maker 1.31 (2.5 MB) is a meta tag creator with support for 33 meta tags that ensure search engines properly index your website. Easy to use and requires no knowledge of meta tags. For Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP.

3. Search Engine Buddy 1.0 (2.7 MB) analyzes web page meta tags and web page content on or offline to help you create the best possible meta tag combinations and web page content based on the requirements and algorithms of the major search engines. For Windows 9x/2000/NT.

4. MetaWizard 1.2a (617 KB) is a simple, bare bones meta tag generator that guides you through the process of creating basic tags for your web site pages.

Link Checkers

Where oh where did all the good freeware link checkers go? Well, apparently they went offline with the cos. or individuals that developed them or they went the shareware route. Of the three listed below, CheckWeb is probably the best.

1. CheckWeb 1.23 (74 KB) is a small, powerful links analyzer that can scan online/ offline HTML pages and generate a report on link, error and page size information. For Windows 95 and above.

2. Mihov Link Checker 0.5 (250 KB) can chëck multiple links on a web site or a local web page. It reports the state of each link as valid, missing, forbidden or otherwise not accessible. Links can be stored in a text file or extracted automatically from a local or internet page. For Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.

3. SiteLinkChecker 1.0 (480 KB) is an easy-to-use link checker tool that checks websites for broken links. Easily locates broken links and links containing syntactic errors and reports the status of each link. For Windows 2000/XP/2003.

Link Popularity Tools

Another category of programs that has suffered attrition in the last few years. At least half a dozen are no longer available, no longer supported or no longer freeware. The first two are the best of the three listed.

1. Indexa 2.0 (115 KB) is a java website popularity program that reports Google Pagerank, the number of backlinks recorded on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and AlltheWeb and the number of pages indexed. Limitations: Analyses 4 urls and 2 search engines. For Windows 98/ME/XP/2000/2003/Unix/Linux/MacOS X.

2. Link Popularity Chëck 3.0.3 (941 KB) checks how many sites link to yours and your competitors in 5 major search engines. For Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95.

3. BackLinks Master 1.5 (1.3 MB) helps you find who is linking to you, whether links are direct and what keywords are in the anchor text. For Windows 98/ME/XP/2000.

General SEO Tools

Last, but not least, are tools that don’t fall into any specific category, but that are multi-featured and definitely worth a look.

1. SEO Surf 0.7 (2.6 MB) is a powerful program for SEO enthusiasts. It offers numerous features, including keyword analysis, SEO page analysis, backlink management and search engine analysis. For Windows 98 to XP and I.E. 6.0+.

2. Keyword Crawler 1.1 (424 KB) is a keyword tool that can analyze your website and provide web page reports for the top keywords used, word density, Google pagerank, internal and external backlinks and broken links. In addition, the program can also generate a sitemap file in XML format. For Windows 98/ME/NT4/2Kx/XP.

3. SEO SpyGlass v.2.0.4 (7.8 MB) is a research tool designed to show how your competitors got top search engine rankings. It reveals backlink numbers, the URL, PageRank, Alexa Rank, and IP address of each backlink, website age, link value, backlink origin, keyword density, etc. Detailed reports can be generated but not saved in the freeware version. Requires JRE and email registration. For Windows 98+ and Unix/Linux/MacOS X. The current version is generally available from the SpyGlass site, but the site was experiencing problems at the time of this writing.

That’s it folks. Feedback is welcome. If you are aware of similar freeware tools that are as good or better than those listed above, we’d like to hear from you. Just send your recommendations along to feedback@sitepronews.com and we’ll highlight them in upcoming issues of SiteProNews.

About The Author
Mel Strocen is CEO of the Jayde Online Network of websites and founder of the Independent Search Engine & Directory Network. The Jayde network is comprised of more than 20 websites, including ExactSeek.com, SiteProNews.com, SEO-News.com and GoArticles.com.