SiteProNews |
- Could Tomorrows Storefront Be Your Web Site?
- How has the Internet Developed into Web 2.0?
- Mythbusting: How Many Article Submission Sites Should I Submit To?
- The Perpetual Traffic Report: Secrets of Google Revealed
- Promote JS! A noble cause ruined by dodgy implementation
- What Every Company Needs on Their Website
| Could Tomorrows Storefront Be Your Web Site? Posted: 27 Sep 2010 07:22 AM PDT  There is good news. Web based sales have continued to spiral upward year after year. Sales are projected to hit $200 billion by the end of the year. The better news: by the year 2012 this figure will increase to $335 billion. The internet is making mega dollars for those who implement wise usage of it’s vast potential. It has continually grown in online sales, as more and more people take advantage of buying and selling online. With the spike in gas prices, it becomes reasonable to shop from home – save the commute to town, save time and effort during the Christmas rush! Not to mention the bargains that can be found through online auctions, close-outs, and retailers who do not even have to worry about overstocking, or inventory- due to on demand shipping. It is a safe bet, that those who go global now, are positioning themselves to reap the rewards of this huge marketing bonanza! More and more businesses are stepping up their online presence to where more than half of their overall sales are coming from the Web. And why not? Why pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a brick and mortar store, where only hundreds of visitors may occupy, when they can have an online store which thousands can occupy daily? Most big stores close for the night, where the dot-com stores never have to close! Why put hundreds of thousands into payroll for employees, when one server can meet the same needs in the digital world? Why pay megabucks in health care and retirement – if the same results can be gained by retailers who simply sell and do not manufacture? Don’t get me wrong, there will always be mom and pop stores simply because there are plenty of services that require employees. But many are finding they can sell online – at a fraction of the cost, of building a retail outlet! This is a trend which will only get bigger. Which is better, banking three or four million a year in profit, or taking in nine or ten million a year, only to bank two million after overhead? Those who already have a huge online business, can only look forward to growth. They have proven themselves as a worthy online retailer to their customers. The customer is pleased to know that whoever they send to your site will get the same treatment as they did. It becomes a win-win exchange. This is how Fortune 500 companies, and other online retailers can know their expected growth is most likely certain. It pays well to have your customers best interests at heart, for clients will reward those who take the time and effort to make sure their customers are well pleased. Who would you buy from? Those who prove to you how important your business is, or those who seems indifferent and treat you as a number? Your web presence and online appeal is directly related to how your prospects view your site. If it is polished, and a help to their needs and interests first, you can be sure of repeat business. However, if it comes off as “thrown-up” and offers no help or assistance, but simply offers a shopping cart and an order now button, it is doomed. Bad news travels a little faster than good news in the business world. If you are serious about growing your online sales, and want to prosper in the coming boom, do yourself and others the favor of hiring a professional writer for your Web content. It will pay you many times over what you pay them, and once that expense is absorbed, you can face with confidence profits upon profits! Get your FREE Sales Page evaluation from Professional Web Copywriter – Stephen E. Monday Please visit the URL below: www.AAAWebcopyservices.com. Click the Contact Us page, then enter the URL of the page you want evaluated, and click submit. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources      |
| How has the Internet Developed into Web 2.0? Posted: 27 Sep 2010 07:16 AM PDT 
So what is Web 2.0? It actually refers to websites and web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability and user-centered design. What is Interactive information sharing? A great example of interactive information sharing is Social Media websites. People use websites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Wordpress – to name but a few, to share information in the form of photos, music, photos – in fact, anything digital. The great thing about these mediums is that once the information has been published it is available around the world. Some of this will be in the public domain, like blogs for example and some will be kept only for confirmed friends and family – like Facebook. This form of sharing falls into one of the four Sharing design patterns: one-to-one sharing, one-to-many sharing, many-to-many sharing, and many-to-one sharing. Technologies that meet all four of these design patterns include blogs, wikis, really simple syndication (RSS Feeds), tagging, and chat. What is Interoperability? Interoperability refers to systems that work together or that inter-operate. James A. O’Brien and George M. Marakas define interoperability as: Being able to accomplish end-user applications using different types of computer systems, operating systems, and application software, interconnected by different types of local and wide area networks. A good example of interoperability is the use of XML or Extensible Mark-up Language. XML is a generic format intended for maximum flexibility to provide information in a wide variety of structural formats. It is not dependent on any particular platform (Windows, Mac, Linux or Unix for example) and is therefore inter-operable. In fact RSS feeds are a very good example of being able to present data in a format that can be interpreted on just about any platform, even mobile phones. This is interoperability. What is User-centered design? User-centered design is a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process. This is a multi-stage problem solving process that involves testing how users will use a product. It is multi-staged because every interface design has to be tested; this is based on what a first-time user of their design experiences. If a developed and designer of a product do not go through this process, users may not intuitively understand how the product works. To provide true user-centered design, it is necessary for these products to have changeable user interfaces that is appropriate to each user-class. User-centered design of a web site, for instance, seeks to answer the following questions: * Who are the users of the document? * What are the users’ tasks and goals? * What are the users’ experience levels with the document, and documents like it? * What functions do the users need from the document? * What information might the users need, and in what form do they need it? * How do users think the document should work? So the term Web 2.0 is more about the development of the technologies used on the web rather than the web itself. These developments are based on user experience and user expectations. The freedom of communicating with friends regardless of time and distance, and the ability to share anything in digital format are the expectations that have led us from Web 1.0 and static web pages to Web 2.0 where we can create our own interfaces for our social websites and share our videos with friends and family on the other side of the world. For online Flash Video Streaming Solutions please visit www.iMediaLibrary.com – Our solution allows you to manage your video content, publish it to the web, add and track banner ad’s, synchronize images with your video and charge visitors to see your content on a Pay Per View basis. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources    |
| Mythbusting: How Many Article Submission Sites Should I Submit To? Posted: 27 Sep 2010 07:03 AM PDT 
Sometimes people are afraid to do this, and that fear is completely unfounded. Let’s start by looking at the purpose of an article directory. Article submission sites (aka article directories) are like libraries. They specialize in having content (free reprint articles) on all sorts of topics that can be “checked-out” for free, like in a library. The difference is that with a library you need to bring the book back eventually, whereas the articles on directories do not need to be “returned”. Publishers go to the article directories looking for content for their websites. They find an article that they like, and they may reprint that article for free, with the agreement that they will also republish the resource box with its link. The purpose of an article submission site is to provide free reprint articles for publishers. Each article can be republished a limitless number of times–the more the better. When you publish your article on a directory, you want it to be republished. That is how you build links, and building links impacts your search engine ranking, which in turn impacts the traffic you receive to your website. So, article directories are never meant to be the end of the line–you do not publish there thinking that it will be the only place that your article will be published. That is not how article marketing works. The power behind article marketing is in the republication of the articles. You write one article, and it gets republished many times. You submit your article one time to a directory, and then let’s say 100 publishers find your article on that directory and put it on their site. So, from one article submitted to one directory, you created 101 links–the first link came from the directory itself, when you submitted your article there. The other 100 links were the result of publishers finding your article on the directory and republishing it. Let’s go back to the original question–is it alright to submit the same article to multiple article directories? The answer is “yes”, and you will benefit greatly if you take the initiative to do that. If you submit your article to one submission site, then you are totally dependent on the results that that one directory can bring. You do that one submission and you wait, and wait, and wait. Kind of passive, isn’t it? But, if you submit your article to several directories, then you have helped your cause in two ways: 1 – You are automatically building more links by submitting to more sites. Submit your article to one directory, and you know for sure that you have build one backlink. Submit your article to ten directories, and you know for sure you have build ten new links. 2 – You multiply the opportunities for your article to be picked up for publication, which also multiplies your opportunities for building backlinks. For example, submit your article to one directory, and then 100 publishers republish your article. That makes a total of 101 backlinks for you as a result of publishing that one article on that one directory. Not bad, but what if you submitted your article to ten directories with the same result–101 backlinks build as a result of publishing on each site. That’s a big increase, isn’t it? Would you rather have 101 new backlinks or 1,010? When you submit your articles to more directories, you drastically increase the number of links that you can create. Article directories are not expecting that they will be the only website that contains your article–the very purpose of an article submission site is to propagate the republication of articles. Each article that you write should only be submitted one time to each directory, but you can submit that same article to as many directories as you like. For more info on how you can use article marketing to reach thousands of potential prospects for your website, go now to www.submityourarticle.com. Steve Shaw is an article marketing expert and founder of the popular article distribution service www.submityourarticle.com used by thousands of business owners. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources    |
| The Perpetual Traffic Report: Secrets of Google Revealed Posted: 27 Sep 2010 06:55 AM PDT 
Wrong. Well, at least, that’s what Ryan Deiss says in the Perpetual Traffic Report. Ryan is one of the most well-known successful internet entrepreneurs today, and he talks about Google’s algorithm, which is based on 3 simple and easily manipulated variables in this report. He says that all you need to do is to analyze these 3 variables Google is pointing out, change your strategy a bit accordingly and watch the free traffic flow like water! Before you raise your eyebrow in doubt, let me give you these variables straightaway. They are: 1. Content (keywords, domain name, tags, etc.) 2. Links (inbound, outbound, authority, etc.) 3. Activity (traffic, RSS subscriptions, comments, updates, It used to be that people scrambled for Google Adwords, paid listings, sponsored search listings, etc. But as Ryan clearly shows in his report, there has been a huge disparity and decline in the clicks to these traffic strategies. Here’s what he emphasizes in the Perpetual Traffic Report: organic search traffic is KING! Every day, more Google users are shifting their focus toward organic search. According to Ryan the key in winning in the first page spot in Google is this: you must do ALL THREE variables. He emphasizes the fact that Google is now factoring ACTIVITY more heavily in their rankings. The algorithm “places a much greater emphasis on activity and freshness.” This simply means that having an excellent content and all the links in the world mean nothing if your page remains the same for days and weeks at a time. Therefore, sites that: 1. Get more blog comments; 2. Generate more RSS subscribers (esp. via FeedBurner.com, which is owned by Google); and 3. Get a bump in overall traffic. …have a tendency to move up in the rankings faster and stay there longer. This makes a lot of sense, knowing how some people would devise to spammy links, keyword stuffing and all other black hat techniques just to “trick” Google into believing the site is doing good. In sum, the Perpetual Traffic Report says: Content + Links + Activity = PERPETUAL TRAFFIC Needless to say, human activity is the catalyst of what Ryan calls Perpetual Traffic, and this is how we’re able to use Google’s own tools against. So what this means for us entrepreneur is leveraging and capitalizing on Google’s new algorithm is that we need to labor hard on ALL of the following: 1. Quality CONTENT 2. Quality INBOUND LINKS Measurable activity will perhaps be the biggest challenge of all, since this obviously takes time, building relationships and engaging in truly valuable conversations. The Perpetual Traffic Report only provides us the beginning of a task yet to be completed. How we can maintain consistency in all three – content, links and activity is completely up to us. Elmar Sandyck Highly Recommends The Perpetual Traffic Report In Developing Online Strategies. For More Internet Marketing Tips Visit www.InternetMastermindSecrets.com. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources    |
| Promote JS! A noble cause ruined by dodgy implementation Posted: 27 Sep 2010 03:12 AM PDT 
Basically, Promote JS! is a cause born out of the JSConf held in April this year. The idea is for JavaScript programmers to spread the word about Mozilla’s JavaScript Developer Center via the use of links to try and improve Mozilla’s Google ranking for searches relating to JavaScript documentation. A noble cause right? Maybe. However the implementation is inherently flawed in several ways: 1) First of all, the site provides a banner for web site owners and bloggers to place on their sites. The banner uses a script which creates a link to a different page of the Developer Center at every refresh so you can choose the destination link of your choice. This method is just plain silly, in my opinion. They’ve taken a noble idea and tried to implement it using link farm tactics. A series of identical banners with nearly identical link code smells very much like an affiliate program to Googlebot. Their code has basically created an affiliate link farm which is likely to be filtered out by Google’s ranking algorithm, potentially doing more harm than good to the Developer Center’s link popularity. 2) The alt tag for the banner is stuffed with multiple JavaScript related keywords. Keyword stuffed tags of any kind can easily be detected and ignored by Google’s ranking filter. There’s just no need to shove multiple keyword repetitions in there. 3) Developer Andrew Hedges had written a blog post about Promote JS! questioning the value of linking to multiple sub pages of the JavaScript Developer Center and suggesting perhaps everyone should link to their home page instead. He cc’d me on his tweet asking for SEO advice and inviting comments on his post. My response is that people should link to ANY page in the Developer Center that they want to promote! If their blog post talks about APIs, they should link to the API documentation. If they were impressed by a particular javascript tutorial, they should link directly to that tutorial. The whole point of the PageRank algorithm is to attribute relevancy weight based on inbound links to specific pages. It’s not about the top level domain. If everyone points to the home page, the inner pages – those containing the most valuable, useful content – won’t rank as well. For a web site to rank well for a wide number of keywords, you need to spread the link juice, not channel it to a single page. You have to trust Google’s own system of rewarding good content – they have a zillion brains working on this full time. 4) Andrew had also tweaked the Promote JS! code somewhat to create a banner that generated a random link at every refresh. In my opinion, this method is also flawed. Link popularity is based around the acquisition of trusted, related, inbound links to a page. If links appear and disappear to a page, that’s hardly trustworthy, right? Google won’t be counting your links as trusted. They are looking for solid, stable links from directly related topic pages. This is another reason why it makes sense to link to specific inner pages at the JavaScript Developer Center, based on your specific blog post topic/s. If your blog post talks about JavaScript drop down menus and it points to the documentation specifically about those, the TrustRank of that page goes up, as does the eventual ranking potential for related search queries. Promote JS! shouldn’t be creating link farms to promote the value of the JavaScript Developer Center. They should simply be encouraging developers to use logical linking strategies as recommended by Google to promote great content. Either that or convince Mozilla to make their JavaScript documentation more search engine friendly! I’m sure there’ll be developers out there who disagree with me and that’s fine. I don’t know how long the Promote JS! site has been live, but it doesn’t have a Google PR, so it’s either too young or hasn’t built up any TrustRank. Make of that what you will. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources    |
| What Every Company Needs on Their Website Posted: 26 Sep 2010 10:00 PM PDT 
PR is an absolute boon for small businesses; it is much more effective than pure advertising and the big bonus is – it’s free! Free in terms of cost, but not in effort. Developing a PR strategy takes time, effort, clarity of purpose, and an amount of doggedness on the part of the company, but for the majority of companies, time is a really precious commodity that is ‘best devoted to churning out the finished product, project or service.’ Most companies have newsworthy events, things that they could really bang the drum about – if only they had the time and the resources. Lately there has been a solution to this appearing on really well thought-out websites; the virtual Press Office. What is a Virtual Press Office? The Virtual Press Office is a dedicated page or pages on your website, where you can place information about your organization or industry for use by journalists who may want to create stories, articles or features for their publications. These are also referred to as online media or press centers. In these dedicated areas you will find a host of useful background information about the company, including archived releases, fact sheets, case studies, contact details for the company spokesman, hi-resolution image downloads – in fact, anything that will make life easier for the journalist researching either your company or your industry in general. While your website might already carry the information in its various pages, why not make life easier for the journalists or researchers by holding specific, relevant information on dedicated media pages? How useful this actually might be was brought home to us when one of our clients, Drilcorp, a Specialist Drilling Contractor in the UK, suddenly found news articles appearing in one of their industry international journals. It was obvious from the content that these articles had been lifted directly from their news pages and as their web development and online marketing team we realized the potential of having a dedicated area where the media could access and download relevant releases and high quality imagery relating to the news story of the day. Plus, having a company spokesman’s details on the site also has the potential for additional expansion on the stories. In addition, lifting pictures from a website and then using them in print media produces really poor quality final images, so the benefit of having high-resolution images to accompany the articles is a much higher quality printed article; better for both the journalist and the source company. To ensure that the news stories hit the right desks, we are also setting up an RSS feed for journos to subscribe to so that when we upload the news, it is pinged right to their RSS feeds. If you are unfamiliar with RSS feeds, here is a brief overview of how they work: RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication.’ It is a system that automatically ‘pulls’ web pages from a website and displays them on the RSS subscriber’s PC (or Mac!) desktop. It is like subscribing to receive information directly from a website – except, unlike a website which you have to visit, the information from the web page is delivered direct to you. And unlike emails, the recipient decides if they want to receive this information. How to Develop an Effective Virtual Press Office The key here is the acronym KISS. (Keep It Simple Stupid) – Put your most relevant and important content in this area, but don’t overload it with everything you have. - Update it frequently and encourage further contact from the press. - Always have a spokesman ready with a prepared statement that reflects company policy. - Make sure that the spokesman is well briefed on what not to say as well as what to comment on. - Put case studies and photography in here – you would be surprised at how much the press really love unique content, and on this note ensure that the photography is at or at least near to professional standard. - If you find that you are answering the same question time and time again, compile these questions and answers into a FAQ section or even create your own mini ‘White Papers’ for use as reference documents by the press. This will establish your reputation as the authority for the industry and your articles and opinions will be highly sought after. - Request notification of any articles that may be published by the participating media; it is cheaper than using a ‘clipping service’ – a paid for service that searches for and collects media mentions about your organization and sends them to you. As your website is often the first point of contact for your organization, it is worth investing the time to keep it as fresh as possible and as useful as possible. It will repay you many times over and really create a great relationship with the media. James McRoy is an ebusiness consultant with the Images Group www.theimagesgroup.co.uk. The Images Group specialize in website optimization and profit extraction systems. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources    |
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