Basic Principles of Customer- & Search-Engine-Friendly Site   Excerpt from '7 Stars of Online Success' by Irena Whitfield

Introduction

Once you decide to start your online business and publish your site, you should start to think about traffic and customers. I can see clearly that the Internet users are much more advanced and sofisticated than they used to be a couple of years ago but yet there are quite many thinking that you can build a site, and the world will find you.

Unfortunately, this will not happen. Just imagine that you drop a needle in the middle of a very deep and dark forest. Would you expect thousands of people a month find it. I doubt it. And exactly the same it is with your site on the Net. If you want people to find it you have to beat a path to it. And the best it is for FREE.

Now, you say Search Engines. Yes, traffic from the search engines can fulfil all your dreams about the right traffic: targeted, automatic, free, abundant, constant. Search engines are without any doubt a substantial source of traffic and a desirable step to reach on the way to the online success for every webmaster and netpreneur.

However, theire is a common mistake most people make: they worry too much about traffic, about getting thousands of people a day to their site, forgetting that the site must be able to convert the visitors into customers. Once the site is not designed to do this, all the visitors and your efforts to get them are lost.

So what's the right strategy to get both of it: a customer- and search-engine-friendly site.

Just a very, very rough outline:

That's all. The crucial point is to pick up the right information, so much wrong information is around but yet - I have a good news: all you need is easy and FREE to get. The only thing about it is that no one believes it. All it needs is to research, study and study, proper homework and steady, regular, daily work. Work. Work. Work.

YOUR own research is necessary because not everything works for everyone and you have to find your way. Of course, there are general principles necessary to observe but except for these, there are many individual items and strategies that can make the job more efficient or even working properly. You can never say this never works until you try and even then you can only say it has never worked for me.

And track your results. All the time. Make corrections. Research and read everything you can lay your hands on. You will definitely be surprised by the traffic you get once you manage.

And one final note: it is vital but quite difficult to get it right the first time because every change you want to make is much more difficult, every unnecessary mistake you make is so costly.

However, don't get obsessed by your search engine position. Once you have a simple and decent, professional site, easy to navigate, providing good, quality, fresh, regularly updated, one-theme content without foreign items, you provide quality, professional services and products, are honest and serious about your business, your search engine ranking will show it to your full satisfaction. I can guarantee it. I know what I am talking about.

10 Main Facts to Have in Mind when aiming at proper ranking

10 Principles of Customer- And Search-engine Friendly Site

1. Your site should contain simple, fast, easy to navigate, one-theme pages.

2. Your home page should inform your visitor about your business.

3. Pages in your site must support the theme, complete it.

4. Stick to professional colours related to your business line.

5. Use simple, polite, professional language, avoid slang.

6. Your site should be of clean, pleasing, professional design.

7. Your pages must have content, could range between 250-850 words, properly covering keyword phrases for the respective page.

8. You must provide all the necessary information about your business, yourself, privacy policy, contact us, terms of use,...

9. Everything in your page must have a selling purpose. To have something eg an image in your page only because you like it, is not a reason.

10. Be careful about whom you link to: link only to sites ranking higher than your site.

10 Technical Principles

1. Stick to HTML code, keep Java, DHTML to minimum, avoid Flash, avoid remote Java.

2. Check your site within diferent browsers.

3. Avoid frames.

4. Optimize your pictures, keep them to minimum, be careful about animated banners, always use 'alt'-Tags.

5. Go for 3-4 keyword phrases, properly covered by your individual pages

6. Use Meta tags to your advantage:

a) Title: 50-60 chars: your main keyword phrase

b) Description tag: 200-250 chars: sober, professional description of your business, a proper sentence strating in a capital letter, ending in a fullstop, no superlatives, slang.

c) Keyword phrases: 3-4 3-4-word keyword phrases for each of your pages, lower cases, without commas. See to it that your page covers the keywords properly

d) use Author name meta tag.

e) use complementary Meta tags.

7. Put a date on your pages or last updated but update often - 3 weeks at most

8. Your pages, epsecially home page and your doorway pages must be fast: 20-30/60-70 Kb, loading time must NOT be longer than 7-10 sec on a 56-K modem

9. See to it that the links from your main pages and external links open in new windows to keep visitors within your site.

10. Create Freebies and give them out.

10 Don'ts

1. Do not try to cover everything by your site, focus

2. Do not use frames, search engines cannot index your site

3. Do not use flash

4. Do not use slang

5. Do not spam search engines by using keywords not contained within your pages

6. Do not lie

7. Do not mislead your visitors by hype

8. Do not use a picture instead of a page content

9. Do not use hidden text

10. Do not use remote Java

13 Tricks to Close

1. Update your site constantly, top quality content is essential.

2. Put Meta tag for Robots to revisit after 10-14 days.

3. Create Subscription pages or promotional pages linked to your site from any web space you can get all over the Net.

4. Check your ranking and linking often.

5. Build your web presence ie yours and your business within two main strategies: long-term - Be Seen, short-term: Selling.

6. Make use of every opportunity to promote your site.

7. Check broken links. To get proper ranking is only one part of the job and in fact, the easier. To keep the ranking long-term is the purpose: you cannot keep your high ranking with broken links within your site.

8. If you have to delete a page that is indexed and ranked properly, replace it by some other fast to keep the ranking.

9. If you write articles, often check the sites publishing your articles, keep them fresh and submit more.

10. Advertize individually as many pages of your site as you can, submit them. Strictly check what you give and receive from these traffic exchangers.

11. Start co-operation with the major search engines.

12. Avoid content on your page that you cannot control, ie banner exchanges, page exchanges etc.

13. Keep your site useful by growing yourself, studying, improving your site and adding top items completing your services and products, 'forcing' people to come back, to buy from you.

A Final Note: As soon as you start to do business seriously providing professional, quality services and products, your site will appear automatically on all the search engines and directories because all of these people try hard to provide up-to-date, quality and professional content.

Check the below Chart to see how Search Engines are interlinked and who brings whose results. Click here!

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Irena Whitfield, a profesional Internet Business Consultant is the webmistress of http://www.thecassiopeia.com. If your site does not bring you the income you imagine, get her personal services and make your online presence profitable. Don't wait. Your future starts now. To order her Small Business Manual '7 Stars of Online Success', click here!

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