Welcome to Part:2 of online marketing tips from Hexahost.

We will concentrate more on site design and content in view of Search engines. Search engines are constantly evolving their process of indexing pages to give the most relevant results. Since this process is changing all the time the methods used for SEO are also changing constantly to keep up. Web way is not a winning way for many web site owners. A online Research says almost 20% of registered domain names are not used, in the remaining 40% of them have only single digit visitors per day. Learn about basic simple techniques from us, and enjoy with your share of success.
 

Today we are going to discuss important part of search engine optimization in view of website design and content

1. Traditional Layout based Design – Too many images, arranged in sequence in table. Make sure content do not add too many delay in page loading, page caching, and page indexing. Use more of text than images. Search engines do not understand images in indexing your website against keywords.

2. Content Management System  based Design – A dynamic approach to website design. Site map generators are must. Use of non meaningful pages has to be avoided. Permalinks are supported by almost all popular CMS.

3. Flash or No Flash – SE don’t understand flash too. It is only eye catcher. Strike the balance between user look and feel against search engine friendliness. In flash there is no text, everything is symbol and images.  Adobe yet use a tag accepted by W3 in flash. To a limited extent Flash can be made to be almost as competitive in the search engine results as a standard HTML page. However the work required to get it there is several times more.If you don’t want to spend a lot of time in making your site more accessible to search engines you can bypass a lot of the more clever stuff by writing the Flash component into the page using JavaScript and then providing a HTML version of the page using a <noscript> tag.

4.  Simple  vs Complex Design – Engage your customer/visitor/users in a simple possible way. Light weight codes which takes minimal load from server side and interact well on client side is the trend now.

5. Site navigation – Few main links from home page, each page connects to home page and important pages are good enough. Do not allow orphan pages. Orphan pages will do nothing in front of SE.

6. Scroll bar – Allow your site to utilize the first screen experience in a best possible way. Utilize horizontal space well. Let the main message occupy best of space. less usage of scroll bar at client end should be the aim.

7. Java Script – Do not include 3rd party scripts without understanding the real meaning of what is what ? Scripts can greatly decrease the “crawlability” of the links. Currently, most search engines will not follow the links embedded inside of JavaScript code (including rollovers and menus), or they will greatly limit the types of JavaScript-embedded links they will crawl.Some JavaScript code is more search-engine friendly than others. As a general rule of thumb, the simpler the script is, the more likely a search engine spider will be able to crawl the link.

8.  Images – Less images and more text is  a SE friendly technique. Every image TAG should have alt text attached.

9.  Site Load time – Check where your hosting provider is located. Your hosted server should have world wide rechability with least possible latency. At least make sure it targeted region has less latency. Plenty of online tools available to measure the same.

10.  Site map – Important step in making your site search engine friendly. XML based approach are quite popular.

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Welcome to the first article of our Online Marketing series. Here we gonna talk about the first step in online marketing “Selecting a Domain Name”.  Creating a website and optimizing your website for search engines is lot easier if you are careful in selecting a domain name. This article will help you to “Appropriate domain name” for your business.

1. Decide your audience before domain name

Let us assume your target audience will be looking for food recipes in your website, then having words like ‘recipe’ or ‘cook’ or ‘cooking’ or ‘cooks’ or ‘taste’  in domain name is a good idea. If your website talks about even more specific category of cooking like ‘Baking’ or ‘Roasting’ or ‘Broyling’ or ‘grilling’ or ‘barbecue’ or ‘fry’ will be even better. Let us try with these combination and check the availability of Domains. Let us assume ‘John’ is your name and you are looking for a Domain name for a recipe website/Blog.

At the time of writing this article:

JOHNCOOKS.COM

JOHNRECIPE.COM

JOHNBAKES.COM

JOHNROASTS.COM

JOHNEYROAST.COM  (resembles Cricket player Jonty Rhodes) were available.

Just apply your mind; you will get a good Domain name.

2. Select a meaningful domain name

Do not try to fill up your domain name. Look-4-Chicken-recipes-online.com is a very bad idea.  At the time of writing this article, I searched Google for “worst domain name” and it gives 14,500,000 results.

 
Top 3 from that list.

Top 10 worst Domain Names
20 more unfortunate Domain names
worst-company-urls

 

3. Do not use Dashed (-) Domain Names

Few years before domain name itself was a significant ranking factor. Now a days search engines like Google do not read the words in your web address.  If some one already registered johncooks.com and active on the internet, john-cooks.com or john-cooking.com is a very bad idea to grab traffic of johncooks.com for a domain name. By doing this you are indirectly promoting johncooks.com rather than your own john-cooks.com. If your Business sense is not long term you need to avoid Dashed-Domain-Names.

4. Avoid numbers in your domain names if you can

If you really like to use numbers , then use it sensibly. For Example easy2shop.com or easy2cook.com is better than shopeasy892.com. Shopeasy247.com or shop247.com makes sense, if your website reflects your 24 / 7 Business.

A good examples of numbered domain names :  1and1.com

5. TLD (Top Level Domain)

A domain name “extension” is called a “top-level domain (TLD).” These are divided into three different categories: generic top-level domains (gTLD), country code top-level domains (ccTLD) and infrastructure top-level domains. .com .net are examples of gTLD. .co.uk, .us, .in, .co.in are examples for ccTLD.

 
Some regional search engines or indexes will only list sites which are registered in their country code. If your site caters to a specific country then buying a domain using the local country code is a good idea. Some search engines will still show your site in regional based search results if your site is hosted within that country or have your address and phone number in the page text, but many directories are extremely picky and will only list regional domains. As search progresses localization of results will become more common. Some of the major search engines already give sites a regional ranking boost based upon where the site is hosted and the domain extension.
 
It’s a common practice to have a .com and/OR .net version of your domain and forwarding them to your ccTLD domain. By doing this you will not loose any Search engine traffic targeted on your business.
 
Just think and apply these best practices. You will get your valuable domain name, which is an online identity of your Business. Guard your brand in choosing the domain name. All the best on your Domain name Hunt.
 

References

http://www.wikipedia.com
http://independentsources.com
http://www.webreference.com/
http://www.seobook.com/

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Dear Reader,


Thanks for visiting our Blog. Hexahost is starting it’s new series of articles on Online marketing. This new series will serve you to develop and popularize your own products through Email, Blogs and Social Media.


The new series will focus on the following topics and more :


Creating a good looking website
Optimizing your website for Search engines
Popularize your websites
Creating and linking your Blog and website
Creating a Mailing list
Creating a Opt-in Database for your Mailing list
Creating your Social Media presence
Developing your social networks
Linking your Blog, Website, Mailing lists and Social Networks
Growing with Blog, Website, Mailing lists and Social Networks
… and much more
 
Keep watching this section for more Updates…

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