When you create your first website or when you buy an existing website or web business my advice to you is don’t get too caught up in the design. I’m not saying that a nice looking website isn’t important but I don’t believe its the most important thing.

You can have the ugliest, simplest site in the world but if you’re selling something people want, a product or information people will pretty much overlook how your site looks provided you solve their problem and solve it fast.

To me, what you write is the key. Generally speaking people are more likely to be moved to buy by words rather than pictures. There are lots of websites with pictures of fancy houses, cars and exotic beaches but I think these type of images are less effective than they used to be. For that reason I’d suggest you focus on what you are writing as much as you can.

So far as the writing is concerned on your website I’d suggest paying particular attention to any headlines and sub headings. People like to skim. They are checking to see if the website they have come to (yours) is going to give them the information or product that they want. They’re busy people, they maybe at work, so tell them what you can do for them fast!. If you’re heading or even the website domain itself tells them the story even better. For example, take the domain icuredmyeczema.com – i think you’ll agree that you pretty much know what it’s going to be about just from the domain. Add that to a compelling headline and sub headings and your chances of success have just got a lot better.

Until next time

Tim Wilde

Search engine optimization (SEO), simply explained, is the process of arranging a webpage’s content in a manner to enhance its chances of being identified by search engines. For this the content can be reworded and its location on the webpage rearranged. Each search engine has specific keywords that it uses for locating websites and by ensuring that the webpage has a higher number of these relevant words, the webpage increases its chances of coming up in the search engine’s search. The entire aim of search engine optimization is to improve a webpage’s listing and to leverage this to have a greater flow of traffic via the search engines.

There are several kind of searches such as for web pages, images, documents, etc. Ensuring that your website is well structured according to the search engine requirements is a task best undertaken while it is being designed as it helps make the website search engine-friendly. Going back and altering the structure according to the relevant requirements is a more expensive, longer and more tedious process.

Crawlers are used by engines such as Google, Yahoo etc. These crawlers have different criteria when they search for web pages. While coding and restructuring will increase a webpage’s visibility on a search engine, certain methods are considered negative by these search engines and they attempt to block them or at the least reduce their effect on a webpage’s’ hierarchy.

For instance spamdexing, which involves various means to increase the relevant content of a webpage, is considered to be harmful and may lead to temporary blocking of the webpage. For the people searching for a webpage, the results at the top of the page and starting from the left are seen to receive maximum attention.
Certain useful techniques include avoiding using Flash as it is difficult for search engines to index Flash pages. Keywords tags are also not given much relevance by search engines as this was one of the methods employed to increase a webpage’s relevance. The title tag is crucial and is key in making the webpage relevant during the search engine’s trawling.
Regularly updating the website’s content is a good way to pop up in the search result. This is because search engines are regularly trawling the Internet for new content. Short and relevant URLs for the website are great as is not having several URLs for the same website – something that confuses the search engines.
Google, the dominant search engine worldwide, does not accept payments to include webpage’s in the results of its search. Its organic search results are free of cost for the webpages. Certain search engines such as Yahoo! Guarantee crawling by their search engine for either a fixed fee or based on cost per click.
While search engine optimization is a critical online marketing tool, it cannot be completely relied upon owing to the fact that organic searches are free and the algorithms used to crawl through webpages change.