Thursday, October 18, 2007

Must Have Features Your Web Site

Must Have SEO Features Your Web Site

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

Conrad Sear - http://KismetSEO.com

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

Conrad Sear - http://KismetSEO.com and http://SEO50.com

Thursday, August 16, 2007

SEO yourself with 5 easy methods

So you want to Search Engine Optimize (SEO) your website.

Well, despite what you may hear it's easy & fun.

The caveat is time. In such a "fast food" "I want it now" mode, the web gives us just that. So why does SEO take TIME? The answer is the millions of others out there fighting for the top spots has created a niche industry by the search engines. They want to thwart the unethical scammers out there. So, we have to follow their requirements so that millions can see my website. Sure you can pay to be in the very first position. But that costs money. Capitalism at is finest.

The early days are long gone. Laws are in place now. Laws made by Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

So the simple advice is, know the laws. Ignorance will not get your site seen by anyone but you.

Follow the slow steady path & you'll be richer for it.

5 sure methods:

1. Your reading it now. ARTICLES! Write articles about your field of interest. Relate it to your website. Set these articles across the internet. Content is KING.

2. Content. You must add some relevant content to your site. It keeps the search engines & people coming back for more.

3. Links. Links are not a dead art form. Links from other sites will always help you. They help bring people to your site & help search engines see that you are popular. However, find related industry linkage. It is highly sought by Google.

When linking find high ranked sites willing to add your link. Try not to buy if you can help it. If you must, okay. But this is the only Quick Fix I recommend.

4. Another domain. Set up another domain with lots & lots of content & links. Keep the them & info related to your main site. Add your main site links. There, you've created your own network!

5. Patience. You don't get to the top overnight. (unless you pay) Submit (manually) to as many search engines & directories as possible. Do this every 30 days.

So, this works. Caveat: Do you have the time? Expect 30-40 days until your in the top 5-10 pages.

Have patience & good luck.
by Conrad Sear

Kismet SEO & SEM

SEO- Search engine Optimization. The latest buzz words. There is now magic bullet. The truth is, there are basic fundamentals that need to be implemented & maintained. To Achieve long term success in Search Engine rankings you must constantly maintain the basics & learn to adapt to many changes. Market, Alogorithyms, competition, etc.