seo specialist

If you want to boost your online business then you must have a good website. You must have a website that looks superb and attracts visitors and customers. Candidly speaking, most of the visitors prefer the websites having good presentations. That is why; website design makes one of the significant elements for internet marketing and business.

Again the question arises, what makes a good and profitable web design? The best answer for this can be that an effective website design is user-friendly and SEO friendly. These both points must be adequately imbedded into the making and processing of a website.

Features of SEO friendly web design:

Content Management: Content should be unique, attractive and very much relevant. Content makes a great impact on the minds of visitors hence it should be written in the interest of customers and upon the focuses of your website.

User-Friendly: Website must have user-friendly features that makes browsing and navigation easy along with less time consuming.

Presentation: In the times of Web 2.0, presentations and looks have been the key for internet marketing. Presentation involves everything that is graphics, textures, colors, tones and so on.

Technical Aspects: HTML coding, graphic designs, flash, multimedia, alignments and other things combine together to create a unique web design.

Importance of SEO Friendly Web designs:

Better Visibility at the Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.

Popularity and help in building a unique brand image

Direct interaction with visitors and potential customers

Good and Entertaining presentation attracts visitors’ attention

According to the modern Internet trends, SEO friendly web design is must to enhance one’s online business. Get it as soon as possible.

From: by Subhash Kandpalpromotionworld.com

UPLINK WEB DESIGNS & MARKETING

A top exec from an online marketing services company recently asked me if I had any great examples of companies that truly excel at integrated marketing. Sadly, my response was, "No."

Perhaps that's not entirely fair. There are lots of good examples of integrated marketing campaigns. We read about them in the press all the time, and we watch companies and agencies win accolades for them. But the keyword is "campaign." These typically isolated campaigns leverage multiple tactical elements across channels. I'm not aware of any company that's truly integrated in its approach to marketing. Why? Well, truly integrated marketing is hard, darn it...

Fundamental 1: Integrated Marketing Starts With the Customer

When I ask marketers to define "integrated marketing," the word "multichannel" typically comes up very quickly. Many marketers believe that integrated marketing is about message and content consistency across channels. Other marketers take the multichannel idea a bit further, emphasizing that different channels have different strengths and should therefore play different roles in an integrated marketing campaign.

My beef with these definitions? They're inside out; they're from the marketing organization's point of view, not the customer's. A marketing organization that excels at integrated marketing puts the customer at the center of its strategy and executes extremely well across channels and lines of business.

Fundamental 2: Integrated Marketing Emphasizes Customer Processes

Think about it this way. Your customers don't care that you're only responsible for e-mail, not the Web site, direct mail, or call center. When a customer or prospect clicks through an e-mail and lands on your home page, or receives an offer in the mail and calls customer service to inquire further, she expects a seamless handoff. Most integrated marketing examples I learn about (over)emphasize coordinating creative elements instead of understanding and coordinating how each channel and customer touch point helps the customer achieve her goal. The result? For the customer, dead ends and unnecessary frustration. For the company, lost opportunities and damage to the brand.

Fundamental 3: Integrated Marketing Transcends Campaigns

I find that most marketing organizations still think in terms of campaigns and launches or pushes, rather than programs. When it comes to measuring success, these organizations tend to agonize over issues like attribution (i.e., which communication should get credit for generating a response or sale). While I don't mean to minimize the importance of understanding campaign performance, overemphasis on individual campaign performance is a common barrier to integrated marketing. Believe it or not, it's possible to optimize response to individual campaigns to the detriment of the overall program and customer value. Integrated marketing requires that marketers evaluate metrics that transcend an individual campaign, namely customer metrics like engagement, value, and profitability.

Fundamental 4: Integrated Marketing Requires Interaction and Dialogue

Although some marketing organizations are experimenting with trigger-based communications and onsite dynamic content delivery, these tactics pale in comparison to traditional push-marketing tactics. Yet when considered from the outside -- from the customer's perspective -- integrated marketing is inherently two way and responsive to customer behaviors.

Fundamental 5: Integrated Marketing Is a Fusion of Sales, Marketing, and Service

Integrated marketing doesn't stop at the organizational boundaries of the marketing department. Integrated marketing requires an integrated approach to marketing, sales, and service. Does this expand the definition of "integrated marketing"? I think not.

Step back and consider this issue from the customer's perspective. How do customers develop their perspective on the companies and brands with which they do business? And without conducting a major quantitative study, ask yourself: do marketing campaigns or individual interactions with a company have a bigger impact on how customers and prospects perceive your company? I think that's a pretty easy question to answer. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but marketing is responsible for how the company is perceived.

CMOs Must Lead the Way to Integrated Marketing

I realize the implications of what I've outlined here. Integrated marketing is customer-focused marketing. Customer-focused marketing requires relevant communications, interactions, and content, regardless of channel and customer interaction point. That's a tall order and requires an incredibly strong leader. There's a lot of inconsistency in how CMOs perceive themselves and how their job is perceived by others. And senior marketing execs often express frustration with how the marketing function is viewed. CMOs must define and lead a customer-focused marketing strategy that crosses product, channel, geographic, even functional boundaries. Otherwise, they risk losing the customer.

From: clickZ.com by Elana Anderson

UPLINK WEB DESIGNS & MARKETING

Every web publisher wants to attain top positions in the search engines to increase traffic. To attain a high ranking, your site has to be search engine friendly.

Search engine spiders index your web site. They only read the HTML code in your web pages. They don't read graphics, JavaScript code and other scripts and features.

Just a few simple changes to your web pages can give your site a huge search engine boost. Even better, it can bring in ongoing FREE targeted traffic.

It's important to create a search engine friendly site while at the same time keeping your site friendly to your visitors. You want to structure your pages for maximum search engine exposure without compromising the content or look of your site. After all, what good is traffic if your visitors won't read your pages?

Keyword-rich, theme-based web sites will give you both targeted traffic and good search engine ranking.

Here are 10 easy steps you can take to make sure your pages are search engine friendly and user-friendly.

1. Selecting a domain name. There is a lot of disagreement about whether search bots give importance to the keywords in your domain name. I suggest that you select a domain name that indicates what your site is about. Even if it doesn't matter to search engines, it's important that it tells your visitors what the topic of your site is.

2. Focus on one theme. Search engines love specialized content. If you have several topics, then you should create several web sites. The more you focus on one topic, the more your page will be optimized for search engines and the more relevant it will be to your visitors.

3. Create multiple content pages. Make a separate page for each important keyword and key phrase. If, for example, you want your site to come up for the key phrases web consulting, web design, and search engine optimization, make three separate pages. Create a web page for each major keyword. Don't create automated pages just to get search engine exposure. To keep visitors at your site, you have to give them good content. Keyword-rich articles are a good way to optimize your pages for search engines while providing useful content to your visitors.

4. Optimize each content page for ONE of your key phrases. Put your targeted key phrases in your content. Include them in your page title, description tag, ALT image tags, comment tags, and in internal and external links. When providing a title and description in the META tags, your listing may be displayed in the search engine listing as you provide it. Make your titles and descriptions informative and compelling to attract potential buyers to your site. Provide a benefit or solve a problem.

5. Put your keywords in your content. Search engines are looking at how often your keyword appears on a page. That's how they determine relevancy. Short pages provide a larger percentage of keywords and are better for search engine optimization. The keyword density of a Web page is important for search engine optimization. How often you should mention your keyword throughout the text is different for each search engine, but it varies between 3% and 5% of your text. In other words, use your keyword 3-5 times for every 100 words on your page.

6. Naming files and directories. Put important keywords in all file names and directories/folder names describing the content. For example, to promote e-book covers, I name my files ebook-covers.html, cd-covers.html, box-cover.html, etc.

7. Naming graphics. The search bots don't see your graphics but they can see the description of your graphics and navigation buttons in ALT tags (alternative text describing your images for visitors who browse your site with the images turned off). If your navigation links are images, I recommend that you provide text links in addition to the image links for search engine optimization.

8. Navigation. Have your main navigation links on your home page so search engines can follow your links and index your pages. This is just as important for your visitors as for the search engines.

9. Link your pages together. You can easily link to all your pages by creating a sitemap.

10. Directory structure. Put your important files in the first level. Sub-directories that lie deep are more difficult for search engines to scan. Creating a site map for large sites and providing a link to your site map on your home page is a good way to get all your important pages indexed.

Make it easy for search engines to index your site. Apply these simple tips, and you will be well on your way to having a search engine and user-friendly web site!

From: promotionworld.com by Jagmohan Singh Gusain

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The key to running a successful large-scale Web site with a focus on organic search traffic is scale. It is obvious that a site with millions of products cannot be manually managed on a product-by-product basis. You would need a staff of over 1,000 employees and a cost center far beyond anything feasible.

A fair-sized team for an in-house SEO department should, at minimum, consist of one director, one manager, one analytics expert and a strong tie into your public relations team. A team of this size should be able to efficiently drive forward even a site with massive scale.

The team should also be capable of working with other departments to educate co-workers on the value of SEO. When SEO is a large unknown, many people will resist it at first. Getting buy-in from the various stakeholders can make or break your search plans. Getting your co-workers to understand why things work the way they do will get them to fight for you. They will be your eyes and ears, especially when you have a really small team.

Write the Way Your Customers Search

To accomplish an SEO task of epic proportions, you must first start small, and slice your site into two main areas: page types and categories. An example of different page types would be the difference between a category page and a product page. These pages will usually be constructed differently and should allow you to utilize different SEO practices, including writing logical page titles that target your particular search audience based on their searching behaviors.

I recommend looking at tools like Google Trends, so that you can easily identify simple category naming mistakes. For example, the choice between naming a category "MP3 Players" vs. "Digital Media Players" can mean a difference from 7 clicks a day to thousands of clicks per day.

From a keyword perspective, it is imperative that short, distinct product names are used. Search engines will index the page with the exact keywords you have on the page, of course. Many retailers make the mistake of trying to optimize the page for the full manufacturer's product name. For example, a digital camera reseller might use "Nikon D40 Digital Camera with G-II 18-55mm Lens." Not many searchers will ever type this query into Google.

The best product name for this would be Nikon D40. This process can be automated fairly easily, since the manufacturers name and model are already in your database. The extra descriptors should be put in the product description content area. This simple fix can mean as much as a 30-percent lift in organic traffic.

Look Behind the Scenes

Another extremely common pitfall is sloppy code generation. Take a look at any large site and you will see machine-generated white spaces, poorly closed tables, div tags and my favorite, meaningless comment tags. This usually is creating extra code that has no real value and will make the page load time longer, which is not a good user experience. In general, if you pay attention to the minute details, they will add up to big successes in the long run.

Data center setup is a show-stopper; it's amazing what your operations department is capable of unintentionally messing up. In some cases, I have seen operations block spiders because they were coming into the site too often. Another common operations nightmare is IP-based redirection to single nodes, when they route spider traffic to a slower subset of servers. When that happens, it will indicate a much higher latency to Google, and can possibly damage your rankings. If you think about it, why would Google want to rank a site that is going to provide an extremely slow user experience when a faster one is right around the corner?

Measure Your Results

Once you start getting things underway, it is critically important to track your progress. With extremely large sites, this can be a very difficult task, but it can also start with something as simple as a spreadsheet with a small sample of your keywords. If you are using an outside vendor for Web analytics, you will quickly find that their ability to handle your specific needs will be scarce. Therefore, a custom metrics strategy will become a high priority and you could be pouring an incredible amount of money into this project.

When it comes to analytics, be prepared to scale immediately. You will quickly find that when you combine traffic, ranking samples, and revenue and conversion data together, it becomes almost unmanageable. Thus, a large-scale database is necessary – so don't skimp out!

Go for the best, or you will be frustrated with speed, availability and data loss problems. Consider hiring a business intelligence expert to come in and build this system. The specific level of knowledge required to design and maintain this type of system is massive and should not be taken lightly.

Building an in-house SEO team can be a daunting task, especially for large organizations. With proper planning, the experience becomes more manageable, and success becomes more likely. The important thing to remember when planning such a big project is to start small, and pay attention to the smaller details within the larger project.

From: searchenginewatch.com by Aaron Shear

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On the Google scale of projects, the search giant’s newly launched online encyclopedia Knol ranks as relatively minor. But for some, it’s a stretch – not technologically, but ethically.

Google has over the years expanded its Web presence beyond the familiar search box. With each foray into content, it raises concerns about conflict of interest with its original function as unbiased search engine – concerns that Google search would be disposed to point to Google content first.

“This is a step too far,” says Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land. “Google’s job started out being a service that points people to other information, and that remains their primary job – not to be providing the information themselves.”

The company now controls the leading online video site YouTube, owns a major blogging platform, and has advertising inventory on millions of external pages thanks to AdSense and DoubleClick.

Like most search engines, Google keeps secret the algorithms that rank search results, meaning that users are left to trust the company not to favor its own burgeoning content over others.

“I would prefer that a search engine keep church and state separate,” says Jay Bhatti, co-founder of Spock.com, a people search engine. “You can’t choose to be a content creator as well as a content aggregator that impartially sends people to data sources. It’s very tough.”

Google has moved into some areas of content because few other companies can undertake projects of such scale, such as digitizing the world’s books. Other times, it dabbles in publishing mainly to improve its search functionality.

In the case of Knol, says Mr. Sullivan, the project overlaps needlessly with existing online encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, Citizendium, and Squidoo.
“They really didn’t need to do Knol,” says Sullivan. “What you really want sometimes is for Google to say no to itself.”

A Wikipedia alternative
Launched in beta form two weeks ago, Knol allows anyone to write encyclopedia pages. Unlike Wikipedia, each page, or knol, will have a signed author and may include his or her point of view. Outsiders can make edits if approved by the author. The setup fixes some perceived weaknesses of Wikipedia, namely the blandness of group writing and the ability of vandals to wreck an entry.

Another difference: The author may put advertising on the knol, with revenues shared by the author and Google.

Within days of Knol’s launch, some knols showed up in Google’s top 10 search results for certain keyword queries – something observers like Sullivan consider an unusually rapid rise to prominence.

Other red flags went up. Search expert Aaron Wall demonstrated that content could be “scraped” off another page – say from Wikipedia – dumped onto a knol, and show up higher on Google’s search results than the original. What’s more, a Google algorithm clearly noted the original page, but still ranked the knol higher.

“Let’s say I’m the nefarious type. How long does it take me to see that Knol outranked the original source before I … grab hundreds of thousands of pieces of content on the Web, upload them to Knol, and add AdSense to it?” says Mr. Wall, author of SEO Book, a search engine optimization guide at seobook.com.

A Google spokesperson countered that the company has “strong and robust” ways of establishing authorship and discouraging plagiarism. The Knol community of users will have tools to flag abuses, and plagiarized authors can file a take down notice that Google “will then investigate and act upon.”

As for the high ranking of some knols, a Google software engineer named Matt Cutts publicly responded in a blog that these floated to the top because of their placement on the Knol front page, thereby becoming highly visibile. Some knols ranked highly in Yahoo, he added, but “that doesn’t mean that Yahoo is boosting Knol.”

Despite the concerns, there is no conclusive evidence that Google has ever favored its own content.

A company spokesperson said Google is committed to keeping its search operations and content projects separate, and any content it owns will be treated by the search team the same as any other.

Google also points out it would not make sense for it to jeopardize public trust in its searches, which makes up the foundation of their business.

Ensuring search transparency
Discussions in the tech community, however, have been percolating over better search engine transparency. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is experimenting with a transparent search engine. In January, he launched Wikia Search, an engine built on open source algorithms – a radical concept Google won’t be adopting.

“We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do. There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse,” writes Udi Manber, a Google vice president of engineering, on a company blog devoted to greater openness. If Google’s search algorithms were known, he argues, people would game the system.

The search engine Spock, meanwhile, found it easiest to simply limit itself to search, says Mr. Bhatti, after partners balked at the possible competition. If Google’s going to do both, he says, it needs to assure users the two are separate.

Sullivan proposes that Google hire an ombudsman – somebody who would have full access to investigate complaints and report back to the public. A variation on that theme, put forward by Jeff Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy, would be a third-party task force that could both vouch for integrity without divulging specifics.

“When you dominate search in such a way, then you need to go the extra mile … to assure the public,” says Mr. Chester. “At the end of the day, Google’s job is to serve the advertisers with the largest budgets.”

Mr. Wales says he trusts Google at this point. “If someone in Google said link to Knol first, we’d hear about it because it would really cut against the ideology of everyone who works at Google.”

That said, as Google grows stronger, the concerns naturally increase. While Wales wouldn’t want a mandated ombudsman, “I think it would be good business sense for Google to offer.”

From: csmonitor.com

UPLINK WEB DESIGNS & MARKETING