Blogs + RSS: The Next Big Thing to Increase Web Traffic

July 26th, 2007 | Posted by Ben Keogh

The phenomenal growth and popularity of RSS feeds and their communication partner - the blog, are both real deal Web marketing tools. Creation of Blogs through their distribution channels - RSS feeds could be the fastest and easiest way to increase your Web traffic!

Blogs are web publishing systems which give us an easy way to create web pages in real time. While on the other hand, RSS feeds are a way to share the headlines of your blog with others without having to visit your website or blog. RSS feeds can then expose your headlines far beyond the borders of your web blog and tantalize others to visit your blog now and often. (more…)

Website Submission 101

July 19th, 2007 | Posted by Ben Keogh

So you have created your website, made it appealing and user-friendly, and now all you need is to submit it to several search engines. But you have some questions on what to do first when submitting your website. This article will help you understand on proper website submission to several search engines that will help you improve rankings that will help you with your web career.

“Search engine submission” refers to the act of getting your website listed with search engines. Another term for this is “Search engine registration”. Getting listed does not mean that you will necessarily rank well for particular terms, but it simply means that the search engine knows your pages exist. One concrete example of this is the lottery; search engine submission is like buying a lottery ticket, but having it does not mean that you will win right away, but having that ticket gets you the chance to win the lottery prize.

Preparation

Do not be too excited to get on public without double checking and preparing first the important things. It is better that your website will be tested than having errors later. After all, you want your page to look its best before the search engines grab hold of it, right?

This preparation means that you have written a 25 words or less description of your entire website. That description should make use of the two or three key terms that you hope to be found for. Another tip for this is; it is essential that the description you write do not make use of marketing language, which editors dislike.

Then follow by rechecking your code, both HTML and CSS. It includes meta-tags to ensure that the title, meta-description and meta-keywords properly describe your webpages and have some of your desired keywords in it. This process of cleaning involves triple checking that all the codes are accurate and do not report errors. Things may have changed since you started messing with the content from your first tests. Take time to review your site to consolidate, streamlining and optimizing your code so the page will load faster.

When you want to submit your site manually to directories, you should prepare some requested information to speed up the process. You have to write or type out the following information about your site and keep it handy as a reference. You can use a text editor like the MS Notepad to copy and paste the requested information and save the data before going and submitting to the different search engines and directories. Here are the needed website reference information:

Pages to Submit

Search Engines vs. Directories

Perhaps we should differentiate first search engines from directories before we continue our discussion. There is a big confusion between the two. Many users do not know and this is not surprising, as most sites that started as a directory, incorporate search engine results (like Yahoo) and most search engines also use data from directories (like Google). To the amateur, it all looks the same. However, for webmasters and site owners understanding the distinction between the two is vital.

Search engines have databases built up by “robots”, which visit a websites and add information to their database. On the other hand, directories are human edited and build their indexes with editors who visit websites, and add to the directory the sites that they consider to be a valuable resource. In addition, directories use “websites” as their building block compared to search engines, as they use a “webpage” as their building block. Example, if the web was a library, then Directories would be a catalog of books, while the Search Engines would be the index of the books.

Submission

Here are the following helpful tips for your website submission:

  1. Submitting your website to every search engine is an incredible time-consuming process. There are hundreds and hundreds of them out there. However, if you have come across the companies who will submit your website to 1,000 search engines for you, it will be fine. Search engine professionals know that the vast majority of these search engines have a very low usage rate and will drive hardly any traffic your way. In fact, it is only a handful of search engines that drive the majority of traffic from search engines to websites.
  2. It is a good thing if you submit your homepage to the major search engines manually, without any special tool at all for you to ensure that it will be submitted successfully. The absolute best way to get listed with the major search engine listed below is to build links to your website. Indeed, this is the best way to get listed for free with all the major crawlers. Crawlers follow links, so if you have good links pointing at your website, the crawlers are more likely to find and include your pages. Here is the good news: if you submitted your site to the major directories and got listed with one of them, then major search engines and other crawlers will almost certainly pick up the URL that was listed. This means you may not need to do additional work to get listed with crawlers. Here are the major search engines to submit your site:
        • Submit your site to Google
        • Submit your site to Yahoo!
        • Submit your site to MSN
        • Submit your site to Teoma
        • Submit your site to AltaVista
        • Submit your site to Teoma
        • Submit your site to Fast
  3. Despite the rise in paid participation programs offered by search engines, free search engine submission is still possible and good, like the FreeWebSubmission.com. However, using the paid programs that are offered will speed up the listing process and almost positively generate more search engine related traffic for your website.
  4. You can also submit to the Open Directory. It is a web directory of Internet resources managed by humans, something like a huge reference library. The good news is that submission is absolutely free; bad news is that this means there is no guaranteed turnaround time to getting a yes or no answer about whether you’ve been accepted. If you are accepted, you should see your site appear within about a month. If this does not happen, then you should resubmit. Just go to dmoz.org and read all their rules first and follow them closely before you submit, it really helps with your backlinks and overall relevancy as a website.
  5. You could also try to submit to important directories. But if you are not familiar with them you should try browsing before you fill out their forms and submitting your site. Have a paper and pen as you browse, and write down directory paths of where you want to be. Here are the following major directories:

Does your Domain Name Really Matter?

July 12th, 2007 | Posted by Ben Keogh

Just like any business, your domain name is your identity. Think of it as your online business card. If you are serious about marketing your products and services on the internet, do it right from the start.

What are domain names?

Domain names are hostnames that provide more easily memorable names to stand in for numeric IP addresses. In fact, this reminds us a little bit of phone numbers. Would not it be easier for us to dial M-C-D-O-N-A-L-D-S instead of having to remember their ten digit phone number?

They are sometimes colloquially (and incorrectly) referred to by marketers as “Web addresses”. The following examples illustrate the difference between a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and a domain name:

URL:
http://www.comunica-group.com/

Domain name:
comunica-group.com

Domain names can contain numbers and letters, plus the hyphen. And the domain name can contain up to 67 characters.

Top level domains

We also have this domain name extensions or what we call the Top Level Domain (TLD), which is always either one of a small list of generic names (three or more characters), or a two characters territory code. It is the letter combination to the right of the domain name, after the “dot”. Therefore, a domain name like comunica-group.com has what we call a “.com” (read as “dot com”) extension. You will also find others:

Does it really matter?

A big YES! is the answer. A good domain name is an asset especially if you have your own domain name. Why? Because of the following reasons:

Tips in choosing and creating a good domain name

What is the Business Value of Web Standards?

July 5th, 2007 | Posted by Ben Keogh

Adopting Web standards can be good for your business. This article will give us a better view in terms of how good Web standards affect your company. There are a lot of benefits, although some businesses are reluctant to invest in standards-based Web sites without concrete reasons. The World Wide Consortium (W3C) develop a strict set of guidelines that ensures your site is accessible to everyone, deliverable to a variety of devices and returns more on your investment in the long-term. Here are some of the business values of Web Standards:

Improve your image, increase your returns

By choosing to adopt Web standards you are telling your customers that you:

Be ahead of your competitors

Because few companies are aware of standards, they really have thought about their impact, or have invested resources into taking a full lead of its benefits; there is an opportunity for you and your company to grab a competitive advantage.

Web standards are designed to be extended and added to and to work together with future growth in mind. They are a good way for you to invest in the future because they enable you to:

Good amount of traffic

Another benefit of well constructed standards based Web sites is that as well as being accessible to your customers, often it will also be more accessible to search engines. Poorly structured inaccessible Web sites can often mean that some of the relevance of your text is misinterpreted by search engines. This means you could be losing out in search engine listings. By having clean structured Web standards , you are helping to ensure that your site (and its keywords) are correctly represented in search engines and is considered more relevant than non-standards based sites in your industry that will result to good amount of traffic.

Increase audience reach

Your site will automatically be available to previously ignored audiences if your site meets accessibility and internalization standards and guidelines.

Big savings

You will have big savings for time , effort and money. Using standards ensures that your Web site is flexible for development and maintenance since well-written standards-compliant code is concise, clean and clear. This means a great deal of time , labor and money you can save during initial developments, redesigning and daily maintenance.

Web standards bring real tangible benefits to business. By moving to a standards-based W eb site , businesses can ensure they have accessible sites which are maintainable and future proofed. Increased engine prominence can improve the level of business that comes to you via your Web site. Using Web standards is not the only best practice and good corporate citizenship, but it also opens up opportunities for a larger and more loyal customer base, which can only benefit your bottom line.