Yesterday I went for my car servicing. While there wasn’t much except mileage problem (my car gives almost 10 km per liter), I was surprised when I was told the service guys have numerous check list that they need to follow even if not reported – for example AC checking, motor checking, car chassis checking etc.

This made me realize sometimes our websites too needs a “service” every six months like our cars.

Some of the things you could look in your website every six months are:

1. Outdated content – check to see if the site has any content that is outdated, needs correction, or needs some tweaking etc. This will help your site be always fresh.

2. Check for dead links – (dead links are links to non-existing pages) sometimes we remove pages or move them to different locations – sometimes external pages we link to are moved/removed, but we forget that there may be some links in our website linking to them. Once a page is moved all links pointing to it are dead. And dead links are hated by the search engines and your visitors too as they frustrate them – thus affecting SEO. Checking bad links every six months is a good way to keep your site with zero dead links. Also check for outgoing dead links (links to other websites not owned by you). Remember dead links affects SEO in a negative way – whether they are internal or external.

NOTE: Of course if the site is big you may need software to check dead links to save time. There are many online available, just search for it.

3. Check your website design – It could be that your website design needs a change especially if you think the conversions are poor. Have a chat with people you know or your friends, let people see your website and give their opinion. You will be surprised with their opinions.

Do you have any idea of servicing your website every six month?

Just like the age-old adage – “What came first – the chicken or the egg?”, a different question is doing the round these days. What is more important on the Internet – the web design or the SEO? This is the million-dollar question on everybody’s lips who are involved in online business ventures. However, it is not difficult to understand that both of them are important and go hand-in-hand to produce a resoundingly successful website.

The 2 types of web designs are the static and dynamic. The former is developed on the basis of the HTML code whereas the latter is based on advanced, complex and sophisticated technologies. Since the Web is a visual interface, people’s minds will reinterpret and manipulate the information presented in front of them. One has to be careful while using color effects, lights, positioning and size of contents and the visual effects. Web design is important from the conversion point of view – to convert the initial curious visitors into serious buyers of services, thus generating business for the website. A professional, aesthetically pleasing website converts more visitors into business prospects than an elementary, novice designed one. The design layout is the first thing that grabs attention and holds the visitor’s interest. But attraction works only up to a certain point. If there is no substance beyond the style, it would act in the detrimental interests of the website and actually drive the visitors away. The website may look great but you would be spending a small fortune on Ad words to generate traffic and ultimately an SEO expert’s services would be called for salvaging the situation.

SEO is the process of increasing traffic volume and traffic quality with regard to a website from various search engines via organic search results, targeting different kinds of search such as image search, industry specific vertical search, and local search engines, thus enabling web presence for the website.

SEO is important from the traffic point of view – it is the first thing that actually allows your website to come up on the search engine results. Once the initial presence has been felt and the initial traffic generated, it will further result in increased volumes later on. If the content is irrelevant or spammy in nature, no one will want to take it seriously. When constructed with specific tactics in mind, the extra hard work in SEO set up (META tag writing, keyword research, keyword rich content) will pay rich dividends in future.

It is an effective Internet marketing strategy taking into account what people search for and how search engines work. It involves editing the website content and HTML and coding to make it more relevant to specific keywords and gives access to indexing activities of the search engines.

Both SEO and web design are equally important and relevant but if I had to choose, I would definitely pick SEO over the web design aspect. Once the site starts generating traffic, one can analyze the data and feedback, understand the needs of the visitors and change accordingly, by altering or restructuring the design of the website to make it more visitor-friendly and improve conversion rates.

What do you think? SEO or Web Design – which one comes first?

Websites are generally present because people have put them out for a particular objective. In some cases, people are interested in putting out their views to the general public through web logs that are commonly known as blogs. A lot of celebrities and media personalities like to interact with their fans and propagate their ideas through websites. This is also true of many professionals as well as religious leaders who want their views as well as sermons to reach the largest audience possible in order to spread their views far and wide. The objective of a website is to garner the maximum number of eyeballs in the best interests of the website. There are other sites also that are geared towards e-commerce or online marketing. These websites have been created with the express idea of providing means to advertise goods and services that can be used by the public to make orders and buy online. These online marketing sites generally have online forms in order to enable people to make online purchases and increase their revenue. A good example of this is companies like www.amazon.com or www.traverus.com in the realms of online sales.

However one needs to keep in mind that just having a website is not enough. Whatever be your goal – brand building, information distribution, advertising, lead generation, sales or service – a website needs visitors. Without visitors a website is a waste resource.

If you are a big brand like Google, Yahoo, CNN etc people may type your URL in the web browser and reach your site, else you may need to advertise your site.

There are two major ways to get visitors – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC). Both these methods involve money and time.

The way most sites reach out to a wider audience is by way of search engine optimization (SEO), which essentially refers to the effective use of keywords. A majority of web surfers get to websites through search engines like Google.com as well as Yahoo.com. These sites crawl up or look at various websites that have the particular keywords, which the surfer has used to search for information online. These sites have certain complex algorithms or Meta search formulae that are used to assign specific ranks to the websites based on the usage of the keywords. For instance, if you look up the terms “Indian curry recipes”, you will find a listing of various sites that have these keywords. The reason of such a result is search engine optimization that helps sites get better ranked on basis of how well certain key words or phrases have been used in their web pages.

It is said that websites ranked 1-10 or at most between 1-20 have a much better chance of attracting traffic, which is why SEO is indeed such a great business as well as training proposition. SEO experts are indeed in great demand as they can influence immensely the way a website is ranked and thus the amount of traffic that a site is able to garner online. It is indeed no wonder that there are so many sites and online groups that are quite dedicated to ensuring better SEO knowledge and information dissemination to SEO enthusiasts and students.

SEO is an exciting field of work and study in today’s context. A lot of researchers are working day and night to come up with new strategies to enhance SEO effectiveness. There are whole new companies that have mushroomed with the express objective to provide SEO related services online. If you are looking to outsource SEO services you must be very careful before doing business without knowing about the history of any SEO company. Google has also written some questions you need to ask before hiring an SEO. I quote:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?
• How do you measure your success?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• What’s your experience in my country/city?
• What’s your experience developing international sites?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been in business?
• How can I expect to communicate with you?
• Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

Good SEO experts critically look at online content and revise it based on keyword research as well as HTML editing with a view to enhancing search rankings. While no one can guarantee that their services will surely give you a number one ranking, it is true that an optimized site will have a better ranking than the one which has not been search engine optimized.

The concept of pay per click (PPC) is also linked to the objective of increasing traffic to a website. In very simple terms, pay per click means that an online marketing company would pay to the website a particular amount based on the traffic that the site brings to the site of the marketer. For instance, if you have a tie-up with Yahoo.com and have agreed to pay them $0.10 per visitor that you get on your site through yahoo, you would have to pay up $1.00 for 10 clicks ($0.10 * 10 = $1).

Pay per click can also have various levels and different kinds of arrangements with various sites based on the kind and volume of traffic that you get from the site that is more visible and well known. You could also differentiate between sites by paying more for sites that bring greater effectiveness into the traffic on your site as compared to less effective ones. PPC is a very effective and quite commonly used means of getting targeted traffic.

While SEO does show results, you can rest assured that targeted PPC is much more effective in attracting web traffic. When you go about further incentivizing your customers to view your website, you will find an exponential increase in the web traffic and that too so fast that it will belie your wildest expectations. No wonder the whole world is going absolutely gaga over PPC and its results. The moot point here is that both in SEO as well in PPC, one cannot underestimate the utility of keyword research in driving traffic. The only difference is that with PPC, one cannot depend on two word keywords. You will need a set of long word keywords that are not being searched up by competitors so that your position is unparalleled and unmatched as compared to what the competition is up to.

PPC keyword research is quite an exact science. You have to know a lot about which words to pair and which to eliminate in order to achieve the most optimized and suitable results. Of course there are many tools available to help you do keyword research. Apart from the tool, a lot of this also happens with time and through trial and error, meaning that the results cannot be quick fix or ‘in-a-jiffy’ answers. One also has to be an accomplished PPC keyword research expert and not just an SEO expert in order to bring about the very best results. For instance, if you have a client who is selling various computer products including accessories, peripherals as well as software products, it would not be possible to actually run a PPC on each and every one of the computer products as that would be too wide a net leading to diffused results. The PPC keyword expert would do the keyword tests by using the word computer in conjunction with various other words like accessories, peripherals or software in order to achieve the best results and thus eliminate those combinations that are sub-optimal. So, there lies the essence of researching PPC for SEO purposes.

One interesting fact is that SEO is more popular than PPC. One of the major reasons why I think SEO is more popular than PPC is that the human nature of thinking that free is good and better. I do agree through SEO one can get free visitors, but it may take a long time before someone sees results. Compare this to PPC – it can bring instant traffic, though you may have to pay for every visitor irrespective of whether there is a sale or not. In the long run may be SEO is profitable, but it can be debated whether each and every site can generate that much traffic required to stay in business through SEO only.

Website owners who realize this therefore “try” both SEO and PPC to generate traffic and track results to invest more time, money and energy where the returns are the most.

Its debatable whether SEO is better or PPC. If you ask me I would suggest first try PPC. Get to know the keywords that can bring good returns for your site and then concentrate on only those keywords for SEO purposes.

Recommended Reading:

1. SEO vs PPC Whitepaper

2. SEO vs PPC – Cases

What do you say? SEO or PPC?

I remember during the 2002-2005 internet marketing era, forums were a must have to create a “buzz” and keep your visitors coming back for more and more. However end 2005 blogs came in and good old days of forums took a back seat. But the fact is even today forums are not dead. Some websites still have it. Some examples:

Search Engine Watch Forums

Digital Point Forums

SEO Chat Forums

Web Master World Forums

It is evident that forums are not dead, though they are not so popular as they were a few years back.

Just for your information, the big hit today in internet marketing is Social Networking. Though in my experience social networking is good for branding but not for direct sales.

Anyways coming back to forums.

The battle for eyeballs is indeed a very big challenge when it comes to websites. When you have a website, it’s quite understandable that you would like to reach out to the maximum number of people in the online world with news and views that could interest them. Unless you have an extremely topical or interest specific portal, the general idea is to make your portal or blog so attractive that it generates fairly high traffic. You could feel that you have the best portal but if it’s not getting any hits, the whole purpose of the website would be defeated immediately.

Among others, forums can be a useful and effective way of directing traffic to your site or blog. Forums are generally an online community of users who log into or are registered with a website and then choose to subscribe to the online forum or discussion board as it is sometimes also known by. Forums could be quite topical, or interest and hobby based. For instance, if you are on a church portal, you could have forums dedicated to charity, online counseling, and matrimonial forums to name a few.

Once you are listed on a forum, the idea is to gain the confidence of the existing forum members and establish yourself as a credible member. Knowledge is power and if you take the trouble to make your knowledge known to others, people will be interested in interacting with you. This in turn will increase the chances of their visiting your website. For instance, if you are on a forum of mushroom growers, you can answer forum member’s queries on mushrooms and gain the respect of listed members. In time, you could guide them to your website or blog on mushroom cultivation, thereby increasing the traffic to your site.

If you start a Yahoo Group, you have the option of placing the URL link of your site at the end so that interested members can visit your site. As the moderator of a forum, you have some unique privileges as it gives you a head start in terms of your credibility and acceptance by other forum members. Your opinion carries weight and you do wield some power over the proceedings and direction of the forum. This always increases the chances of forum members looking up to you and referring to your website for details. Obviously, this also depends on the level of skill and dexterity with which you can do the job of forum moderation.

Another technique is to drum up interest and enliven the proceedings on the forum by starting debates, posing questions and increasing interaction. Debates need not be acrimonious or nasty. If you can maintain a healthy and knowledge based debate, it would increase your online stature and prompt more people to use the link to your website, thereby increasing site traffic. Sometimes, webmasters can also include links to your site, which in turn will increase its online reach and popularity.

You can even drop links to your website in some forum interactions. For instance, when you are answering some member’s query, you can include a line, “For more details, please visit www.xyz.com” where you can place the link of your website. Based on the interest and the credibility you inspire, you can expect increased traffic to your site.

Don’t forget the free valuable content you get on your website. Members ask questions and members reply them. This is indexed by the search engines. Then when someone asks the same or similar questions the search engines direct the visitors to these pages. Thus creating more visitors, more members and in turn more free content.

In other words, forums can be a useful ally in helping your website win the online battle for eyeballs.

Does your website have forums? If yes what benefits you got from it?