SEO- The Ethical White Hat Techniques
In the earlier days of search engine optimization, web designers used many unethical ways to get good ranking in search engine results. There was not much importance given to doing Search Engine Optimization using just and honest methods. However, things have changed in the recent past. White Hat SEO emphasizes on using ethical methods like relevant content, user friendly features etc to increase search engine (SE) ranking.
White Hat SEO
In this approach, the SEO service providers work towards furnishing valid information to the user. They strive to provide search results that are relevant to the user, and not concentrate only on promoting the business needs. This is done to ensure that user has not been provided with compromised information. White Hat SEO providers provide following services, and webmasters of repute like Google affirm these.
Good Content: Relevant and user friendly content that is regularly updated is the backbone of a White Hat approach.
1. Keywords: There are certain keywords that are frequently and popularly used in a particular business or industry. These keywords are used by SEs to figure out content that is useful for the user. White Hat SEO service providers improve the site ranking by identifying the popular keywords and incorporating these keywords in a seamless manner in the website.
2. Meta Tags: Meta tags are also used by search engine spiders to decide the ranking of a website in the search results. These include the keywords, title, single line description etc. Using valid content for the Meta Tags increases the search ranking.
3. Apt Content: SEs give very high importance to the content of the website. SEO service providers regularly update the website and add relevant content to it.
Design of the Web Site: A relevant and simple web site design is what is ranked highly by the Search Engines.
1. Optimum use of media like videos, animations etc: Web designers tend to make the website attractive by using multimedia features like videos and animations. These features add to the look and feel of the website, but reduce the ranking, as they are not well traversed by the search engine spiders. Also, using a lot of Dynamic web technologies like Ajax, Flash etc also reduces the ranking. Optimum usage of these multimedia and dynamic technologies is advised by specialists.
2. Simple and straightforward Hierarchy: Each web page should be accessible from at least one other page. SEO service providers ensure this by maintaining a relevant hierarchy of all the web pages that are used by SEs for indexing.
3. Site Maps and Technical Specifications: SEO service providers follow technical best practices like including date of modification in the data header. This further helps in the search engine indexing. Also, Site maps help in navigation of complex sites.
Web Site Links: Search Engines use complex algorithms to rank a website. One way of ensuring good ranking for a website is the number of links that other websites contain to this website, and the number of links that this site contains to other sites. Search Engines use this as an affirmation of the popularity of the website.
White Hat SEO helps clients build credibility and long list of frequent visitors along with much improved visibility.
Website Design - Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid While Developing Website
Running a successful website is a mammoth task that requires considerable planning and effort. Do you think you know all there is to designing and running a successful website? Stop and take a look at the following ten mistakes that you should never commit when designing, launching and maintaining your website:
1. Adding too much personalization on your homepage
The focus of your website should be on your customers, not yourself. Excessive personalization on the homepage, such as including your photo is unprofessional. The ‘About Us’ page is more appropriate for personalization and can help you to create effective connection with visitors.
2. Make the site flashy and slow
The golden rule of website design is ‘keep it simple’. Don’t add animations, audio and video features to your website because they please you. Make sure they are relevant and use bandwidth judiciously. Excessive use of such features can considerably increase the time web pages take to load, irritating customers and discouraging website use.
3. Give them too many options on a page
Don’t confuse customers by overloading them with a plethora of choices and navigation links. If your customers cannot decide which link they should click on and cannot easily find what they are looking for, they will get bored and leave your site. Structure your website such that customers will not have to choose from more than five navigation links on a page.
4. Ignoring to address security issues
Ensuring the security and privacy of your website is an essential goal and lapses in this regard can permanently damage your business reputation. Hire an experienced and reputed web hosting service after double-checking their security features, including physical security of servers, back-up data, power back up and access to data. Additionally, if you require customers to enter sensitive data such as health information or financial data, then hire an expert to check the security of your website. Keep a watch on unusual activity on your site.
5. Including obtrusive and excessive advertising
A clutter of advertisements and pop-ups on every page of your website is a turn off. Choose a compact area on every page for ads and include only those advertisements that are relevant to the page content and your business. Including inappropriate advertisements can erode your credibility.
6. Excessive use of Jargon
Customers don’t want to do business with a website if they can’t understand what has been written. Use minimum technical terms unless you are creating a website for a specific industry or small target audience. The goal is to make customers clearly understand all you have to offer and convince them to work with you. Excessive use of jargon can interfere with this goal.
7. Bragging but not informing
If you want customers to do business with you, don’t cross the line between bragging and informing. Customers are not interested in tall claims about your achievements but in concrete evidence. Provide them with testimonials and press coverage about your website to allow them to evaluate your effectiveness, credibility and value.
8. Allowing unmoderated chatting
Unchecked online chats can be counterproductive and wasteful. To develop interactive relationships with customers start a company blog instead of online chatting. To allow your customers to instantly get in touch with your company, share your IM screen name. Webinars are another option for cultivating healthy relationships with customers and building credibility.
9. Broken links
Broken links on a site is one of the greatest sins of all in web designing. It conveys lack of quality and disregard for customers. Regularly check your site for any bad links and take corrective action.
10. Posting outdated or conflicting material
Outdated, invalid, irrelevant or conflicting content on different pages is confusing. Make different parts of your web site coherent.
Though these rules are not universal and there might be some exceptions to them, they are applicable to most businesses and websites. After all the hard work on web design, you don’t want such trivial issues or a little complacency to interfere with the success of your website. Avoid these mistakes and remove all roadblocks between you and successful web entrepreneurship.
Top Factors Slowing Down Your Website or Blog
Obey the Four Second Rule
In the world of websites they say that if a page doesn’t load within four seconds that most visitors are likely to leave, so if your website is slowing, what are the top factors making it do so? Figuring out what it is exactly that is slowing down your website and how to remedy the situation can mean the difference in online life or death.
There are many things that can slow down your website but there are several factors that seem to crop up each and every time a website is slowing which include:
•Too many HTTP requests: An HTTP request has to do with what is on the page that needs to be downloaded other than text. Images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, and other fancy components can all lead to a slower load time for your website’s pages. To correct this, try to limit the number of HTTP requests that you put on each page. Remember that a great looking page is only great looking if people actually get to see it.
•Scripts are not at the bottom of the website: When you do not have your scripts at the bottom of your web pages the problem is that they block parallel downloads. This results in your page loading extremely slow and that ever important four second rule gets violated. The solution is to move your scripts to the bottom of the page so that they are the last thing to load.
•Java Script and CSS are not made external: To get your pages to load faster you should be sure that all Java Script and CSS files are external. This makes the pages load faster because the Java Script and CSS files are cached by the browser instead of your site. This in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests and cuts down on a major factor that slows down your website.
•Duplicate scripts: If a script such as Java Script is included twice on the same page it will obviously hurt the page loading performance. Don’t laugh, this happens more often than you might think and recent review of the top ten U.S. websites showed that two of them contained a duplicate script. When this oversight happens it creates unnecessary HTTP requests and wastes Java Script execution, which ultimately leads to a slower page load time.
•Too many cookies: HTTP cookies can be used for a number of different reasons such as authentication and personalization. This information about the cookies is exchanged between the HTTP headers of web servers and browsers and for this reason it is important to keep the size of cookies as minimal as you can to lessen the impact of the user’s time and thus lessen the time it takes for your web page to load.
Again, there are many other factors that could be involved with slowing down your website, but these are almost always among the culprits. Doing some small tweaking here and there can greatly affect the speed of your website and always make sure that the golden rule of a four second page load is observed.
