Bill McRea

Do you have to sacrifice all of the creative and artistic elements of your web site to rank in the search engines? Later in this article I’ll show you a real case scenario and the design and SEO approach used.

Thanks to the birth of professional search engine marketers the top ranks are saturated with the pages of companies that can pay for such insight. That said, it’s certainly possible to employ high ranking tactics in your own website. Actually, the most basic tactics can move you up from an 800 position to a 300. However, it’s the top of the scale where efforts seem almost inversely exponential or logarithmic, you put a ton in to see a tiny change in rank.

How do you meld the ambitious overhauls required to attain significant ranking and NOT compromise the design of your site?

DESIGN CAN’T BE IGNORED

if you have an existing site, you’ve probably tied it into your existing promotional content. Even if you’ve allowed your website to cater to the more free form of the net, it should still be designed as a recognizable extension of your business.

The reasons for doing so are valid, and can’t simply be ignored for the sake of achieving a first age position, can they? If your research into search optimization leaves you shuffling around thoughts of content, keyword saturated copy and varying link text, you correctly understand some of the basic pillars of search engine optimization.

And, you aren’t alone if you have this disheartening thought-If I do all this SEO stuff and reach number one across the board, who would stay at my site because it’s so stale and boring I’m even embarrassed to send people there!

There are two ways to successfully combine design and SEO. The first is to be a blue chip and/or Fortune 500 company with multi million dollar advertising and branding budgets to deliver your website address via television, radio, billboards, PR parties and giveaways with your logo.

Since chances are that’s not you, and certainly not me, lets look at the second option. It begins with some research into your market, some thoughtful and creative planning, and a designer who is a search engine optimizer, and understands at least basic CSS and HTML programming techniques. Or a combination of people with these skills that can work very well together.

DESIGN IS FOR BROCHURES, INSTANT RESULTS ARE FOR THE WEB

that’s not the whole truth, but it will help compare and contrast design and SEO. In reality, SEO needs the quantity and detail of supporting text that a brochure has, but good web design has to catch a viewer’s attention in 5 seconds. It’s pretty difficult to read and absorb the content of an entire brochure in less than 5 seconds.

Search engines need rich, related, appropriate, changing and poignant content. And for them to rank you, all of that must be on your pages. But if it’s not well organized and broken down into bite size chunks, no one is going to bother learning about what you’re offering.

CONSTRUCTION 101- ATTRACTIVE DESIGN AND SEO

sadly, it’s very difficult to optimize a site without completely overhauling it. You’ll soon understand why. Design and SEO must be strongly rooted into every aspect of each other, possessing a true, symbiotic relationship. Lets look at a simplified example of this. Lets say you are optimizing a page for the keyword phrase, “pumpkin bread recipe.”

From a design standpoint “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” would be the heading for the page, in a nice, readable font with the words perhaps an orange-brown color. And lets add a fine, green rule around it.

There are many ways to create that simple, colored heading. However, there is only one way that is best for both design and SEO. That is to use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. In addition, that line of code containing “Pumpkin Bread Recipe” needs to be as close to the top of the page as possible (which CSS also allows).

To a viewer, the recipe text might be read more if it were located to the right of a photo of a buttered piece of pumpkin bread on a small plate next to a lightly steaming cup of coffee.

SEO needs to read that ingredient list and baking instructions. Search engines now understand on a rudimentary level that the ingredients are indeed related to the optimized words- pumpkin bread recipe.

Additionally, it would take many extra lines of code to make a table in this example if you didn’t use CSS. Search engines don’t like extra code. In fact, given enough times, that “extra” code will make the keyword phrases seem less important and hurt rank.

Note: In the page code, a few thousand characters more than you need to get all of that content organized would normally just add to your page load time, and might be acceptable. But to a search engine, that time can really add up. It wont read through page after page, site after site, billionth after billionth character of unimportant code to find the relevant text. Therefore, the less code, the better your chances. Moral- Less code, more content.

SEO USUALLY MEANS REDO

In the previous pumpkin example, CSS will eliminate the need for almost any extra code at all, and provide the means to place the text to the right of the photo.

Now, imagine that someone had already created this page, but done so using other programming methods. The page could very well be W3C compliant, well programmed and got the job done. However, without designing and programming for optimization as in the above illustration, the end result would have no significant rank compared to others that do.

You can be sure that there exist at least 30 web sites built to rank for the keywords “pumpkin bread recipe”. Note- why did I use the number 30? It’s safe to assume if you’re not on the first three results pages of a search, you’re not being seen.

While this is a simple example, hopefully you understand that it would be impossible to optimize this simple page without redoing it. This isn’t always the case, but extrapolate this into detailed, multiple pages in an entire website and the issue is greatly magnified.

AESTHETIC IMPORTANCE VS. TRAFFIC

everyone has an idea of what they want their site to look like. The pretty factor- splash pages, cool flash and graphics must now be justified as to their importance to the bottom line. If you want/need to establish an online presence, you will have to make some compromises in these areas.

Understand exactly the role your site should play in your company marketing.

Ask- What is the goal of your website and who is its audience? Is it for existing clients to see? Is it to reach new clients? To venture into yet untapped market segments?

Ask- How strongly do your other marketing efforts promote your site?

Ask- Is your website an extension of your existing collateral that must reflect the same graphical look?

Ask- Is your website meant to assist to your sales force or is it your sales force?

Chances are you wont have any single answers. That’s ok. It will give you some meat for your designer/SEO to digest and develop a solution for you.

REAL CASE OF DESIGN BALANCED WITH SEO AND SALABILITY

if you sell jewelry solely online, you must have a catalog of exceptional photography and detailed, high-resolution close up images. But, you must be optimized and rank well if you want to sell any of that jewelry.

If such a company approached me with this project, my recommendation would be this: If you sell a product, people have to see that product. Lots of good images. The site should be slick and sheik and easy to navigate. The home page has to capture the buyer’s attention. If it’s very expensive jewelry, the site should have a lot of class and elegance. If it’s home made jewelry, the site shouldn’t look home made.

However, as you have no store front, if the online community can’t find you, you’re business will fail. So I’d have a very optimized home page with some discussion of the quality of your product, the history of your company, etc. This is also great sales copy. Ad a few special catalog pieces with descriptions below some smartly placed gifs, jpegs and readable type graphics built out of CSS and you’ve got a cool to look at, content rich, and well optimized layout.

I’d make the link to your catalog very obvious and prominent. Note the catalog is not the homepage. I’d also include subsequent well written, in depth pages about the history of some specific pieces. Load them with targeted keywords and a few images. Again, make your catalog link very prominent. In doing so you’re creating relevant content for search engines AND providing additional pages that can rank.

The catalog can be database driven, simple and changeable, and you have the foundation to build your search rank.

PLANNING YOUR SITE

if your designer is not a search engine optimizer, hire one to work with your designer from the initial development stage of your site. If you would like a visible presence that is not dependant on traditional marketing efforts to get your name around, then you will have to optimize.

However, with advances in html and css, text itself can be a very flexible and attractive design element with endless possibilities. Site optimization consists of some rigid, unbendable rules. It can be intertwined successfully with very creative and attractive design. If your Designer and SEO aren’t the same person or company, make sure they have the same, close working relationship.
If you want/need to establish an online presence you will have to make some compromises. But how many? How much do you have to sacrifice in the aesthetics of your site to be seen? Examine the problem and read a real world case solution.

Babita Kumari
http://www.articlesbase.com/business-ideas-articles/design-and-seo-make-site-look-good-and-rank-well-503713.html

Affiliate marketing is one the most powerful and easy ways through which you can earn money online.  To succeed in affiliate marketing on the internet, you will need several tools that you can use to build your business.

This article presents these key tools and how they can help you to easily build your affiliate marketing business.

1.    A professionally designed website. A serious affiliate marketer is one who invests in building a website for marketing affiliate programs and products. This is professional and increases the credibility of your business. Instead of sending traffic to the product owner’s sales page, you can direct them through your own website. By doing this, you can include your own personal recommendations of the products on your website, which is helpful to people considering to buy. You can also collect the names and email address of people who visit tour website and build a list of prospects.
2.    Have a reliable hosting company so that your website is running smoothly all the time.
3.    An auto responder system.  This is important because not everyone who visits your website where you market affiliate programs will purchase right away. An auto responder helps you follow up with these people, and will keep on reminding them about your website and invite them to visit your site. You can use an e-course or an e-zine with interesting tips that will make your prospects want to visit your website again. By doing this you are increasing the chances of generating a sale from most people who visit your site.
4.    An advert tracking system. If you want to make sales and earn affiliate commissions, you must drive traffic to your website. This means that you must be constantly advertising your website using different types of campaigns. It is important that you track and assess the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns and advertising tools that you use. This analysis will help you select the most effective campaign and invest more money in it for even better results.

There are thousands other affiliates who are marketing the same products like you. It is therefore important that you use the tools presented above so that your business is professional and efficient.

Joining and promoting affiliate programs and products is the best way to easily and quickly earn money on the internet.
It is important that you do some research about the program or product you intend to promote as an affiliate. This will ensure that you join an affiliate program that is reputable and that will be easy for you to market and generate some sales.
After you have decided on the affiliate program you want to join, it is important for you to follow the steps outlined in this article which will help you earn huge affiliate commissions.
Step Number 1: Build your own website to promote your product. If you are serious about affiliate marketing, it is recommended that you have your own website where you will be promoting your affiliate products. By having a website, you can therefore select several good affiliate products and promote them on your website. This will increase the affiliate commissions you can earn from these products.
Step Number 2: Start your own newsletter and build an email list. Having an emails list is important because if gives you a huge number of prospects to whom you can promote your affiliate programs on a regular basis.
Step Number 3: Get an Auto Responder for your website. Email marketing makes it easy for you to automatically send emails and capture emails from people visiting your website, and you can do this using an auto responder on your website.  The auto responder can send a newsletter, e-course or articles to your prospects on a regular basis. This automated process of promoting your website saves you time and make it easy for you to build your business.
Step Number 4. Write and distribute articles. If you want to be successful with affiliate marketing, you will need to write many articles on your topic and submit them to directories. You must post your article on as many websites as you can.
Step Number 5: Start a reciprocal and one-way linking campaign. In order to increase the ranking of your website on search engines, you must start to exchange links with other websites in your niche. You can also participate in forums, have a blog, write articles and give free e-books that have your website URL. This will create one-way links back to your website. The more websites that link to you, the higher page rank you will have in the search engines, therefore leading to more traffic to your website.
Follow these 5 steps if you want to earn huge commissions with your affiliate programs!

Many people who want to earn money online think that affiliate marketing is very easy and that you can start to earn money without doing anything. Yes, it’s true that affiliate marking is one of the easiest ways to make money online. However, some effort is required before you can start to see your affiliate cheques rolling in!

New online entrepreneurs who get into affiliate marketing with some misconceptions are easily discouraged. This article outlines the realities and facts about affiliate marketing.

§    It is necessary for you to invest some money if you really want to succeed and earn big commissions. You will need to have your own website, an auto responder on your website and also track the performance of your adverts. All these items will require you to spend some money. In order to generate many sales and hence earn huge commission checks, you must drive huge volumes of traffic to your website. Depending one the advertising campaign you will want to use, you will need to pay some money for advertising.
§    You will need to apply some hard work and effort to build your affiliate marketing business. This is particularly important during the early stages of starting your business when you will need to write articles or other reports that you can use to promote your affiliate links. Blogging, participating in forums and writing affiliate product reviews are some of the things you will need to do. Depending on your budget, there are several marketing-related steps you will need to take to advertise your website. If you have money you can outsource some of the services you need. If you have a limited budget, it means you have to do most of the marketing activities yourself.
§    You will need to keep on learning. Internet marketing is very dynamic, and there are various ways of promoting your website which you can use. This means that you must keep on learning to keep yourself in line with the most effective ways for marketing online. You can interact with other affiliate marketers or you can have a very successful marketer as your mentor.
§    You need to have confidence and faith in yourself. This will help you to keep on working on your business until you become successful and earn huge commissions.

These are some of the key facts about affiliate marketing. You must fully understand this before you decide to start an affiliate marketing business.

Nowadays, marketing has become an important character of selling a product. While looking at the competitors of your product or niche, you need to motivate yourself and toughen up and the most crucial thing to do is to make sure that your marketing schemes are better. Spending money on promoting your product or website is a worthful investment. There are nowadays so many ways of promoting and marketing your business.

are today more forward-moving when it comes to marketing and promoting. Thinking about the old days when all the promoting and advertising of your product or services had to be done through hand out flyers or leaving it up to word of mouth. Nowadays there is are lots of individuals doing the identical business as you and working round the clock to get the most customers. As a webmaster you must use effective ways to get visitors to your web site. Getting traffic to your website is not just achieved in 1 day; it expects a lot of work and imagination.

Requesting a link to your website by numerous web directories is a way of driving traffic to your personal website. Most of these web directories are for free which means you do not require much money to advertise your website. The most essential thing to consider is that there are directories that are for special lines of businesses. So if you are in the wholesale industry, that means that there are a lot of special directories that list wholesales only. Nevertheless there are also some on line web directories that are not for free. You are required to pay monthly fees for being listed. A lot of them are also very good for driving traffic to your website.

Exchanging links with other websites that complement your own website is important way of driving traffic to your website. When you link with other sites, what you are simply doing is revealing yourself on a grander base thereby raising the encounters of someone visiting your site.This means that the more sites you link with, the more visitors you’ll have on your own website. The trick is to make sure that you link up with sites that get at least as much traffic as yours does. If you can link up with web sites that get more traffic as yours then so much the better. Linking up with internet sites that do not get a lot of traffic is only a waste of time and in business time is money.

Making sure that you are indexed by search engines is another remarkable and one of the most important ways of driving traffic to your website. Striking the search engines can be a profitable way to gain traffic to you website but make sure that your website looks good and professional. Make sure that the META tags of your website are correct and set. Also make sure your keywords are specified and relevant to your website. From there you should also make sure that the content of your website is right and interesting.

Another great way to get Quality Website Traffic and also Targeted Website Traffic is to make a deal with website traffic providers. Take a look at Wholesale Website Traffic.
Change your business online and actually start making money today. No traffic means no profits!