Information Placement & Website Optimization

Arranging information in a website is hardly different from laying out furniture in a house. As much as you would group different kinds of furniture together in certain rooms, so would you group different kinds of information in certain pages?

If you’re just starting out in building your own website, then this is a useful metaphor for you when it comes to positioning information effectively in your website and avoiding a confusing, unorganized mess.

Grouping information together
Beds, dressers and closets belong in a bedroom; kitchen appliances, cupboards and pantry shelves belong in the kitchen – you get the idea, right?

The idea is to categorize information. You don’t want to be hopping from one page to another and back again to get a coherent set of information. You’d want them all conveniently contained in one page.

So for example, if you sell items on your website, group these into one page. (Of course if you have a lot of items to sell, categorize them into the different kinds of products as well).

If you maintain a website about your family or an association you’re part of, group pertinent information together. It probably won’t be helpful if you lump the family tree with the photo albums and the contact information all in one single page. That’d make for one very cluttered site.

Typical websites have major headings or categories, which are:
- Home (also called index) page
- About Me / Us page
- Resources page
- Contact page

A Home page should contain information that answers the question “What is this website about?” It should also display the other categories so a visitor can easily access them.

The About Me / U page holds information about the person or organization who owns the website. Some websites don’t have these, but it adds to reliability and attachment to the site when visitors are allowed information that lets them know more about the site’s owner.

The Resources page holds useful and practical information for the visitor. Some resource pages also contain trivia and games, which many visitors enjoy. The resources page is usually the page that gets updated the most as resources are added or renewed. Updates on this page is usually the main reason a visitor comes back to surf the site again.

A contact page is usually the last page to be viewed by visitor when accessing a site. It is usually done only when the visitor wishes to directly communicate with the website’s administrator and / or owner. While the information for this could have been included in the About Us page, a Contact page makes this getting information easier for the visitor. And ease in accessing information is an important factor in good website design.

Laying Them All Out
Now that you’ve got your categories and the information ready, now is the time to lay the information out on each page.

First of all, it is highly recommended that you maintain a uniform layout for all your website’s major pages. This is to help the visitor orient himself quickly to your site navigate easily.

For example, if you locate the major headings of your website at the top area of your Home page, it is best that you do the same for all the rest of the pages. Getting a different layout for each page tends to confuse the visitor.

Hot Spots, Weak Spots
With a uniform layout, now it’s time to begin prioritizing information. As it is with a room, a web page has choice focal points and weak spots. You should identify these areas on your web pages and lay out the information accordingly in degrees of priority.

Even with animation and graphics, the main medium of the Internet is still text. Since this is so, applying the principles of reading when laying out information on your website will make it so that viewing each page is easy and effective.

The English language is written (and therefore, also read) from left to right, top to bottom. The website visitor will skim the pages in this general pattern. So the information you consider the most important should ideally be located at the top left area of your web page.

Of course, the information may not necessarily be text as it could very well be a picture. But rest assured, what will be located in the top left will get the first and therefore, freshest attention from the visitor. It would do well to present your core message in this area.

Other information follows as the progression from left to right, top to bottom continues. However, despite this pattern, a visitor is capable to digressing from such a pattern. In fact, next to the top left area, a visitor tends to notice the left and right margins of a page. Usually, links to other pages are located in the left side of the page, while pictures or advertisements are located at the right.

The center can either become the weakest or strongest area of a page, depending on how the other elements are laid out.

It becomes weak when the body is uniform all throughout (as one continuous block of text or pictures). However, if the body is strategically broken up, the center of the page becomes a prime focal point and therefore may rank as the most important area next to, if not higher than, the top left area of a web page.

While it is possible to have an endless length for a web page, it is highly discouraged. It is much preferred to have several short pages that are concise with easily seen information, rather than to have a few long ones that are crammed with text and pictures.

As you layout the information you wish to share on your website, keep in mind convenience and practicality as would in laying out tables and chairs in a room. You will soon find that you have come up with a website that is not only informative, but memorable as well, because of how well you laid it out.

Free internet Marketing Resources

Website Traffic Targeted Visitors

Web site traffic is every website owners’ dream.

The kind of visitors that these owners would want is those who are interested already on the site’s traffic. They are the same ones who will benefit more on what the site have to offer.

This is the reason why your visitors should be highly targeted ones. Now, you may be wondering, what is the best way to get targeted website traffic coming over to your site?

Take it from the expert. Below are some of the things that proved effective for them in increasing their web site traffic.

1. Search engine optimization. This should be first and foremost in your mind. Whichever way you put it, in the online world, search engine rules. To be known in this business is to be recognized by major search engines. Your site needs optimization in these search engines. Know the importance of links and site tactics.

2. RSS. Blogs and RSS feeds go hand in hand. Since more people are into blogs, website owners are finding that this has become a valuable tool in getting website traffic. Once you input RSS feeds into your blogs, expect a great number of targeted website traffic to come pouring into your site.

3. Viral marketing. One way of getting more website traffic is by giving out freebies to your visitors. Consumers come running at the first sign of something free. Many websites offer free reports that their visitors can download and be able to use.

One example of a freebie that can bring a lot of website traffic is updated report and tutorials on using software like RSS for all kinds of website.

The viral marketing techniques you should are the ones, which you can brand with a link to the company and that can pass around with no trouble at all. Programs that goes with what your site is all about is another viral marketing suggestion you may want to consider.

4. Articles marketing. This works big-time. Whenever article marketing is used, major changes for the better have been made on many websites. Not only were website traffic increased, the profits are also doubled. Article marketing is an effective means of getting targeted visitors into your site.

Submit your articles to article directories and published on websites. Before you know it, your content will be displayed on various websites and read by customers who would even be attracted to what you are offering.

The technique in article marketing is to write quality and informative articles that focus on your niche market. Publishers are always on the search for fresh new contents. Once they see your articles, they would want to use them in their publications. When this happens, your link popularity will be given a boost along with your search engine rankings.

When writing articles, look for the right keywords to target. They should then match the topic of your site. It is best to try and use keywords that have very high traffic but with low competition from existing websites.

5. Ezines. This is for those who have ezines. You can building up a huge opt-in list of subscribers to your ezine in order to bring in more website traffic to your site.

Use your ezine to give out tips and suggestions to your readers. When you have built up a good relationship with your readers, they will remain faithful to you and try to come back for more of what you have to offer.

Your ezine should be directly related to the topic of your site and gives information that will be very much helpful. You will realize that once you continuously manage your site based on a single focus, you will be regarded as an expert on that field. When you are considered an expert, visitors will come looking for you to seek out ideas and suggestions.

There are other sources of website traffic that can work well also but not as effective as the ones mentioned above. Examples of these are forums.

Website traffic is a continuous process that website owners have to maintain. Try to use these techniques that the experts have found to be beneficial. Or you can think up others ways of for your own.

Free internet Marketing Resources

Links and Website Usability

The Internet is what it is because of connections, bridging one computer to a host of others. Because of this we are able to access information at a click of a button.

The things we click are called links, and they can be likened to the synapses of a brain – connecting the user from one document to another.

One of the main tenets of website design is that a page must be able to link to another page. Failure to do so renders the page dead – and is a lot like crashing into a brick wall as you speed down the information highway.

That said, website designers, both pro and amateur, make it a point to include links into every single page they design. But it is simply more than just slapping on links anywhere. Links are as vital to a web page as the content on it for without it, a visitor will be hard pressed to connect to other documents on the Internet.

In any website, there are different kinds of links. There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to laying out links on a web page. But over time, certain conventions have emerged that seem to have become an unspoken standard in design. Deviations certainly will not depreciate a website’s over-all impact, but it may require some amount of time for the visitor to get oriented.

Whether you tend to follow conventions or not, it is best to be acquainted first with the rules, so that you will know what to break and how to break them.

But first of all, for the sake of clarification, imagine a website to be like a book. Of course, you know that a book holds several pages. In the case of a website, the pages are called web pages.

A web page basically has two kinds of links: Internal and External.

Internal links are what connect pages of the same website to each other. Going back to our book analogy, an internal link connects a page to another from the same book. So a visitor can access the contact page of a website from the home (or index) page via an internal link.

An external link, on the other hand, connects a web page to another web page from a different website. So an external link is something like a connection between two pages from two separate books.

Layout Conventions
Over the years, as more and more users and websites are added to the Internet, certain conventions or assumptions about the location of links have been formed.

The most common of which are the internal links on either the top or left margin of a page. Seeing that these two areas are the ones first noticed by a user, designers felt it was natural to place internal links that would connect the pages of the same website together. Because of the nature of its location, links on these sides of the page are prominent and graphic designs on them.

Another area where internal links are located is at the bottom of the page, usually where the copyright information is placed. However, unlike the top and left margin areas, the links at the bottom are discreet and usually rendered in small fonts (like the copyright info). This is done primarily to avoid redundancies in design, while still providing alternate sources of links should the others fail.

External links are usually found in the body of the text or in the right hand margins of the page. No specific rule exists for this, and the conventions arise merely out of common usage.

However, some designers have surmised that the tendency to place external links within the body of the text is done because references to information outside the website should be described or explained, whereas internal links need little to no explanation at all.

Another theory is that the right side feels like the outer part of page. This assumption is built on the observation that reading is done from the left to the right. So the right part of the page indicates the end of a page, thus references outside the website find themselves allocated to this area.

For some reason as more and more text advertisements (such as Google AdSense) proliferate, the location for such external links are designated at the center or the right side of a web page.

And yet, as mentioned before, these are merely conventions and NOT rules set in stone. Designers have all the freedom to layout information and links however they want. Deviations from such standard practices simply make the surfing experience for these websites slightly more interesting than the rest. The important thing is that connections are made and everyone can continue to cruise and surf the Web one link to one page at a time.

Free internet Marketing Resources

Get your First-time Visitors to Come Back

Whether it is to shop online, to book a plane ticket, to check movie schedules, or to pinpoint your current location via GPS, the Internet has become a one-stop shop for almost all the needs for daily activities – and then some.

And yet, despite all functionality many websites offer, there are still a huge number of websites that simply do nothing but take up space, particularly on a SERP or search engine results page. What happens is that even with the most stringent of filters employed by powerful search engines, Internet users still need to wade through websites that are practically dead – dead because they offer no real information and are therefore useless.

But should it necessarily be that way? Do functional and effective websites come into being by simply throwing money at it? Does it mean that small companies cannot produce useful and practical websites? The answer to all three questions is a resounding NO.

With just a little bit more effort, small websites can offer just as much information, if not more, than the high profile websites maintained by media giants and conglomerates. And it doesn’t necessarily entail needing to break the bank.

There is a fundamental rule in designing websites and that is Content is the number 1 consideration.

You could spend a fortune on producing glitzy and flashy animation and special effects, but if your target user is not getting anything useful from the site, then all the bells and whistle will be for nothing. Remember that the Internet paved the way for the Information Highway and as such, content – useful content – is the heart of this medium.

Just what constitutes useful content?

When you first set out to create your website, you had to think about your target user. These vary with the kind of audience you wish to reach. Some target young people, others go for the yuppies, still there are others who wish to cater to household moms and dads. There is practically a market for everything. It’s simply a matter of identifying what to present to whom.

Focus on Your Target Audience
And this is where you need to do your homework: You need to focus on your target audience and determine what kind of information and content material will capture and sustain their interest.

For example, if your target audience is women in their early retirement years, then you should probably be creating and posting content that has to do with hobbies taken up by your target market, which could be garden, golf, or maybe even both. The same applies to young teenagers if that is your target. You will most likely need to gather content about teenaged stars, fashion tips, sports news and / or the like.

Identify Your Website’s Goals
What should your target audience get out of visiting your website? This is the core question you need to ask to determine a website’s usability. Will it be able to answer or given solutions to problems commonly faced by your audience? The answer you should strive for that question is a big YES.

Sourcing Your Materials
Now that you have an idea what you want to give your website’s target audience, you need to find legitimate and reliable sources of the content you wish to present.

Of course nothing beats writing and producing the material yourself, or hiring someone to do it, because you can claim the material is uniquely yours and you do not need to worry about copyright issues. However, should you be unable to spare the resources of producing your own website content, there are still solutions around that?

The Internet is full of articles written by people of varied expertise, which very likely include your website’s line of interest. And the best part of it is that, very often, these articles can be published on other websites (including yours!) for free. The small trade-off is simply including the writer’s name and credentials before or after the article.

Nifty Knick-knacks
In addition to informative (and free) articles, there are all sorts of mini-programs (usually Java-based) that come in the form of games, quotation estimators, body fat counters, weather report update, etc.

The idea is to give your target user more tools to use that will help them with what they need to accomplish on and with your website. Once again, you have the option of programming this yourself and making it available on your website, or you can copy a code from a third-party programmer and integrate it with your own website’s code. Very often the only trade off again is reference to the creator – which is only just right. Other more interactive elements such as surveys, quizzes and the like may be enjoyed and appreciated by your audience (especially if prizes are available afterwards).

In providing useful content for your website’s target audience, you may not have to look very far or to pay prohibitive professional fees. All it takes is an attentive mind to what your audience wants and needs and the patience and resourcefulness of looking around and assessing what options are out there. Once you’ve got those down pat, it simply a matter of time when visitors will come by regularly and repeatedly because your site offers current and useful information.

Free internet Marketing Resources

Free leads & Traffic for Website

You will notice that even the finest optimized site, which has the best sales page, will not gain an extra penny without increasing web traffic.

There are numerous ways to increase web traffic and most of the webmasters have tried everything to make it to the top.

Although these ways are known to generate traffic and help increase income, most of them will cost you money without a complete guarantee that you will profit from it once you have spent your cash over it.

On the other hand, there are still many ways on how you can be able to generate good web traffic without spending too much. Sometimes, it even comes free when added with perseverance and patience.

Exchanging links to other sites is a good strategy to generate web traffic. If you carefully study the performance of top ranking sites on the different search engines, you will get numerous links.

However, you should make sure that all sites that you make links with operate with a relative or similar niche. It is important that the links have relevance to the theme of your site.

Now if you share a common subject, you can get more hopes of getting good web traffic and your site will have a recommendation by the sites they are on.

Another advantage of exchanging links is that your site will have more possibilities of having a higher ranking in the different search engines. This may favorably help in getting traffic from the search engines plus the linking site.

You have probably read an article in the Internet. Most of the sites are open for submission of articles and directories, newsletters, and many more. Most of these sites offer those services free.

If you have a little tight budget, this will be a good alternative and you can start submitting your own articles. If you want to save more, you can write your articles if you can so you will not pay for them.

Although you can find many freelance writers that charge small fees, it is still advisable to write your own articles because you know your site very well. If you can, why not give it a try?

Writing and posting articles is an effective strategy to increase web traffic. However, in writing articles, the content must match with the theme of your site. You need to write about something that you are familiar with.

If you come up with friendly and readable articles, more visitors will get interested in reading them. As much as possible, you can give tips and advices, which you have learned from your experiences. This will attract the reader’s attention, which can thereby increase web traffic.

After every article, you must include a resource box. You can also include a short and brief biography about yourself. It is also necessary to include the URL of your website for it to make sense and add traffic to your site.

Traffic exchanges are another form of link exchange in which the members of a certain traffic exchange can view each other’s pages by simply surfing.

Each time your page is viewed, you gain a certain credit so the more pages you view other’s site, the more chances of your site will be viewed in return, thus giving you more credits and higher chances to increase web traffic.

However, traffic from these exchanges is not well targeted and it may not possibly produce a lot of sales but it can rather be used to effectively capture names for your subscriber list.

Anther good and smart way to increase web traffic is by having your own newsletter. The more subscribers you get, the more chances of increasing web traffic is achieved.

This may sound tiring because the more subscribers you have, the more you need to come up with unique and creative articles to distribute to them. This is the time that you need writers to write bunches of articles.

The last good option to increase web traffic is having online forums. You can think of good subjects so that a lot of people will get interested. With a good subject, expect your members to be frequently logging into your site and you can get the web traffic that you have been dreaming of.

Free internet Marketing Resources

Reduce Website Loading Time

In this age of instant everything, hardly anyone wants to wait. That is probably the main reasons why drive-thrus, instant messaging, one-touch photo printing and all sorts of “now” technology and products were invented and are profitable today.

The same can be said when surfing the Internet. Recent studies conducted on Internet habits show that users get irritated when a web page takes more than 10 seconds to completely download; beyond 15 seconds, more than half leave the site entirely. That is how demanding the average Internet user is.

Some web designers and developers would probably argue that with broadband access, download time should no longer be an issue. However, what these people fail to mention is that only 3 in 10 users in America have hi-speed access. A great majority of Internet users still surf the Internet via dial-up modems. At speed of about or below 50 kbps, web pages heavy with unnecessary baggage easily lose the race for the user’s precious attention.

So how do you keep your website lean, mean and quick? Here are some tips:

1. Use lean graphics.
Graphics, even in .jpeg or .gif form will still take a while to load. But since images do enhance a website’s appearance, it is very likely you will find these necessary. However, keep the loading time for the images down by specifying the height and width attributes of your images. That way, the user’s browser will be able to map the page’s layout while the images are being loaded.

If large images are necessary for your content, use a thumbnail a link to the bigger version of the picture. This allows the user choose what images he will wait for to load and saves him from needing to wait for those pictures he’s not interested in.
Another nifty trick for quick-loading images is to use software that cuts up large graphic files into smaller pieces that can be put back together using a table. Software like PictureDicer (by ShoeString) or Online Image Splitter does exactly that and generates HTML code for a table tag. However, be sure to reduce 256-color images to 8-bit colors before processing the picture.
2. Cut down on the flash intros.
They may look nice, but they take forever to load. And if these animated presentations are at the front door of your website, you stand to lose a lot of visitors (practically half) even before they saw your actual site.

If you simply have to have a flash introduction, please do not forget to include a “skip” button prominently displayed on the page as an option for those who don’t want to wait to load the intro.

Another caveat that comes with flash intros is that (as of now) search engines are unable to index content on flash format. So if you intend to present most of your important information via flash presentation, you stand to lose a lot when it comes to hits from search engines.

3. Maintain an ideal page size.
Experts vary in opinion on what is the optimum file size for a web page. As a middle figure, somewhere between 30 to 50 KB file size (including fonts, graphics, html and JavaScript and so on) should do fine and load pretty quickly.

4. Keep the pages as shallow as possible.
No one wants to go through so several clicks and links before accessing the page they intend to reach. When creating your site’s over-all organization, make sure that every page can be accessed from any point within 2 clicks. (3 are ok, but it’s pushing it.)

That said; try to keep all your pages no further down than 2 levels deep from the home page. If the site grows to have so many pages that making deeper levels is inevitable, consider creating an archive page where outdated pages may be kept for reference without causing delay to the more current content.

Having a quick-loading page show that you value your visitors’ time. They will show their appreciation by staying longer to know what you have to say. It also enhances your company’s brand, showing that you can be efficient, but substantial.

Paying attention to what is important and useful rather than what looks good but offers little in content will result in a website that is not only quick and lean, but usable as well. And for your target audience, that is the main and most important key.

Free internet Marketing Resources

Website Graphics Tutorial

There can be no argument about the importance of design in attracting Internet users to a particular web site. No one would bother to explore the contents of a site if it does not contain eye-catching graphics that can please the visual sense of the users. With so many kinds of web sites existing online, it is extremely challenging to attract users and keep them interested in the site.

But a web site developer does not simply apply graphics freely on a site. Graphics should be used in the correct manner, or else, users might get turned off because the graphics featured just overwhelmed or confused them.

While it is true that attractive design is important for reasons that need not be explained, the choice of design must be carefully considered against the fulfilling the needs of users. When done successfully, it could be safely said that the web site has achieved its goals.

Graphics used in the Internet is inextricably linked to multimedia. Multimedia is a combination of graphics, text, sound, and animation to express a message to users. The multimedia features that will be incorporated to a web site should be dependent on the content. In general, multimedia and graphics should serve as supports to content, and should have precise, instructional purpose.

According to research, animated images can facilitate the transfer of learning in a positive way if it is utilized to show a vital part of the concept that is being illustrated. On the other hand, animation can serve as a barrier to user recall and performance.

Here are the guidelines in incorporating graphics to web sites:

1. Justify the usage of the graphics
The most obvious problem that can be seen on web pages is the over-usage of graphics. The main downside of this is that complicated, unnecessary graphics can take a long time to download, and this, of course, will not sit well with users. The graphics to be applied should support the transfer of data and should also be in relation to the accompanying text.

2. The difference between graphics with text-redundant data and those containing information that is non-redundant is that the former facilitates and ushers in the learning process, while the latter does not either help or slow down learning.

3. Consistency should be a priority in graphic design

4. Web pages should be marked up so that text will be downloaded before the graphics. In this way, the users will know immediately if the page has the information that they are looking for, and if not, they will be able to save precious waiting time knowing that they do not need that certain page.

5. The loading of graphics should be controlled as such that loading will commence from top to bottom, and the users scrolling down the page will encounter said graphics.

6. The downloading of pages should be fast in order to save users waiting time, and in order to reduce the chances that they will get frustrated that they will abandon plans to download. Here are several ways to achieve fast download periods:

-Keep the physical size of the graphics to a minimum
-Images should be combined in order to minimize the number of server connections. Remember, the more connections that exists, the slower the download time will be
-Decrease image resolution
-Limit the colors that will be used for the images
-Limit the use of animation

Animation is very much a part of web graphic design. The primary difference between web text and graphics and contents that are print-based is the dynamics. Moving displays attract the attention of users as long as the frequency of the display is regulated. Too much animation display can irritate and distract users. An animation that is perpetually moving can destroy the readable quality of the web page.

The usage of blinking texts should be avoided. It has long been regarded as an overused feature and the latest browsers no longer support it.

In designing a web site, there always exists a conflict between the desire to have total control over the appearance of a page and the need to permit users to establish their own preferences. The general appearance of the page should be made by the designer, but there are certain elements that users should have control over, such as color and text background, and the option whether to display graphics or not.

It takes a considerable amount of effort to establish and maintain the attractiveness and efficiency of a web site. If the guidelines above will be followed, all the efforts of web designers will bear desirable results. They only have to remember that the benefit of the users will always be the basis for everything.

Free internet Marketing Resources