Thursday, February 5, 2009

Eight Strategic Steps to Developing a Successful Web Site

Eight Strategic Steps to Developing a Successful Web Site:
  1. Do our Research. Understand our objectives, the target market, the products/services, and the competitive landscape. We can review market research studies, conduct a competitive analysis, host focus groups, hold interviews, run surveys, and look at other Web sites to see what they’re doing and what works.
  2. Prepare strategy to create a convincing architecture for our Web site that speaks directly to our target and drives the action we want them to take.
  3. Design our graphical user interface and prepare persuasive content. We need to create the atmosphere that captures our audience and doesn’t let go. Before moving into development, we should have the content of our Web site prepared and organized
  4. Build the Web site and supporting applications. Coding of the Web site should be based on our audience requirements and best practices.
  5. Test and publish the Web site to the host server. Before releasing the Web site to the public, check everything and make sure that everything simply works properly.
  6. Market our Web site through both online and office mediums that reach our customer.
  7. Measure and monitor the success of our Web site and online advertising initiatives.
  8. Test, refine, and improve. There is always room for improvement. Our Web site will constantly evolve and grow over time to adapt to changing consumer needs and changes within our business.

Monday, February 2, 2009

How To Optimizing Our Site For The Search Engines

For optimizing our site for the search engines, we need to:
  1. Determine the search engines we want to focus on. These usually will be the most heavily used search engines. And then learn as much as we can about their algorithms or formulas for ranking sites.
  2. Determine the keywords and keyword phrases we want to focus on with the search engines.
  3. Allocate different keywords and keyword phrases to different pages of our Web site based on the content.
  4. Populate the respective pages of the site with the assigned keywords/keyword phrases appropriately. The keywords/keyword phrases need to be included in: the domain name or file extension for that page of the site, the page title, the text of the page, and the end of the page, in the alt tags, in the headers, in the keyword meta-tags, in the description meta-tags, and in the comments tag.
Online marketers were also aware of the offsite ranking criteria that were included in the formulas and developed strategies to score high there as well. These elements included things like: link popularity, link relevancy, leyword being searched on in the text around the link, click-throughs from search results and length of stay, site traffic, length of domain registration, frequency of updates, and the Google page rank.

Friday, January 30, 2009

What You Need To Know Before Landing On The Blog World: Stick To The Topic

As far as blogging is concerned, you are invited to write about anything you wish to. But it is necessary that the contents of items in the blog should all relate to a general theme. The majority of your readers are keen about the contents that relate to a specific defined theme or loosely defined area of interest. So first decide the theme, define it and then stick to it. Once you are satisfied, you have started a hot topic, leave the rest to the other bloggers who are left with but the opportunity to weave interesting threads of contents, which are sure to gain momentum with more number of encouraging bloggers.
While choosing the topic, go for the hot ones which would be of much interest to many. Discussing about affairs which were on the news some months ago may turn down your readers. If you want to keep your blogs alive and expect good response, select a hot topic. Most of the bloggers may not prefer discussing ‘history’ of events considering it a waste of time. This in turn will be questioning the value of your columns.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

RSS Could Improve Our Search Engine Rankings

RSS has been documented to bring a great impact on the traditional search engine rankings. Even sites supposedly with low traffic are pushed to first-page sites positions for their key search engine keywords and phrases after switching over to RSS feeds. This is due to the fact that RSS feeds increases the number of inbound links to the site, the specific RSS feed format, and tight RSS feed focus and RSS-specific search engine strategies. These provide the search engines with strong and focused content streams from publisher’s website. RSS publishers get more attention by search engines and directories since RSS contents are still scarce.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

RSS Agregator

RSS aggregator or reader is a software that collects content from many websites that publish new content regularly provide a list of headlines of the latest content. In addition to displaying these headlines on their own websites, it is very common for publishers to make them available for syndication, so that other websites or applications can also include their headlines. When a website has an RSS feed, it is said to be “syndicated”.
The RSS aggregators come in many different forms and flavors. The most popular are desktop applications and RSS aggregation web services. In the case of desktop RSS aggregators, end-users have to download them to their computers and install them there. In RSS aggregation web services the users can create their own accounts and then use those websites to view RSS content directly from their Web browsers.
When any new content item is modified or updated in the RSS feed, the user is notified of that through his RSS aggregator. The content is also immediately available to him, without having to face any SPAM filters and other obstacles on the way.
RSS being essentially a pull-content delivery channel. In order to receive content via RSS the end-users need to subscribe to the RSS feeds they desire. Content cannot be delivered to people who have not granted permission to be contacted by you. At the same time, the user who had given permission once can revoke it instantly, taking away your capability of communicating to them.

Friday, January 23, 2009

RSS Feed

With RSS feeds we can deliver the RSS content. RSS stands for either Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. RSS files look a lot like HTML code. RSS files (which are also called RSS feeds or channels) simply contain a list of items. Usually, each item contains a title, summary, and a link to a URL.
The main components of a RSS feed are channel (A channel is the total collection of items you wish to highlight in your site. There is exactly one channel per RSS file), item (Item is a single thing you wish to highlight from your site) and RDF (RDF is the mother specification of RSS).
We should provide an RSS feed if we want to distribute our information to a vast and fast-growing community of users, who are more interested in knowing about our topic. In general, people who write articles or publish newsletters benefit the most. Most blog software allows us to offer RSS feed of the blog posts. We can also offer our press releases through an RSS feed. In general, anything that we publish frequently can be offered as an RSS feed.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

RSS as A Marketing Tool

RSS can be very useful as a marketing tool. RSS is simple to use as publishing tool for marketers and publishers and has the versatility allowing contents to be delivered to the target users and other “content consumers”. These criteria enhance the marketers and publishers to achieve their business goals. RSS has ability to influence the entire key internet marketing elements, especially content delivery to end-users and improving search engine rankings. RSS is unique in the way it forces marketers to become more relevant and sensitive to the needs of their target audiences.
RSS is already used by the majority of the reputable media sites, by a satisfactory number of corporations and by almost “all” bloggers. RSS is fast becoming the de-facto standard for pull-based information delivery because the user can anonymously subscribe to your feed, judge your content and stay subscribed as long as he wants to. He can unsubscribe at will, without any problems and delays. RSS also eliminates a large part of the external noise and shortcomings of other delivery channels .In addition, RSS content can be delivered to other websites; such as search engines, specialized RSS directories, special content aggregation sites and other site types.