Must Have Features For Your Web Site

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to potential sales when customers visit your site is for them to see the products they came looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, maybe by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you will make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customers better you can ask them to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customers want to buy online, provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

Tips to Increase Ranking and Website Traffic

It is worth cataloguing the basic principles to be enforced to increase website traffic and search engine rankings.

• Create a site with valuable content, products or services.
• Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document.
• Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers.
• Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc.
• Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.
• Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service.
• Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.
• Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.
• Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
• Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.
• Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.
• When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.
• When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.
• Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:
• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’ hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.

There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself or with a software package and service.

Make It Easy To Buy From Your Site

Convincing your prospects to purchase from you is a hard job, but have you ever thought that you're making the process twice as difficult for both parties if your prospects are convinced but don't know how to buy from you? No matter how good you are at convincing your prospects, they won't buy if they find the process cumbersome.

First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.

Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects' desired payment method. After all, it wouldn't make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they won't be able to pay you when they want to.

On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing?

Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects' confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet.

As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximize your profits

What’s a Fair Price for Your Internet Ebiz Item?

You can “Jump on the Bandwagon” to use an old phrase. How eager are you to be involved in Internet Marketing? Remember, “Look before you Leap” is just one phrase and it is contradicted by “He who hesitates is Lost.”

Strong desire is a two word phrase, but it’s not the one which I am referring to in the title of this article. Big money is another one that doesn’t answer the question.

People have a tendency to get involved quickly, to take the plunge, to hop aboard; get in up to their elbows, but there’s a simple preparation to “getting in” to the craze of the last couple of dozen years. (Getting In isn’t the phrase either.)

The desire to do something online has been heightened by rounds of layoffs from auto companies, airlines, the service sector, and even the government is offering early retirement. It’s hard to find a newspaper that doesn’t have a doom and gloom story that they want to share with you.

The rise in foreclosures, the cost of food, the price of gas, how expensive it is to send your children to a good school, and the list goes on.

This does nothing but fan the flame of the hot Internet lure. It’s not magic that people are attracted to the Internet; it’s the fear of being left behind. This makes “Jumping In” such a common practice, but you want to know the two words that can make or break your internet website.

After reading the two words, please, read further to understand what I mean by these two words; and here they are; “Clearly Define.”

You should, you must, you had better, clearly define what it is that you expect to get out of, put into, or learn from your Internet venture.

Here are a few examples to set you off in the right direction when it comes to entering the fascinating and almost addictive world of cyber space.


•Before you spend serious money, spend serious time looking at the layout, colors, offers, and topics of websites that interest you.

•Look at as many websites as possible that are related directly to the area that you have interest in.

•You absolutely must clearly define what you are going to do with your website; otherwise you might as well burn the money and save your time.

•Know that most people on the internet do not make any money from their website; some merely choose to inform and have nothing better to do. Most people lose money on their first Internet experience; I lost plenty.

•I’m giving you permission to change your mind, about what kind of Internet business you are going to start, one thousand times before you actually get up and running on the World Wide Web. It’s better to change your mind before you expend all the time required, than to invest your precious time, only to start over and over and over again.

•Seek knowledge and strategy before you go bragging about how great your website is going to be. The more you learn before you begin, the fewer mistakes you’ll make. (Should I mention the money you’ll keep yourself from wasting?)

•If your time horizon isn’t at least a year to get all the dimensions of your website tweaked, you’re probably better off opening a lemonade stand in front of your house, so you can experience and feed your need for instant financial gratification.

•In the beginning, you’ll get an overview of what it takes to put together a website, drive traffic to it, advertise your presence on the net, and how to cash in on it. As time goes on in your early days, weeks, and months, you’ll discover what you like and what you hate to do and learn to delegate the chores which don’t appeal to you. (It’s natural; you won’t like or want to learn how to do everything. Some requirements can be quite challenging.)

•If you’re smart, you’ll discover all the tutorial avenues that are available that may be free, cost a little, but return information and move you up the learning curve faster and with more confidence.


Clearly Define what it is that you want to do with your website(s) and seek the basic steps that it takes to build a website. The most challenging thing about the Internet is the terminology.

Once you know the difference between a C.E.O. and an S.E.O. it makes the getting up to speed drive easier. Some terms you’ll learn to ignore, because you’ll delegate the task, or get software that does the thinking for you.

Trust me when I say that learning HTML isn’t easy, but there are harder things to learn, like the French language. Stick with areas that you enjoy, because it’s a continuous journey and you will never arrive.

The rules will change like the weather in the Midwestern U.S.A. and you will be forced to take the next step or get left behind in the greatest human breakthrough in history; global communication at the click of a mouse or the touch of a screen.

A path or goal which is clearly defined has a magnetic power like iron filings to a magnet and will pull you in, prop up your spirit, and unleash energy and vigor that you probably didn’t know you had.

Contributor:
Lazz Laszlo is a former Investment Executive and Radio & Television Financial Reporter with many entrepreneurial endeavors to his credit. He invests his time, energy, and money in businesses of various types. He's written eBooks about Creative Thinking, Trends, and Travel. Please visit Lazz's website; www.eBizEinstein.com