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You may be unaware of the many steps necessary to create an excellent website. From planning the site to getting all the wording just right, it can be a bit overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re doing. Let this article help you prepare for the challenges you might face.

Do not utilize pop-ups. One of the worst things a user must deal with is getting one pop-up after another when visiting a website. A lot people will leave a site with pop-ups, even if that website is a popular one. Keep your customers happy, by steering clear of these annoying ads. If your host tries forcing pop-ups on you, look for another one.

There are many free programs available to help you develop your website. Though expensive software is certainly available, free products can work just as well when it comes to setting up and running your site. Just perform a simple search and you’re sure to find some wonderful tools.

Never use an overabundance of conflicting fonts on your website. You have to keep in mind how these fonts render on the computer screen; for example, small serif fonts are difficult to read. Verdana is a font used by many sites. It is easy to read in most sizes and colors.

Is the content on your site fun and interesting? The actual site design “look” is important, but content is king. When your content provides useful and valuable information that addresses the needs of your site visitors, those visitors are more likely to come back to your site in the future.

Alt Tags

When designing your site, use ALT tags when adding images. Tags such as these are key because for those who browse without graphics or who are vision problems, the tags provide descriptions of the images. If you have images that are links, your ALT tags will tell people how the link will behave. And most importantly, search engine bots need to see the descriptions through ALT tags in order to help your search engine ranking.

This article provided you with a variety of website basics. Once you slowly figure out how a few website creation tips, soon enough you will begin to figure out more advance design concepts that eventually grow into creating amazing web pages. Come back and read these tips over again if you run into trouble.

Just so you know, some people think that its easier to just use a free blog site like Google’s Blogger, but here are a few reasons why a Business Should NOT Use a FREE Blog Hosting Site like Blogger. Especially if you have your own domain.

XTELWEB uses WordPress as our Content Management System (CMS), or fancy word for web 2.0 blog software.  But there are reasons that you should not use a Free Blog hosting site such as Google’s Blogger and here is why!

Top Reasons Why YOUR Business Blog Shouldn’t Be on BlogSpot.com

• Google is huge, wait….Google is the largest internet company on the face of this planet.  They do not need the help with your traffic.  So lets assume that you have a company website, hopefully you do, especially if you are reading this.  If you don’t have a company website, go here.  Your company website is probably hosted on some type of hosting service that you pay for, and you have your own domain…right?  (example….www.yourcompany.com…)  By hosting your company blog on a subdomain (http://yourcompany.blogspot.com) you are basically depriving your primary website an kind of real search engine optimization.  You are only providing SEO to Google’s BlogSpot.com service.  And if you are like me, envious of Google, you should know that Google does not need any help ranking high on search engine results page.  Even if you are not ready to switch blogging platforms (from free to own hosting) then at least go out and register yourself a “real” domain .  At least you will have your domain ready for your business when you do decide to get a company website.
• Domain Lock-in:  Savvy tech people will tell you that the right way to move a website, webpage or even a blog is by doing a “301 Permanent Redirect”.  What this means is that you setup a clean forwarding address from your old site to the new site.  If you do a 301 Permanent Redirect, you will not, I repeat WILL NOT lose any of your hard earned SEO work you have accomplished while posting to your blog.  We just did a domain name rebrand for a lawyer’s website, their old website, “321Paul.com” was not really getting the keyword traffic that we wanted.  So we ended up buying a more keyword rich domain name, “TheFloridaAccidentLawyers.com” – Upon doing this, XTELWEB was poised to do a 301 Permanent Redirect on the website.  Just go to Google and type in “321Paul.com” and see what search results pop-up. This is the direct result of the redirect I am telling you about.
• Transfer of Data:  If you are this far into this post, and you are already thinking of switching from a free blog hosting system to your own private domain, then now is the time.  BlogSpot.com does not play friendly with data transfer.    There is no automatic process of moving all of your blog postings from BlogSpot.com to a privately hosted blog like WordPress installed on your hosting platform.
• Its weak!  Sure, it might be fine for you, but if you let a company like XTELWEB or any other type of CMS Management company that will offer to setup your blog with really cool features. You will quickly see that BlogSpot.com cannot be compared to the resources and customization of a blogging system like WordPress.org.  Go to their  plug-ins page and type in SEO, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr ,etc.. or their most popular plug-ins page and just look at what you can do! Team this up with all the cool WordPress themes , and you got yourself a high quality money making machine!  Plus you can get a lot more search engine optimization rankings out of a custom setup from WordPress.  XTELWEB will help you every step of the way in setting up your blog, we even provide training or assistance after the blog is setup so you can get the most out of it.

10 Great Tips For Using Twitter.com

1. Post Tweets Regularly: Some people don’t understand that Twitter.com is not supposed to be an annoyance. I have people sign up for my twitter management service all the time. It only takes 3-5 tweets a week to be successful. There are plenty of tools that allow you to post tweets from anywhere. Yoono, a social network bookmarking tool, for instance, allows you to tweet right from your browser.
2. Retweet: Look at other peoples twitter accounts, do you see a tweet you like? re-tweet it! Very common is that people don’t understand twitter 100%. You can retweet someone else message, which is just as good as posting your own. Don’t get too carried away though, add UNIQUE CONTENT in there once in a while.
3. Be Helpful: As with any other form of Social Networking, interaction is the key. You are probably excited because you found a “tool” that will automatically tweet spam for you…well that’s no fun, and your clients will not like it either. Be personable with your tweets, twitter can be a very successful advertising medium.
4. No Need to Follow, EVERYONE: Just because someone started following you, does not mean you need to follow them. A lot of people are misusing twitter for spam, and they send out bulk emails trying to get you to follow them. What they are doing is a viral campaign, meaning they are getting as many followers as possible in order to get their message out quicker. Before you choose to follow someone look at their profile to make sure they are legit.
5. You have twitter, now what? It depends on what you want to do with it. Most of my clients use twitter for business purposes, therefore I train them to think of twitter as an marketing tool. Our Tampa SEO Company provides company’s with training on how to fully utilize twitter as an effect social network marketing medium.
6. Comment: Commenting is great for social network marketing. It shows people that you are actually using twitter and get’s them interested in what you are saying. You can tweet, tweet, tweet all day long, but you are not commenting, then you are not going to get people visiting your twitter profile. XTELWEB basic Search Engine Optimization package includes twitter account management and commenting is one of our biggest successes.
7. Thanks….That’s right, even in the social network marketing community, you still should say “thank you” – when some one decides to share one of your tweets, an then retweets, send them a thanks! It keeps the social networking community spinning in a circle…This also helps your search engine optimization, because their are websites out there that index tweets, re-tweets, comments, urls, etc… So the more exposure you get, the better off your SEO Campaign is going to work.
8. Robot or Person? Anyone can install an “automatic” tweet poster, but whats so “personable” about that? Nothing, and your customers will realize this. When you comment on a tweet, include that persons username (or real name if you know it), and add a little side comment after your post (about the whether, a new coffee shop, last nights sports scores, etc…)This will let your client know that you are the one tweeting and not some spambot. Like I said, our Tampa SEO Company has the ability of creating and managing your twitter account so that you can focus on your company’s day to day business.
9. Multimedia Please..If you don’t know this by now, you should. Video and Images are the #1 way to get a potential clients attention. As fast as technology is progressing, so is our minds, and we are sick of seeing text. Your clients want videos, images, flash presentations, they would even take a hand coming out of their monitor slapping them in the face if we had the technology. Your customers want interaction, and video is the way to show them, you have what it takes. Our Tampa SEO Company handles video content creation and viral video submissions.
10. Not Just Marketing: Believe it or not, this is the most common mistake, Twitter, as great as it is, was not made just for marketing, video marketing company 🙂 – So while you are using it for marketing, don’t forget to add comments or information about yourself. Nobody will want to follow a twitter user that is just one big commercial. There is a fine line between these two though, for instance, you shouldn’t put on your company twitter account, “Last night was awesome, I got so drunk I fell down some stairs”. I like adding messages about projects I am working on, or new blog posts I have added, video’s I have posted, or times spent with my family. But you can’t get too personal, you should create another, private twitter account for that.

So now that you are armed with 10 great tips for using Twitter.com, you need to put them all into action. If you follow my tips you will surely get more people interested in your tweets, which in turn equals more clients signing up for the services that your company has to offer.
If you would rather have a company like XTELWEB | Tampa SEO & Website Design Company | manage your twitter account for you, then please contact us for a free website optimization & SEO analysis of your website.
Be sure to check out our Free SEO Tools.

While some SEO tasks are best left to professionals, there are many things that you can do to optimize your site without additional help. Read on for some great tips to help you get the most out of your SEO efforts.

One of the most important elements of the optimized site is appropriate keyword density. To avoid this from happening, keep the total number of keywords on a certain page under 20%.

It is important to hold the attention of your visitor. You want people to return to your site and stick around once there. Focusing on these sort of things will help to improve your ranking.

Anchor Text

Use keyword-friendly anchor text for links between pages on your website. If you use generic text like “click here” for your links, search engines might think your site is about clicking here, rather than cat food. In order for spiders to notice your site, relevant keywords should be incorporated into anchor text.

Don’t use dynamic queries if you can avoid it. A URL like www.mysite.com?sid=100&mode=q may not even be indexed. Search engines won’t get anything out of this, so make sure that your URLs have meaningful language and keywords.

Site Map

Develop a site map to make it easier for the search engines to index your pages. Also known as a navigation bar, a site map allows search engines to find pages from any other page of your site. Although you may have a small website, you can use a site map to have a bigger effect on search engine ranks.

Your site should be simple to read. If you design a website which is easy to navigate and read, including accessibility options like making the font size larger, you’ll find that your site ranks higher on search engines. Your site should be easy to read and easily found by search engines.

Search Engine

These tips will assist you in getting higher rankings, not only as you begin, but in the future as well. Having proper search engine optimization can be a big help in raising your search engine rankings and gathering more customers.

Many people falsely believe that flashier websites are best, but that’s almost never true. Successful sites make sure that site design and navigation is kept simple. Continue on for a number of great tips so you can keep your site clean and simple.

Use a fixed-position navigation format for easy navigation for your users. This keeps the site menus in place as visitors scroll through your site. This is convenient for visitors and helps frequent visitors quickly find what they need.

People don’t like to wait when they browse the Internet, so your pages need to load fast even on slow connections. You cannot expect much patience from your visitors. If they are stuck looking at an incomplete page for minutes on end while your content loads, they are quite likely to close your site and find what they’re looking for elsewhere.

Broken Links

Always double check pages for broken links before publishing a page. A visitor will get very annoyed when they click on a link that takes them to either a blank page or one that gives them an error. Either use a program to check for broken links or check each link manually.

Make it possible for users to cancel action if they want to do so. For example, put a “clear” button on a form, an unsubscribe link on all newsletters and a “cancel” button on orders. If visitors cannot cancel an action they are not interested in, such as providing their contact information, they will feel they do not have a choice and won’t buy anything.

It is important that your website is easy to read. Usability testing has shown that visitors are interested in scanning the content for items of value, rather than reading every word. Use sub-headers to break text into sections your readers will appreciate. Also, make sure to keep the most important information at the top. These techniques assure that the visitor to your page will find what they want fast and this results in higher satisfaction for your readers.

The use of JavaScript should be kept at a minimum. Some of your website visitors may not have JavaScript, and others will not want to update it on a regular basis. Each of the many popular web browsers out there are frequently updated, leading to many different versions being in use at the same time. Some visitors will have older versions of their browser, which doesn’t support the latest JavaScript. On top of this, some visitors will have JavaScript disabled in their browsers. Both of these elements can prevent users from fully experiencing your website.

Now that you read the above article you understand how important it is to keep flash to a minimum, because it may causes issues with loading. Find an even balance between flashy and simple. Implement what you’ve just learned, and build a site that visitors will flock to.

It may seem like it is you against the world sometimes when it comes to dealing with search engine optimization. The sheer amount of information online can overwhelm many people. This article will provide much helpful information for you to get started on the right path.

Do not fall into thniking advertising can boost your ranking for search engines. It can help get traffic to your page, though, which is important. Still, your ranking won’t move as a result of the advertising.

Take your keywords and research all the different variations and misspellings of them and include them in the meta-tag section of your webpage. The larger the variety in your meta-tags the more likely it is that your website will be ranked high in a given search. For example, say your site’s keyword is “cat food.” In addition to “cat food,” you can add “catfood,” “kitten food,” and “cat chow.”

Anchor Text

It is important to use anchor text correctly with any internal links on your site. If you use generic text like “click here” for your links, search engines might think your site is about clicking here, rather than cat food. If you use the correct keywords in your anchor text, search engine spiders will be able to locate your content quickly.

If you want more traffic to your site, you should improve your content first. Users will want to find information on your site fast, so content is king.

Use a properly descriptive title tag to make sure that search engines can best understand the content of your web page. You should not have it over 60 characters, most search engines do not show anything after that. Search engines pay less attention to keywords after a certain point.

Site maps make the website easier to navigate and increases the traffic to your different pages. A site map can link your web pages together. Readers like to be able to move around sites as efficiently as possible.

Learn everything you can about SEO techniques. There’s really a lot of info out there, and here you’ve seen some great tips to start. With any luck, you now have sufficient knowledge to get your own SEO program moving ahead.

Web designers have to acquire a lot of different skills to design a website people will want to read. This article is among the many resources available to new designers, providing a great starting point. Read on to learn tips you can use to create better web designs.

Despite the type of site you are going to have, you definitely want to keep the loading time under ten seconds. A well designed website will show up on a browser within moments. The majority of online users demand instant gratification, and it is in your best interest to provide it.

Each topic needs its own page. If you have several topics of discussion on your site, put them on different pages. This helps alleviate any confusion that your customers may experience, as well as giving search engines a broader and more clear view of your site, potentially bumping you up higher in their rankings.

Keep the front page of your website simple. Most people will decide whether or not to stay on your site just by looking at this page. Be descriptive when you talk about your business and what you offer that is unique, but keep other information minimal to avoid your visitors getting distracted.

Free design software is a valuable tool for quickly setting up a website. Do not listen to people who tell you that you can’t design and operate a website without relying on pricey software packages; you can find a free alternative for virtually every task. You simply must be willing to find these helpful design resources.

New web designers who are aiming to create an appealing website, should utilize Photoshop. Using programs like PS can make amateur sites look professional, fast. When you do not possess a program like this one, it can be extremely difficult and time consuming to get enough information to build an appealing site fast.

Popup Adverts

Do not put pop-up windows on your site. While popup adverts can help you to generate some income from your website, they are also likely to frustrate your visitors. When you annoy your visitors with these popup adverts, they will more than likely leave your website and vow never to return.

As previously stated, beginning web designers must learn proper website development basics in order to create visually appealing websites that function correctly. Due to the large amount of information available, it can be difficult to determine where the best place to start is. The above advice is a safe springboard for anyone with website creation aspirations.

The ideal setup when it comes to your company website would be that all search engines index every single one of your pages and crawl them frequently.  Some of the issues preventing this from happening will be discussed in this article.  You want to remove crawl errors and now is the perfect time to give your search engine strategy a review.  It’s always best to be up to date on the latest search engine optimization techniques, we recommend reviewing your strategy every three months, and then reading up on the latest search engine updates to see what is important to have in your site and what is not. For instance, about six months ago, Google and other major search engines started putting emphasis on video and the importance of video on your website.

Social media marketing is one of the hottest things in search engine optimization right now.  Before, having a website for your business made your company look more professional, and this was the norm.  Now companies are investing time and money in social networking sites.  There are different methods for social media marketing, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and others.   Either way, you will want to use social networking for SEO.

Lets get back to reviewing your current SEO state.  Whether you have a company managing your search engine optimization or you do it yourself, you should review your SEO to see how it’s performing.  Hopefully the company that manages your search engine ranking, social media marketing, and video marketing sends you a performance review sheet.  This will allow you to easily see what is working, and what is not.  Then you can use this data to focus more on whats working, or change the techniques that don’t.  A good tool to check for errors on your pages is Google Webmaster Tools.  We have already written an article explaining what Google Webmaster Tools is. If you have a gMail account, then it’s simple to start using and setup Google Webmaster Tools.

Look for errors on your page, usually they are 4xx errors or 5xx errors, such as a 404 not found, or 400 bad request, 500 internal server error, a list of all the HTTP status codes can be found on Wikipedia.org.  If you have moved pages that cannot be found, then the first place to start fixing them would be your webserver’s .HTACCESS file. We recently moved our website to an all WordPress site, and used to store our blog postings in a directory called /blog/ on our server.  Well now that everything has moved to the root directory, we had to update our HTACCESS file to point to the new place on the server.  Our site was already indexed on Google, Yahoo! and Bing,  and we didn’t want to lose our rankings, so this was our only options.  There are plenty of guides on the internet to editing the HTACCESS file and can easily be found by performing a search on Google.

When it comes to content, you want to keep your site relevant. We don’t write articles on how to groom your dog, simply because thats not our niche. There are some quick and easy programs out there that tell you they can generate content for your site.  Often times these tools, apps, or widgets are generating content that is not relevant to your company, business or product.  Now would be a good time to review the content on your website and look for ways to generate traffic on your website.  You can review popular keywords with online tools such as KeywordSpy. Use the information you find from Google Webmaster Tools and keyword tools to optimize content and ensure that it is focused around a central topic or theme.  Using these tools will allow you to see (at least in Google’s eyes) if the content is relevant to your website and its objectives.

Why not take the time to review existing rankings?  See how your website ranks on certain keywords and keyword phrases.  Don’t forget that SEO is a process, and it takes time for search engines to re-crawl your site and update the SERP.  If you don’t know your current rankings, then knowing if the changes you are making to your SEO strategy will be difficult to tell if they are working because you didn’t find a baseline for your current status.  I know this sounds repetitive, but you should definitely research and document each pages rankings, so that when you change things like the META tags for instance, you can look down the line several months, and see if what you did has actually helped.

Now that you better understand things like content, keywords and keyword phrases, the use of online tools such as Google Webmaster Tools and KeywordSpy.com, you can start to review your websites performance in SEO.  Search engine optimization combined with social media marketing is the key to getting your business noticed on the web.  There are other things you can do, such as creating and publishing videos on your website and integrating a blog into your site that will help with SEO.  Don’t forget to document where you are now, so that when you do commit to making changes, you can look back at your notes to see what has helped and what has not.

Many people have praised WordPress and considered it an intuitive blogging platform. However, not knowing how to use the blogging site will make it harder to get great results. Keep reading for some wonderful information that will change everything.

When you are using WordPress, get familiar with the tools and features available in the application. It’s important for you to understand what the different features do and how each option improves your webpage. Utilize this to manage and format your site.

The title and Alt keys should be used. text as you are uploading images to your posts. Not only do these fields offer more opportunities to stuff in more content specific SEO keywords, but they also allow users who can’t load images to know what they can’t see on your site.

WordPress can help you include video blogging on your site. While this might take a little extra preparation on your part, it is worth it. Most users on the web will love this. One powerful tool is video because it can convey messages more clearly than the written word.

When you are set to post, set a schedule. Doing this provides you with the necessary motivation to make your posts. You could write a lot of posts at once and then use the WordPress scheduling feature to post them for you.

Eliminate any comments or content that detracts from your site’s purpose. This makes your site more appealing. Akismet is a great plugin that you can include that will help you to filter out the daily spam on your site.

Make sure that your work is saved at all times. That’s not necessarily the case. Clear the browser cache to see if it helps. Just press and hold your “shift” key while refreshing your browser and your changes should appear.

Are you someone lucky to have a large number of commenting people on your posts? If they do, it can be quite a chore for you and your readers to comb through all of them. Consider a page number plugin to simplify this. This navigational tool will save time and make your site look organized.

If you spend more time on your pictures, your search engine ranking will increase. Use a title and also text tags. If your readers “pin” you on Pinterest, that title will automatically show on their screen.

Create the best greeting for the top of your WordPress website. This can make things more personal with your visitors, as you can create a message that relates to how the user found your blog. This will make your site look much more inviting.

Keep your password secret so that you will not suffer any security breaches. Your plugin choices should be from reputable sites. If your site is hacked or attacked with malware, you could lose the whole thing.

Organize your media library. While putting a bunch of pictures right into the library might seem the way to go at first, that turns messy before you know it. Make sure to incorporate folder structures that allows you to categorize properly. You will be glad you did this when you are searching for a particular image at a later date, as it will be far easier to find it.

WordPress is widely known as a blogging platform that is simple to use. With the information you learned here as a reference, it is easy to get the most from WordPress. The sooner you start using WordPress, the sooner you will reap its benefits.

Although you could be keen on starting an online business, you should do your research first. Through this article, you can gain some great advice.

It’s important to set up a mailing list for your customers. Give your customers several opportunities to leave their email address. This address can be then used for either sales letters, promotions or seeking feedback on their recent purchasing experience.

How will you advertise? For example, you may find that some of the best ways to go about marketing your site won’t cost you a single penny. But unless you’re first taking the time to really think about it, you may end up paying money for nothing. You can attract visitors to your website in many different ways. Creativity is key when trying to gain customers.

Ask for feedback often. It is important to ask people from various backgrounds for their opinion so that you can understand how your work is seen by others. Ask for feedback from those people that visit your website or even friends and family. Take any and all feedback to heart, and do not fear making necessary changes.

To help convince your audience that they should purchase your product, link them to a page that offers relevant information in an engaging way; perhaps through a video. They will feel they know more about what they are buying. This educates them on your product without looking like a tacky sales pitch since they can decide to purchase it or pass.

Do your homework before jumping into a new Website marketing campaign. Choose a trustworthy admirable online mentor. It’s common for online marketing experts to help up and coming marketers out for free or a small charge. Stick to a system you pick for a period of time. Remember that it may be slow to start, but it is worth your effort and time.

Flash Sparingly

Use AJAX and Flash sparingly. It might be attractive on your site, but the search engine is not going to rank you this way. Only use Flash sparingly. Be sure to add plenty of navigation links and keywords to the pages the use Flash.

When it comes to Web marketing, it can be hard to learn everything. But everyone needs to start somewhere. The more you open yourself up to learning, the better your odds are of ultimately profiting in this game. Use every tip to your utmost advantage.