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Sunday, October 29, 2006

Top Paying Keywords: How to Increase Your Pay Per Click Returns

by: Christopher Smith

There is no doubting the success of Google's Adsense program. Even Yahoo! and Kanoodle have joined in on the game, offering to join publishers with advertisers. Given the right circumstances, its a win / win situation for both.

There have been many sites that promote Top Paying Keywords and how if you add these keywords you can instantly improve your Adsense revenue. However, if you really want to see a dramatic increase in pay per clicks, you need to ensure 2 very important areas are addressed. They seem very obvious, but many site owners miss the opportunity to attract higher paying ads simply because they ignore these two areas.

Optimization

Many "would be" web designers decide to build a site around the highest paying keywords, yet, forget to optimize their site around a specific keyword. Instead, they forget the basics of how to properly create a title tag, page description, keyword density and having clean search engine spider friendly code.
Remember, its the source code that the Adsense and Kanoodle programs are using to decide what ads will appear. If your top 2 keywords are "insurance" and "downloads", you may find that you end up with ads regarding "insurance downloads" which of course will not pay much.

Also, having a high keyword density score for the keyword can get you into trouble with the search engines (specifically Google). Keywords spamming is never a good idea.
Optimize your page and you will search more hits to that page and not confuse the bots that create the ads for you.

Content

This is by far the most important and most missed tips. If you are going to include top paying keywords on your site, remember, if you want to attract high paying ads, you need to be selling your visitor on what your advertiser wants. Your content should sell to the visitors needs. Why should your visitor consider car insurance? What are the benefits of car insurance? Where can they get the best quotes? If you pique the interest of your visitor, they are more likely to click on your ads than if they feel that they are not getting the information they came to your site for in the first place.

Your content should have a specific flow to it. If you start jamming keywords into your content, your visitor will automatically suspect that you are trying to deceive them. Once you do that, they are gone! Why waste your visitors time after working so hard to get them to your site in the first place?
Well optimized, focused content will always produce better, higher paying ads. That is why you are a publisher: you want those high paying ads on your site. What use though are those high paying keywords if your content doesn't pique your visitors curiosity? Be passionate about your content, and the click through rates will skyrocket!

Its also important to make sure that you are using the right number of ads per page, but that is for another article!

About the author:
Christopher Smith has been helping people make money through Google Adsense by providing them with the Top Paying Adsense Keywords for his visitors to Adsense Heaven. http://www.adsenseheaven.com

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Google's SEO Advice For Your Website: Content

by: Joel Walsh

The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't get so caught up in the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, that you forget your site's content.

I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web.

Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise, considering how often officials at Google proclaim the importance of good content. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing.

Does Google, the world's wealthiest media company, really ignore traditional standards of quality in the publishing world? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point?

Apparently not.

Most Common On-the-Page Website Content Success Features

Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.

I looked at Google's top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google.

The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:

* Updating: frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.

* Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's check feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? I can already hear the scoffing on the other side of this computer screen. Before you dismiss the idea completely, keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google's algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.

* Paragraphs: primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.

* Lists: both bulleted and numbered, form a large part of the text.

* Sentence length: mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.

* Contextual relevance: text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword.

SEO Bugbears and Sacred Cows

A hard look at the results shows that, practically speaking, a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows may matter less to ranking than good content.

* PageRank. The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google's algo is using. But if you're one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought.

* Frames. The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site's linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot.

* JavaScript-formatted internal links. Most of the websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. Again, that's not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do.

* Links: Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contain over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about "link popularity bleeding." Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it's not clear what benefit the website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn't seem to care if your website makes money.

* Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page.

Recommendations

* Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site's content, particularly in the case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are an SEO, make sure you get a pro to do the content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I've even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit the "back" button when confronted with the unpalatable text, so the increased traffic is just wasted bandwidth.

* If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online.

* Update your content often. It's important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can't afford original content, use free-reprint content.

* Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a "duplicate content penalty" for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.

In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffic, you should consider making sure the bulk of your investment in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns.

About the author:
[Formatting: for web, please use "website content provider" as the link's anchor text (visible link text)] Joel Walsh's archive of web business articles is at the website of his business, UpMarket Content, a website content provider: http://UpMarketContent.com

Monday, October 23, 2006

The Best Web Design Programs

by: Maui Reyes

Who doesn’t own a webpage nowadays? If you’re thinking about spicing up your webpage or (heaven forbid) move your webpage off that blogging host, consider some of these web design programs that will make mastering the art of html a breeze (well, not exactly, but with these WYSIWYG—What you see is what you get—tools, you’ll be a designing maniac in no time).


Dreamweaver MX

This is probably the best web design tool. Dubbed as the “Swiss Army Knife” of web developers, Dreamweaver at first could be quite overwhelming. But with a little practice, you’ll wonder how you ever survived without it.

Don’t let the “flash” and “perl” options intimidate you. What rocks about Dreamweaver is it supports CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which means you get to preview your work before uploading it. It also integrates seamlessly with other Macromedia products, so if you’re a genius when it comes to creating Flash presentations, adding them in would be a cinch.

If you’d like to learn a little bit about html, you can also split the work screen to show the WYSIWYG screen and the HTML encoding (what better way to learn than to see what the code actually looks like?). If html encoding is your kind of thing, you can ditch the WYSIWYG option altogether. And when you get really good at html, Dreamweaver offers a “code hinting”, which displays code options as you type, as well as “Snippets”, which is a panel that stores common pieces of html code that you always seem to need.

Dreamweaver generally takes a lot of time to learn, but take heart, Padawan. It’s worth the training.


Microsoft Frontpage 2003

For those who love working with Microsoft Office’s tools (especially Word), this is the web design program for you.

It’s easy-to-use interface makes it easier to access the editing features (unlike previous editions). Just like Dreamweaver, it splits the screen to show the html coding and the site’s lay-out. It also features CSS, which means stacking up layers an option. Its Coding Editor also has the Microsoft IntelliSense software, which presents possible choices for the code that you’re laying out.

Although not offering as much eye candy as Dreamweaver, Frontpage is perfect for small business and school projects.


Adobe GoLive 6.0

If you swear by Adobe’s products, then this is a no-brainer for you. The format is just like any other Adobe program, so getting familiar with this software will be as easy as pie. It also integrates all the Adobe products in it—you’ll get to work closely with Photoshop, Illustrator, and LiveMotion. Which means you get to drag other Adobe files into GoLive. How sweet is that?

But as with any other Adobe program, if you’re not familiar with most Adobe products, it needs a little time to get used to. It’s quite a heavyweight tool, and if you’re not serious about putting up that webpage, you might end up trading in this software for another.


About the author:
For comments and inquiries about the article visit http://www.ucreative.com

Thursday, October 19, 2006

How to improve website accessibility

Why accessibility?

Thinking of accessibility when developing your products should not be a matter of "we are forced to by law" or a matter of "there are a lot of rich disabled people out there". It is a necessary thing to do, as it allows everybody to reach what you want to offer or convey. It is a simple matter of using the media in a more mature way.

Possible legal necessity

You might be forced to adhere to some level of accessibility when developing your product; it may be a government related or funded project. In any case, thinking of it now rather than when there is no time to do it properly is a more logical approach. Simply trying to add only what is necessary for the site to be legal is not a good approach, as in 90% of the cases this results in patchwork rather than a functional accessible site. Think of accessibility as an enrichment of the product, not as a burden.

Easier maintenance and rebranding of the product

Making your products accessible it easier than it may seem at first. A fully accessible site also means that it can be maintained a lot easier, and a clever separation of content, visual appearance and behaviour makes it easy to redesign the site. It also allows for easy rebranding of the site for third parties.

The "blind millionaire"

One reason that is mentioned a lot when it comes to accessibility, is that it is not necessary as the product may not make sense for blind people, or that "the few disabled people are not worth the effort". There is one disabled user no one can afford to lose these days: Search engines. Search engines experience the page the same way as a blind user or a user with disabled javascript. Important is textual content marked up in a logical way and links that lead somewhere. The earlier the content is available in the document, the better. Companies spend a lot of money on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), money that can partly be saved by simply creating your documents the right way.

How to introduce accessibility?

The biggest obstacle we have to tackle toward accessible design is the fear of the subject. As visual developers and Computer users we are afraid of losing our eyesight or hand-eye coordination. Only when everyone involved understands that accessibility does not mean catering a minority, but inviting everyone, an accessible product is easy to develop.

Raise disability awareness throughout the project - designers, developers and sales force.

Force people to use keyboard only, turn off CSS and Javascript in their browsers, show them assistive technology. Set the keyboard and mouse settings to fast and ask them to navigate their designs. Show the product in text browsers, and explain that a clever web site has to have a good document structure design, and a nice visual output.

Raise client awareness from the start

Also ensure that the client knows that building an accessible product does mean some extra work, especially in the design. The more you review initial designs and spot accessibility traps there, the less fixing and testing has to be done later.

Separation of Markup, CSS and Scripting

Be sure to clearly separate the site development into different layers, the markup (HTML) which defines what a part of the page text is, the CSS which defines how it looks like, and additional scripting, that makes the page behave differently.

The cleaner these levels are separated, the easier it is to test for accessibility, simply take away one of them (except for the markup of course) and see if your product still makes sense. If that is the case, you have won.

Testing, testing, testing

Testing is of utmost importance for accessible design. Make sure to test the product on different browsers and environments, if budget permits, buy a screen reader and test with that. A lot of web sites and software products offer accessibility checks, use these, but don't take them as a set in stone truth, a software can never experience a page like a human being does.

What are the problems we are facing right now?

Accessibility is not rocket science. On the other hand it is not that easy as some software vendors try to make us believe. The biggest obstacles we have is that we can not always define 100% how the code output that is our site will look like "under the hood". Other problems are also man made.

Current web design aesthetics are too print driven

One of the biggest obstacles is that a lot of brochure ware web sites get designed with print aesthetics in mind. Every bit needs to have its size and location on the screen .This is aesthetically pleasing, but the problem is that we don't know how big the screen is.

A browser view port is not a canvas, the user can (or may be forced to) crop it to whatever he wants. One of the main requirements of accessible pages is that the text has to be re sizable, with fixed layouts this can cause trouble.

Web development is considered graphic work rather than document design.

Most projects fail to become accessible, as too much time is spent on the visual design with out creating the right document structure at the same time.

An HTML document is, in essence a text that has some controls in it which define which part of the text is what.

Without knowing all the elements necessary to assemble the designs, we cannot create a nice and clean document.

Consider web sites a piece made from LEGO. You need to have the right pieces to put it together, and they need to connect, otherwise it'll fall apart.

In an ideal situation, the design elements the page is made up from should be ratified by the client before the first line of code is done, and the designs should also get Ok-ed by the developer. Plan for some hours of simple document design, not only for visual development.

Visual changes can be made in the CSS in the finished product, however, if there have to be new elements to the page, the markup needs to change as well. This is not a big issue in standalone brochure ware pages, but can be very time and money consuming when a back end generates the markup.

Browsers and Screen Reader CSS implementation is still dodgy

CSS is a beautiful idea, the clean way of styling text without changing the text itself. Sadly enough even nowaday's browsers still have a lot of problems with it, and that forces us to use outdated and less maintainable techniques from time to time.

The biggest problem with browsers these days are multi column layouts. These are still a headache and even the most used browser, Internet Explorer 6, behaves very random at times.

The same problem presents itself with screen readers. Some support Javascript and CSS to a certain degree, others don't. Nothing to do there but testing.

One thing is useless though: Do not let your site development be hindered by old browsers. Web sites do not have to look the same on each browser, they should simply provide the same content, the experience can vary.

Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors and back ends create invalid, un maintainable code

One real annoying element of every big project is that generated content is always a horrible mix of presentation, structure and behaviour. This is based in the approach most back ends and editors take - visual to markup, rather than the other way around. Whenever you deal with generated content, may it be by a content management system with a what you see is what you get interface or a back end that keeps the current state of the site in the HTML, you will have to find a way to keep the damage as low as possible.

Especially Microsoft's .NET back end is a big problem if you use it out of the box. Its output is very Microsoft Product specific and degrades badly on other browsers. A lot of tweaking has to be done. Whenever you do use some of these products, make sure to add extra development time for cleaning up their HTML outcome.

Accessibility Myths

One final big problem is the sheer amount of wrong information on the web about accessibility. As it dawned on a lot of companies and developers just lately that it might be important, a lot of rushed solutions are found for problems that are not there to begin with. A lot of times technology is used to replace common sense. Before jumping into it kicking and screaming it might be a good idea to post your problems on some message board or mailing list or look at the web sites of book authors on the subject.

The multi level approach

  • Create the design, identify the components
  • Start the markup, ensure the site is usable without any Scripting or CSS
  • Add the CSS layer to make the site look as it should be
  • Separate the finished (x)HTML layout into "components"
  • Add the back end functionality to re-assemble these components.
  • Add a Javascript layer to enhance usability