In the past, Search Engines were not as evolved as they are now. There are a number of constantly changing Algorithms now in place to determine whether you make the cut. Realistically, you would need a professional SEO company to optimize and maintain your Website properly if you want to follow all the Tech specks that Search Engines use, but to keep it simple, here are some basic SEO tips and questions to consider when building a Website:

1. Optimize the size of the web page to the fullest. Resizing the images to their correct dimensions and getting them reduced in file size as much as possible is important, because the more KB a Website has to load, the slower it is. Ideally, a visitor wants to get in to your Website and get the information that they came for as fast as possible. If the Website takes long to load, visitors will get discouraged and leave. Achieving a balance of a great design and a fast loading time is crucial to Search Engine success. There are a number of Websites that will test your loading time using different speeds. Usually these services are free. Do a search for one. It is definitely worth your time.

2. Too much optimization can hurt you.. Some elements are important to properly optimize a web page. An example of these include: Metatags with a well written Title, relevant strategically placed H1 and H2 Tags, ALT Tags, Comments, and obviously keyword rich content are to name a few. Key fact to keep in mind though, over doing it can actually hurt the Website. There needs to be a balance of real content and optimization. When unsure, less is always better.

3. Is the Website using web safe colors and fonts? Fonts and colors often make a web page more attractive. This becomes a problem when designers use fonts that are not available on the visitor’s computer. The font then defaults to the closest web safe font available. The result is often unpredictable and a visual mess. The same applies to colors. Colors look different on different monitors, and unless a web-safe color is used, it will vary on different monitors.

4. Is the content “Readable” by the Search Engines? To display the content exactly how the designers plan it, they often turn valuable content into images. Remember, Search Engines cannot read images. An ALT description can and should be used for images, but it does not substitute for great HTML content. If possible, always opt for using HTML content and ALWAYS, write the content for the readers, not the Search Engines.

5. Design with screen resolution in mind. Screen Resolution is a setting on individual computers that people set according to their preference. Screen resolutions can vary. Here are some common settings that people use: 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1152 x 870. When designing a Website, you would want to stay somewhere in the middle of the range. If you must go beyond that, try to fit at least the important parts of your Website into that valuable space. The last thing you want the visitor to do is scroll horizontally to read your content.

There are a lot more intricacies to why a Website succeeds or fails out there, and different Search Engines are constantly evolving and changing their review criteria. If you speak to 10 different SEO professionals, they will most likely give you 10 different interpretations of what it takes to be a truly Search Engine friendly Website. Chances are they are all correct. It’s hard to keep up, but one thing seems to be a definite constant. Keep all the SEO pointers in mind from the start when designing a Website, and definitely design with your visitors in mind. You do that, and it will save you a lot of time and heartache later on, and the Search Engines will love you.

At the same time, they shy away from it as the costs involved could represent a big expenditure on their businesses. PPC traffic costs for known keywords are not cheap any more and so most people tend to lose money on it.

If you stick to these core principles you will be able to create campaign after campaign, expanding your wealth accordingly.

1. Use desperate keywords
Do not pick generic information keywords. Keywords like “free information on (keyword)” , “No cost (keyword)”, do not guarantee a purchase but a gathering information search activity.

Instead, go for words like “comparison”, “buy”, “review”, etc. Also, use model numbers, book names and name of authors to get the best results.

These are the usual keywords people type in when they are ready or close to the purchasing cycle so you should concentrate on them for a better return on your PPC investment.

2. Testing and tracking for best results
Once you know where your money is being spent on advertising, you will be able to make changes that will greatly contribute to better returns of your money. Which clicks turned into sales and which ads get the most clicks and sales are only some of the methods used to gain control of your PPC campaigns.

If you do not have enough information on it, you will be running your PPC advertising department blind. You will also be paying for clicks which do not produce any sales.

Interested people that click into converted sales is what PPC is all about. And that is where the money is.

3. Spy you successful competitors
This is the best way to cover yourself against high costs and risks on your online advertising.

How often are they running their ads? What message are they using on their ads? Are they promoting other affiliate products?

These are some of the factors to look for when spying on your competitors. They are already spending their money so get some advanced knowledge by spying on them on a proper way.

Once you have those three points covered, you should be able to get ahead on the PPC business game and you will seriously minimize the costs and risks of online advertising.

Do not forget to duplicate your efforts on additional campaigns once you have a winner. That is the right way of doing PPC advertising.

Features

Different shopping cart providers offer similar and unique features that are useful to the consumers and beneficial for you as a merchant. While choosing which features to have may depend on the size of your business, a good shopping cart provider offer a wide range of feature options for different business needs.

Integrated Online Marketing and Promotional Tools

With a right shopping cart, you can increase traffic and increase sales virtually over night. How? Shopping carts affect the costumer’s response to your website. The more useful tools it has, the more it can attract new costumers and persuade existing costumers to buy your products. Through integrated marketing and promotional tools like catalog and product comparison, your costumers are able to make easy and wise decision on which products to buy.

Promos, sale, discounts, free shipping and coupons are powerful marketing strategies that can attract more costumers. Shopping carts offer these features.

Product review is another powerful feature that can increase sales. In a study conducted by CompUSA and iPerceptions, 63% of costumers are more likely to buy for the sites with product ratings and reviews.

User-friendly Interface/Ease of Use

Costumers are very impatient when it comes to purchasing products and services online. The last thing your costumers want to you is figure out how to navigate your shopping cart. A user-friendly website is important to keep potential costumers browsing. A user-friendly shopping cart is crucial if you want to keep your costumers stay and complete the transactions.

Payment Options

Different online costumers prefer to use certain types of payment. While most would like credit cards, many are still hesitant to enter personal information online and choose other alternative modes of payment like Paypal, checks and money orders. A good shopping cart service should cover all these.

Hacker-Safe Ordering Page

Earning your costumers’ confidence is important in any business. That is why you have to make sure that your costumers are properly protected when they enter their credit card information to your website. Wise costumers often look for SSL certificate seal on a merchant’s website. This seal is a guarantee that the site is hacker safe. Make sure that you have one.

Full Order Management System

A good shopping cart guides costumers throughout the process of purchasing, checking out, payment and shipping. These services can be provided fully by a hosting company or are linked from different services. Payments can be through major credit cards, PayPal, money orders and checks. Shipping can be linked to major shipping carriers like UPS, DHL and FedEx.

Costumer Service/Support

One of the best ways to gauge if a particular e-commerce shopping cart provider has a good costumer service is by sending questions though their email address. How fast did they reply? Did you get a template reply? In business, time is money; and personal touch is a plus. Costumer service should reply a personalize message as soon as possible. Another way to test how good the costumer service is is through its technical support. In running an effective e-commerce store, the availability of good documentation is important.

While many choose to go online to purchase merchandise, it doesn’t mean that you can get complacent because if they happen to stumble upon your website, they will buy anyway. This is a wrong way of looking at your traffic. You have to please your costumers and please them well. You need to know what they want – not necessarily the things they need to have but the right tools to guide them through the entire online purchasing process. And with tougher competition now, you need to raise the bar and stand out among the rest.

Thus, your online store needs not only to look good, but also to have efficient shopping cart system. Here’s how to maximize your website and shopping cart and convert traffic into buyers:

Use all the tricks in the business. Use large headings and sub-headings to let your costumers know where they are; and breadcrumb navigation to help your costumers know how deep they are on your website.

Use search functions to let costumers find what they are looking for fast and easy, especially if you are holding a large inventory and multi-page site. Place the search function above the fold where costumers can see it.

Give the power to your costumers to narrow down their search options by using search category refinement. Costumers should be able to refine according to size, shape, color etc. Make sure that they can clear this refinement anytime. Utilize sort option that allows your costumer see your product by category.

Let your costumers remove or change items from their cart easily. Help them find product that are related to the items they have chosen. Cross sell!

Place your contact information where costumers can easily see it.

Never allow your costumers to go on a lengthy process of shopping, only to find out that the products they have chosen are out of stock. Show only the products that are on stock or place “out of stock” mark on those what are not in your inventory. Most shopping carts have this feature.

Cart abandonment rates are high simply because many shopping cart services do not allow shopping before registration. What you should do is to let your costumers to add items in their cart before they register for an account. Some vendors have this feature.

Show them every detail of the product they wish to buy including the price, discounts (if there’s any), applicable taxes and added fees. Do not hide any information that the costumers should know.

The key to any online store is usability. Many online shoppers get irritated even on the tiniest hitch on your site. This is the main reason why many abandon their cart even on the last step in purchasing product. Keep your costumers fully satisfied by making everything easy. Use your e-commerce shopping cart properly. Extra efforts may require time but the pay offs are all worth the trouble.

Your next task will be to determine the things your possible clients will want and need to know prior to making a purchase.  These things may be:
•    A detailed product/service description complete with pricing guides, key features, product specs, et cetera.
•    Customer reviews and testimonials, reports and studies, customer success stories and positive remarks made by prior customers.
•    A section that covers frequently asked questions (FAQ) to answer questions and cut down on the need for one-on-one assistance.

When planning the construction of your site, you should focus primarily on customer use.  Potential clients will want a site that’s easy to use, easy to navigate, and answers the many questions most consumers have prior to spending money on a product.  You should strive to create a site map that will outline each page of your site, starting with the home page.  You should also plan to implement the use of tools that will track and measure your site activity (i.e. where do customers click most often, and whether or not those clicks lead to a purchase).  This way, as you build your e-commerce web site, you will be able to compare your goals against your results.

As you build, you will want to make certain you’re using the right tools.  Your solidly laid out plan is just the beginning. Next comes the actual construction of your e-commerce web site.  Many business will turn to professionals (a very powerful tool in web building).  The professional web site builders design and create outstanding web sites.  There are unlimited sources of contact for professional web builders.  Use the phone book, or better yet, look online and you will quickly find a firm in your area.

On the other hand, maybe you’re not budgeted to have professional help building your web site.  Many successful e-commerce sites are constructed using tools that are designed to help the layperson create a professional and polished site on their own, without the aid of HTML experts.  Again, resources for such sites can be found all over the Internet and you can even find great web building programs to download for free.

Let’s review.  In order to build a successful e-commerce web site, your primary goal is to keep your customer in mind.  Determine what you’d like to see if you were investigating a product and do your best to build a web page that meets those specs.

What you need to know:

1. Qualifications are worthless. Unless the person has a proper graphical design background, almost all of the web design training is learned at a community college part time and not very credible. Unless the person you are qualifying can explain XHTML and CSS to you and why they are good for your website, stay clear.

2. A good web designer will have a diverse portfolio and lots of attractive sites they have built for their customers. They will also be able to explain to you why they designed the site the way it looks. If a person does not have a substantial portfolio, get them to do a first draft design to display their skill to you.

3. Your designer candidate needs to realize that they are building your website for users. This means all users regardless of technical ability and which web browser they are using. Amateur web designers tend to come up with what they think are impressive looking pages while ignoring the visitors who will come to your site. Ask the prospect which browsers they will test the web site on? (Answer: as many as possible) What is the purpose of the website? (Answer: explain the point of the site very simply).

4. Many web designers have no idea what to charge for their services. When you ask, you will get bids form $50 to $5,000. Both of these are ridiculous as one of them may be from a non English-speaking foreigner and the other a committee that will accomplish little. Look for an independent individual as opposed to a corporate type person. Be willing to negotiate the price but never agree to a let them do whatever it takes to make a good site and pay by the hour!

5. Be very wary of any web designer who tries to sell you a whole package such as domain name, web hosting, etc. Most of these types of operations have huge flaws in one area or the other. They will either be web hosting specialists who think designing web pages is easy or designers who are reselling some cheap hosting package for a huge profit. It’s best to buy the hosting yourself.

Keep these five points in mind when looking for that perfect web designer.

Blogs, derived from the words “web log” were originally thought of as simply online diaries a place for people to record their thoughts and inspirations. At first, no one took blogging very seriously and these collections of online thoughts were simply passed off by many as hobbies or creative outlets and nothing more.

But then Google came along and started to recognize the unique and original content that these trite little sites presented and the rules of the game suddenly changed. After all, unique content is what makes the Google world go round, and what better way to command the attention of Google than by creating a dynamic environment with content that is solely your own.

At this stage, a whole new SEO world emerged and in the process, brought with it traffic opportunities like never before. People began blogging on more than what they had for dinner last night. They started to blog about new products, exciting travel adventures and all things related to online commerce.

The evolution quickly continued and today, with RSS feeds, sites like pingoat.com and many other content clearinghouses, blogging is big business and not to be overlooked by hungry entrepreneurs looking to establish a web presence.

What currently makes blogging so attractive is the sheer speed with which blogs and blog posts are able to get indexed in the search engines. It is a simple matter of static versus dynamic and the search engines love the dynamic.

Let’s take two different scenarios to see how traditional websites and blogs differ in their index-ability:

Scenario One:

One person creates a website to advertise gardening products and services. Each page of the site contains the traditional information about the company; it’s founders, the services they offer and the products they sell. Maybe, at best, the site has articles and content that is updated with some small frequency that are relevant to the avid gardener. When visitors arrive at the site, they have the option of signing up for the company newsletter and receiving valuable tips and new offerings.

In this scenario, the Webmaster or business owner will need to tend to many SEO related tasks in order to get and maintain high search engine ranking for a tight list of selected keywords related to the gardening niche. Not only will this activity require great skill, it will also involve many hours to achieve the intended results.

Scenario Two:

The same business owner as above also creates a blog to supplement their company website. Now, instead of focusing on simply one set of tightly selected keywords, the blog itself remains a broad overview of the gardening niche, while each individual post reflects a drilled down topic within that same niche.

So when the business owner writes a blog post about the benefits of “organic vegetable gardening in backyard containers,” this individual post becomes a keyword rich, targeted wonder and when indexed by the search engines has a far greater opportunity to bringing highly targeted traffic to the blog based upon that single post.

Through time, the blog expands with many similar posts that are targeted to sub niches within the broader gardening niche and can even be categorized from inside the blog structure itself. What has now been created in Google’s eyes is an extremely dynamic, naturally evolving site that is content rich and niche specific.

When properly constructed and promoted, each time the business owner posts to the blog, that individual post can get indexed in anywhere from two to twenty four hours on average. This opportunity is far greater than any options available at the static website.

Additionally, when the business owner endeavors to have a visitor signup for a newsletter, further segmenting can occur and subscriber lists can be refined and targeted. And because the blog is the front-end showcase to the original website, each blog post has the opportunity to link back to specific and relevant products at the main site.

When properly structured, blogs are the biggest SEO asset to a website that currently exists. The wise business owner will recognize these benefits and when implemented, will enjoy many opportunities that do not currently exist with traditional websites alone.

In the six digit value, the first two numbers define red, the next two define green and the last two define blue. Each digit has 16 values, using numbers and letters 0-9 and A-F. A through F function as the numbers 11 through 16. Because each color is represented by a pair of base 16 numbers, there are 256 (16 x 16) possible values for each color. When you combine the values of the three colors there is a possibility of 16,777,216 (256 x 256 x 256) combinations of color.

For example, pure red is #FF0000, pure green is #00FF00 and pure blue is #0000FF.

At first it may seem difficult to determine what color you will get with different color codes. A simple solution to this is to remember that FF is the maximum and 00 is the minimum, and use one of the following codes for each component:

FF means full brightness
CC means 80 percent brightness
99 means 60 percent brightness
66 means 40 percent brightness
33 means 20 percent brightness
00 means none of this color component

Sometimes you will find hexadecimal numbers expressed using only three digits, such as #F32. This is an abbreviation for a color that has a pair for each of the three numbers. #F32 is the same as #FF3322.

You will also see web pages that use color names to describe a color that is being used. The W3C’s HTML 4.0 specifies only 16 standard color names: aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon, navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow. Most browsers today support more color names, but when specifying a color it is usually best to use a hexadecimal number as hexadecimal colors are supported by all browsers.

You should be aware that when viewing colors on a computer monitor, different monitors may display colors in very different tints. Neutral, earth-tone colors such as medium gray, tan and ivory can lead to even more unpredictable results on many computer monitors, and may even seem to change color on one monitor depending on the lighting conditions in the room and the time of day.

Websites are typically made using a coded language known as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and it is this language that allows for the basic structure of a website. This includes its headings and even the type of font that is used in a paragraph. Since the time that HTML was used for website building, more ways have been developed to make website development faster and easier. What separates one website from another is design.

When designing a website, one must consider the following key elements: the purpose of the site, the possible audience, content structure, and the design compatibility.

Firstly, it is really important to know why a website is needed. There should be a statement that says what the site is used for and what visitors can get from it. This will help the designer to plan a proper outline of how the website can be broken down and modified over time should the need arise. Thus, keeping a long term objective is the best plan.

In terms of audience, one should keep in mind the people who will be visiting the website. Basically, what should be considered is the target market. People will be viewing the site for different reasons and a designer should know what those reasons are and if they are attractive enough to have them return to the site often.

Content is probably the most time-consuming section of the website. A lot of planning is required because this will be the most dynamic part of the site. This means that the information will keep changing every now and then. This is especially true if the website deals with articles changing every day like newspaper websites. Content may also mean the way a product is advertised or presented to the user. The more attractive the graphics are and the catchier the copy is, the more it will help get more customers to a website. Copy is the text content that is included on the website.

Another tricky part about web design is making it compatible for all kinds of web browsers. A web browser is what a person will use to access the website. Some websites are not displayed exactly the same way across different browsers. So a designer must keep in mind that the programming is still essential in realizing the design. It is tricky but not very difficult since not only a lot of tweaking of measurements will be made to adjust the website dimensions.

Websites have changed the way businesses are run. People actually purchase items online now and this is why having a good-looking website is essential. A professional-looking website will ensure more transactions and therefore lead to more sales and higher profitability.

The rule of thumb in looking for graphics online is to look for royalty-free clipart and photos. This means you may use the work without paying a continuing royalty fee for use. You may receive the right to use the artwork free of charge, you may pay a fee to access such artwork (say $15.95 a month for unlimited downloads), you may pay for the right to use that particular piece, or you may agree to link back to the creator’s site in exchange for the royalty-free use of the artwork.

The second problem with finding clipart and photos online is that good royalty-free art may be more expensive than you would hope. This is changing rapidly as sites like StockXchange, iStockPhoto and Dreamstime make it easier for photographers to sell their work and for consumers to find clipart they need.

The key to finding exactly the right art for your project is to have a very good idea of what you are going to need before you start. Think about color, shape, size and resolution (whether it will be printed or posted online makes a difference).

Decide what you need, find something that fits the bill, and move on with the rest of your project. Otherwise you may spend a waste a lot of time searching for something that may not exist. The biggest obstacle to finishing a project on-time and on-budget is trying to go from great to perfect, when great is usually good enough.