by C.Toal

In today’s competitive world, the only way to guarantee that your website will get noticed and therefore earn revenue, is to make sure it goes through internet search engine optimization. This can be achieved by hiring a company that specializes in search engine optimization or SEO.


When you hire a company that specializes in internet SEO, they will offer various schemes and packages that you can choose from. Some will charge on a monthly or retainer basis, some will charge on a per project basis, and others will charge you for each process of the project. Choose the package that is best suited to your needs and budget to get the most out of your money.


The end goal of any internet SEO project is to ensure the maximum visibility of your website by making it come out on top on a given list of search engine results. This increased visibility will lead to more traffic and hits to your website, and in turn, will convert to more revenues for your company.


There are various ways to achieve internet SEO. There is the natural way, which is also known as the organic or unpaid search engine optimization. There is also the paid SEO and lastly, there are the methods that fall under what are known as black hat SEO techniques or spamdexing.


The natural or organic SEO is the most ethical method among the three kinds, and it is also the most effective. Again, the goal of natural or organic SEO is maximum visibility for your website in search engine results. You website must not only appear in the list of search engine results, but must also be among the high ranking sites on that list. That means that your site must be number one to ten in the said search engine results.


Natural internet SEO involves the editing of your website’s content so that it contains the right amount of keywords that are being searched for by today’s internet users. The keywords must of course be relevant to your product or service, as well as to your target audience. Otherwise, the number of hits that your website will receive will not matter because the people who visit your site are not the market that will actually be interested in what you have to offer.


That is why keyword research is so important. Keyword research is a service that can either come together or separately from an internet SEO package. When your website has the proper keywords that are popularly used today, whenever an internet user makes a search using a search engine’s query box with these keywords, there is a high chance that your website will come out in the search engine results. And if the SEO is done properly, your website will even come out as one of the top sites in the results.

• Organic SEO also involves making your website compatible for searches done using image or video searches and local or geographical based searches. The more specific and specialized the search engine optimization is, the more beneficial this will be for your website.Natural or organic SEO also involves making sure that the HTML codes of your website are optimized, and that the proper tags are put in place in your site.




• Paid SEO involves paying for or sponsoring search engine results. Your website will appear on top of the search engine results for the keywords that you pay for. The disadvantage of this is that the paid results are segregated and actually shown as paid results. Therefore, most internet users will tend to disregard such websites.




• Black hat SEO or spamdexing involves stuffing a website with keywords, where the website does not contain actual information or content, but is merely a way to get people to go to the site only to be directed to the main site using links.

About The Author

Christopher Toal is an SEO expert. For more great information on Internet SEO, visit http://www.seoproficient.com.

by Maura O’Neill

If you plan to effectively compete on the Web, site design elements should be carefully evaluated and improved if possible.

The Words

Referred to as “content,” the messaging on your site should match the overall theme of the page and the overall theme of the website. Not only that, the content needs to be maintained. Refresh, correct and update your site content regularly. Add more content if it’s relevant to the overall theme of your site and will make the website more valuable to your readers.

The Design

Web site design is like all other types of design: it should be easy to understand and easy to use. Plenty of white space, consistent use of color and font, and plenty of organizing elements like headers, bullets, small blocks of content, etc. all help. Images and animation fall under this umbrella too; don’t let images override the message of your site. Instead, include images and animation only where it enhances the user experience and supports your website goals.

The user experience

Those who provide Web design services for a living know that building websites is similar to building any other tool or vehicle: It’s only as effective as it is usable. For websites, this translates to:

• Including intuitive, consistent, clear navigation that makes getting around your website nearly automatic: the language and design should carry repeating elements from page to page
• Page names should stay universal (Home, About Us, Contact Us)
• Hyperlinks clicked on to move the user into the website and from page to page should be obvious and made of real text, not images of text.
• Finally, a good website provides users a search tool. Period.

Other elements

• Screen resolution should fit most screen sizes. Users shouldn’t ever have to scroll horizontally.
• If you intend to include a registration form on your site, it should be very easy to use. Don’t make users register to enter your site, because they probably won’t. You’re just not that important.
• Finally, avoid having background music on your site. Not many websites use this anymore, but in case you haven’t noticed how annoying it is to have the sounds of nature or other background music comes on when you arrive at a website, take note. If you must have sound, make it optional, never automatic.

Quality assurance

Before your website is loosed upon the world, make sure it works the way you want it to. Testing is easier now than ever before.

If your website is set up to sell, you may want to run a check up on the following elements common to good ecommerce site design:

Ecommerce words

• Tone – The content on the pages of your ecommerce site should be suitable for the type of site you have. Some ecommerce sites work better with fantasy-based copy, while others are more effective with straightforward copy. Some ecommerce sites can really play up the imagery to help customers get a physical sense of the product. For other sites, this will be just a nuisance. Think about how you might describe your products if your target customer were on the phone.
• Organization – Headlines can describe what’s on the page and highlight a main benefit
• Product descriptions – These should always be original (copy and pasting means you have duplicate content and miss an opportunity to get ranked well in the search engines). Product descriptions let you include target keywords in a more natural way.
• Audience – Does the content directly address the website visitor? Or does the content go on and on about you, your company, your products, etc.? For better results, use customer focused text. Futurenowinc.com/wewetext.htm can help you see how well you’re doing.
• Word count – to get pages ranked you need content. If you just have a few words and mostly images on your pages, that’s not going to cut it. 200 words and preferably more per page is best, but be sure that the words add value to the product page. Make every word count.
• Strong calls to action – Shop, order, check out, buy, sign up, compare, click here… these words are all overt ways of encouraging shoppers to move through the buyer cycle. It’s okay to use them here and there. In fact, studies show that we human beings are more likely to perform an action online when we are told exactly what that action should be. Make sure that once someone performs the action they are taken to a relevant page and rewarded with something of value. Give them what they expect.
• Creative, fresh, uniquely you – This last content-related element is hard to describe, but if you can get it and master it, you’re a step ahead of many of your competitors. Make your content a transparent window that reveals what is unique about you and your store. One way to do this is to spend some time writing the content yourself, even if you plan to have it spruced up later by a professional copywriter. Another great way to help with this is to read the content on your competitors’ websites. See where certain phrases appear again and again? Notice how so much is about the store owner or the products and so little is about the customer’s needs and pain points? Make a list of the words and phrases that are used over and over on these websites and make a point not to use them. Instead write directly to your audience in your distinctive voice.

Ecommerce design

• The same principles of website design apply to ecommerce site design, but a few more elements also apply. Here are some great tools that are great for SEO, sales or both:
• Recommendation engines – these are not simple to implement, but they do have the potential for upselling that could be worth the investment
• Page load time – if you sell many products and may be looking at lots of traffic, make sure your Web hosting package can handle it. Google for one has intimated that they will be measuring page load times when they rank website pages. Pages should upload quickly to allow search engine spiders to crawl them, and humans don’t care for slow load times either.
• Landing pages – These are central areas designed to pull categories together. Make sure that these look great and work well. Keep them simple, navigable and themed.
• Image attributes – Search engine spiders can’t see images, so make sure that your images have keyword rich captions related directly to what the product pictured is all about.
• Breadcrumb trails – Great for website users and for search engines, these trails (home>cosmetics>mirrors>magnified mirrors>compacts) are maps that show the visitors where they’ve been. SEO benefit is that they can also be read by search engines and match with long tail searches (detailed, more specific searches).

You can pay for Web design services and ask about the elements listed here. If you plan to do the work yourself, some good resources for a regular or an ecommerce website include SearchEngineLand.com and HighRankings.com. Good places to look for creating content for websites are CopyBlogger.com and CopywriterUnderground.com. Others are listed here.

About The Author

Maura O’Neill, copywriter for Network Solutions®, writes Online Press Releases, web site content, articles, blogs and more to help small businesses thrive online.

by Melissa Smich

Choosing the right web hosting provider is one of the most crucial decisions of a webmaster. A poor web hosting service provider can be your worst nightmare, so this guide will be very useful for beginners. Here are the golden rules:

1. Amount of web space:

Consider your required amount of space carefully, especially if your website has lots of videos or rich in graphics. You might want to expand your space tomorrow and be sure that your web hosting company could be able to provide more space. Also, watch out for “unlimited disk space” claims, there may be more to it than meets the eye, and you may soon find out that “unlimited” doesn’t really mean “unlimited”.

2. Bandwidth/Data Transfer:

Data transfer is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site. After you decide on the amount of web space you need, you need to consider sufficient bandwidth for efficient data transfer. Again, beware of “unlimited bandwidth” claims, there is always a limitation. To give you an idea, a typical traffic requirement is usually less than 3 GB of bandwidth per month.

3. Site Builder:

If you don’t know anything about programming or making websites, you may need an easy site builder system. Be sure that your web hosting provider has one for you to use.

4. Reliability, security and speed of access:

They are extremely important for all online businesses. If your site goes down or is not available, you will lose many visitors, and worst of all, potential customers. So how do you know if a web hosting company is reliable? Ask other customers and read comments and feedback left about the company. Look for a hosting site with 99.5% or higher uptime. No hosting company can guarantee 100% uptime. If anyone says so, make sure you investigate their claims first.

Besides, you have to be very cautious about security; especially if you have an e-commerce website. Your customers will expect security from you. You will definitely need SSL if you want to collect credit card payments on your site.

Test the speed of a host’s network to your location by clicking (for windows users) Start, Run,Type in “command” and Enter, and then type “ping hostdomainname.com”. Wait for it to finish and look for the average ping. The lower the number the better, the faster your site will load. Averaging around an 80 ms could be considered good. You may also want to check if the company is legit by doing a WHOIS for the company’s domain name.

5. Customer Support:

Inquire carefully about their support services. Do they provide 24/7 support? Do they provide your preferred contact method, be it telephone, email, or chat support? Check out their FAQ and help pages. Do they charge for support or is it free? How rapidly will they respond to your inquiry? These are all important questions to be answered. Avoid a host immediately that has a poor customer service reputation.

You can even test their support before joining. Make sure you call the technical support department; often Sales departments have better response time, which may give you the wrong idea. And is it in-house Customer Support or is it outsourced? Often an outsourced support department doesn’t have the in-depth knowledge, skills or even the access they need to help you with your problems.

6. Web Host Pricing:

It’s not necessarily true that most expensive service is the best one. Compare prices and services and decide accordingly. Most web hosts allow you to select an annual payment plan that gives you a cheaper rate than if you were to pay monthly.

7. Email services:

Get an email through your domain name. It looks more professional and official and helps you to stay in touch with your visitors. Investigate the email services provided by your hosting company. Do they support POP3 or IMAP4 or only offer webmail? Do they offer Hosted Exchange or Business-Grade email? How many email addresses are provided with their web hosting plans? Can you set an email address to automatically reply (auto responder) or forwarded to your existing e-mail address? Make sure they have all the features you’re looking for in an email host.

8. Logs:

All the good hosting services provide you website logs. So you can manage your statistics and monitor your website accordingly. Make sure that at least raw log files are provided.

9. Web Hosting Features:

Make sure that your hosting plan has all the features you need to get your site up and running properly. FTP access provides the ability to upload new pages. If you are using personal web builder, FTP access is crucial for you. FTP provides more flexibility when managing your website. Also, if your web site is built with any server side scripting features, make sure you host supports the scripting language you are using, be it ASP or ASP.NET, PHP, Perl and so on. Also chances are that you’ll need a database tool as well, such as Microsoft SQL or MySQL.

10. Control Panel:

The Control Panel allows you to manage different aspects of your web account by yourself, such as changing passwords or managing features and add-ons. If you don’t want to call their technical support all the time, you definitely need an extensive control panel.

About The Author

Myhosting.com takes pride in offering a range of competitively priced web hosting services, including domain and email hosting. This Web host service allows you to redirect Web visitors a Web server level and supports top-level domains and sub-domains. Know more about the company’s services by visiting myhosting.com or calling 1-866-289-5091.