Website Structure Advice

Guest post

There are several types of websites on the internet. Some websites are selling a product or service while others are more informational. Whichever type you are creating, the text should be concise, short, and to the point, and the website itself should be well structured.

No matter what type of website you are creating, know your target audience (a stay-at-home mom, business community, sports fans, artists, etc.) and adapt your website as specifically as possible to the audience you desire to reach. Knowing your audience makes it easier to write text for your website that is effective, appropriate, and interesting.

Before creating your website there are various questions you need to ask yourself. Why is this website being created? What do I plan to accomplish with the creation of this website? Who is my target audience? How do I communicate most effectively, with words, graphics, video, audio? How do I capture my audience?

A website is composed of a series of individual pages. No matter what type of website you are creating, your site should be well organized. Before creating your site, decide on the how it should be structured.

A website structure is basically made of first page (referred to as the home page and/or index page), the next level down known as the "main sections", and the third level down referred to as subsections and/or content pages. Try to imagine your website as a hierarchy of pages, with your home page located at the top.

The home page should be short and to the point. This is the front door of your presence online, the first impression of your site to the majority of your website's visitors. This is the page that will capture the reader’s interest and give them reason to go deeper into your website.

The main section pages should contain the overview of the general topics your website covers. For example, if you own a website that is selling doors, this would be where you would list the various types of doors that you are selling but not yet sharing the details of a specific model of door.

The subsection pages are where you offer the specific details. Using the same example as above, if you own a website that is selling doors this is the level where you list the detail description of each door, a picture of the door, the cost of the door, etc.

Some people sketch out a diagram of what they want their website structure to look like on a piece of paper. I prefer to use index cards to get an idea of how the website structure will look since they can more easily be moved around. Once you have the index cards in the structure fashion that you want, sketch the diagram on a sheet of paper to capture the layout of the index cards. Then, you can get work!

Bio: Kate Forester writes about web hosting providers, web design tools and other online products and services for Consumer-Rankings.com.

Does content really make you money?

Guest post by: Paul

Everyone’s gone marketing crazy lately and I suppose I don’t blame them either. With more competition than ever you really have to work to get your site noticed online. For many webmasters this involves many hours/days of link begging until some blogger eventually gives in and links to you from their resources page (which is buried 10 levels deep from the homepage).

So the marketing side of being a webmaster is un-avoidable but I’ve noticed that many forget you need great content on your site if you expect visitors to convert into sales, either for yourself or your advertisers. How many times have you been to an ecommerce site that’s just had a bunch of technical info on each product that they got free from the manufacturer? I’m not sure why people think boring content increases sales but they seem too.

How about instead of some forgettable technical specs you shot a video of yourself using the product and explaining the features and benefits of it? People love to watch video online because it requires even less effort than reading, people are lazy and I include myself in that bracket. I know some webmasters are worried about how to put a video into web format and maybe also bandwidth costs. However this is no longer a realistic excuse because Youtube will now do it all for you including converting the video. All you have to do embed the video code on your site, plus you will attract visitors from people viewing it on Youtube too!

It’s not just video that can increase sales on your site, info-graphics are also great for explaining something complex quickly. If you’re not sure what an info-graphic is it’s just an image with lots of labels explaining a process, the key is to keep it light-hearted with cartoon characters and fun colours. Try not to let it become a power point slide, otherwise people will feel like they are at work!

The best reason to create useful content though is because long term it’s really the only strategy. Untimely at some point someone at Google may review your site and if you have a 1000 pages of junk you can’t really complain if your site disappears the next day. When it comes to quality creating something worthwhile is the best bet you can make.

I have more articles like this on my blog at earning money online which has lots of marketing advice for webmasters.

The Art of Forum Marketing

Guest post by: Neil Jones

Forums are an asset to every serious marketer as they attract people from all walks of life and all parts of the world who have a common interest on a specific subject. A forum usually evolves into a community of friends who share their knowledge, expertise and experiences. It becomes an interactive society of people in a virtual setting.

Each forum adopts it own unique character that is often influenced by the members themselves and of course there are rules and regulations than have to be upheld to maintain order within this virtual community. One of the biggest obstacles faced by forum owners is the fight against spam: people and automated software that register with the sole purpose of obtaining a backlink to a site to drive traffic or for SEO purposes.

These members do not last long on the forums as they are usually banned before they turn the forum into a spam jungle. But spammers do not understand the value that a forum can inject in their marketing efforts if they actually approached forum marketing in an ethical manner. The amount of traffic that can be directed to a site from a relevant forum is incredible.

The Right Approach to Forum Marketing

Your first approach as a forum marketer will be to establish an element of rep power. Your credibility is what will essentially embolden your signature link within each of your posts. How to establish credibility?

• Do not post replies or begin threads and ask people to visit your site
• Offer valuable replies that will be remembered and will stand out
• Treat people with respect and do not use your knowledge to criticize, but rather, use it to help people
• Build relationships with long standing forum members to further establish yourself

Once you are comfortable in the forum environment and you feel a sense of belonging you can approach your marketing by replying to threads that are relevant to your niche. Again, add value by answering the questions posed with tact and ensure you provide information that is practical and can be applied in real life. This approach in itself will attract people to you and you will find the traffic gained from the forum will begin to increase.

Next, you should begin your own threads that directly relate to your personal experiences, and offer a detailed exposition on your problems and the solutions you have found. For example: if you are part of an internet marketing forum, and you have found success as an internet marketer, you can begin a thread entitled, “How I made my first $100 online”. You can subsequently provide step-by-step instructions on the process you followed and you can highlight the challenges you faced and how you overcame them.

People will begin to respect you even more and of course they will begin to visit your sites from you signature link.

This is all you need to do to gain exposure from the forum environment. The one common denominator is offering value. Value will help increase your credibility, it will gain you the trust of other members and it will position you as an authority in your niche. If you embrace this approach your member status will appreciate and so will the traffic to your website and there will be absolutely no need for you to tell people to click on the link in your signature. 

 

This is a Guest post by Neil Jones, who Specializes in launching ecommerce sites, he is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe they are on course to be one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers like the Datalogic Memor and the Symbol MC70. Neil has been an online marketer for the past 6 years and in that time he has owned and run a range of sites all built around the ecommerce platform.

Email signature

How to create email signature for Outlook, Windows Live, Gmail or Yahoo Mail? In this short article you will find guidelines for adding signature to your mail.

How to create signature for Outlook

To learn how to add signature and for more information about signature in Outlook follow links:

• How to Create an Email Signature in Outlook
• How to Create an Email Signature in Outlook - Step by step Screenshot Walkthrough
• How to Insert a Graphic or Animation in Your Outlook Email Signature

Set Up Windows Live Hotmail Signature

Here is a link for Windows Live signature:

• How to Set Up Your Windows Live Hotmail Signature

Add Yahoo mail signature

Links for implementing and changing Yahoo mail signature:

• How do I add or change a Yahoo mail signature?

Adding a signature in Gmail

To implement a signature in Gmail follow links:

• How to Set Up an Email Signature in Gmail

Beginners - Link Building Explained

Guest post by: AlexSimmonds

So, you’ve spent the last few weeks building your first website, either from scratch or using a Wordpress template. You’ve even gone so far as to have done some work on keyword research and optimized your site for certain phrases you know are relevant. Yet you’re still not showing up on the search engines. Your site is optimized, your keywords are correct and in the right place, you’ve organized your headers and tags, and you’re writing some awesome content. But no one is reading it. What now?

The next step on your SEO journey is to delve into the murky world of link building. For those of you who have been reading up on search engine optimization you will almost certainly have come across the term ‘backlink’ but might have wondered what exactly it meant. Well now is the time to roll your sleeves up and get to grips with backlinks, because when it comes to SEO the backlink is king.

Backlinks are essentially like friends. The more of them you have, the more popular you are (although some of them are actually no good for you and can get you in trouble.)  Also referred to as inbound links (IBL’s) they refer to other websites that link to your site. They are crucial for SEO purposes because many search engines, including Google, will allocate more credit to a site when indexing if it has a decent number of quality (the important word here) backlinks and therefore place it higher up the search engine results. However, the days when you could simply farm out link building to a link farm or link building company are over. As with all things SEO, too much abuse by webmasters has made it far harder to game the system now. Google has only recently adjusted their algorithm to ensure that link building and backlinks are about quality and not quantity. With this in mind, for those just starting out, here are a few tips on correctly building links to your site:

(1) Do Your Research – If you’re putting together a backlink strategy the first thing you should do is head to the sites of your competitors to see where their backlinks are coming from. If someone is willing to link to your competitors then their site will probably be of relevance to yours too, so they will probably be open to linking to you. Once you have established this, it is simply a case of offering better content than your competitor and approaching their website for a link. An easy way to do this back link research is to get hold of one of the many free tools out there such as SEO Spyglass or SEO Back Link Analyzer.

(2) Guest Posting – The easiest way to get quality back links. Find sites with a good reputation and high PR and who are open to guest posting. Then write an article which is of relevance and interest to their readers and submit it. In return they will normally give you a brief ‘author’s box’ in which you can have one link. Link to your site.

(3) Use Only Quality Backlinks – Quality not quantity is your mantra. Try to only go for quality backlinks, as they will bring much better link value to your site. If possible, stick to sites with a PR rating of 2+, that are a few years old and are genuine sites, not link farms, article farms or any other kind of farm. Similarly, make sure you link on a search phrase that is relevant to your site rather than having your anchor text as something like ‘click here.’ If possible, pick sites where they have very few other links on the page as these can dilute the strength of your ‘link juice.’

(4) Submit Your Site to Directories – less important than in previous years but there are still advantages to be had from submitting your site to as many directories as you can get your hands on. With many directory submission services out there you can delegate this job to someone else, although if you want to get in the highest quality and most reputable directories you’ll need to do it yourself – they don’t accept automatic submissions.

(5) Write Quality Content – This is along the lines of ‘build it and they will come.’ Google are changing their algorithm every few months to push higher quality content further up the search results. Good quality writing should always be the first aim of any site. Not only will it rank better, it will also attract people who actually want to read the stuff. They will recommend it to other people and hey presto, you’ve got natural links and some buzz about your article and site.

Alex Simmonds is a freelance journalist and copywriter. He currently writes a blog for the Bedouin Group on freelancing and the contracting sector, covering everything from taxation to umbrella companies.

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