High Converting Web Design With Offshoring

Psychologists are aware what makes people tick. Now, they even work with web designers in order to build the ultimate online store that will convert shoppers to buyers. With the spread of online shopping, people are also being more aware of online scams. That is why it is becoming harder and harder to convince web shoppers to become web buyers. How can you reassure your customers and get them to pull out their credit card?

Converting visitors into customers is a tricky process. The most important thing is for the website to gain the trust of the would-be customer. The website must create this ultimate shopping experience where the buyer will be comfortable to part with his or her money.

How does one make a web shopper comfortable? Buyers need to feel that they have control of all parts of the transaction. All things must be transparent to them. No underscoring terms or hidden agreements. Full disclosure is required.

Here are a few points that you should concentrate on when developing a website design for your website.

1. Website design that loads quickly: Make sure that your homepage loads within 10 seconds of your visitor typing your domain (or coming to your site if coming through a search engine


2. Website design with light background: Make sure that the background of your website is light and makes it easier for the visitors to read the content of the website. Most of the modern website designers understand this aspect. Think about using black or dark blue font on a white or light body background.


3. Concise Navigation: Make sure that your website has a navigation that is easy to follow. Again I believe that most decent website developers will help you develop a concise navigation.


4. Instil Confidence: You should work with your web designer to create a website design that helps develops trust between you and the visitors to your website. Its only when your visitors trust you, they will become your customers.


5. No Advertising banners: I can't argue this point enough; no website design needs external advertising. Your website design should be developed so that it helps you grow your business and not someone else's. Also many visitors will not take your website seriously if they see third party ads on your website.


6. Create a "sense of urgency." Urge the customer to act immediately; they are not likely to come back later and buy. Emphasize that supplies or time is running out, or that if they miss their chance it will be gone forever. Of course, try not to go overboard as if you are overly hyperbolic or "spiel-like" (ever seen a really bad infomercial?) the customer might not believe your sense of urgency claim. Just like in dating, you don’t want to sound desperate or use ultimatums that will put off your customers and destroy your credibility.


7. Eliminate clutter. Clutter does not look professional and it confuses the mind. Remember that Google built an empire on a web site that is mostly white and minimalistic, and there are some important lessons to be learned from that.


8. Easy E-Commerce: If you want to sell using your website, make sure that your visitors find it easy to make a purchase.

Some tips on making the ultimate, most comfortable shopping experience are-

1. Make the site look professional. Professionalism builds credibility.. And web shoppers look into credibility, because a lot of online scams are already present. Upon learning that credibility, this is already one step in making their shopping experience more comfortable.


2. Ease navigation. Make the site very user-friendly.


3. Have an FAQ page ready. Answer all possible questions the web shopper may have.


4. Have a contact form or e-mail link available. (Assure the potential client that their queries will be answered to ASAP.)


5. Offer lots of payment options. (Ones that have good reputation where the buyer will not even doubt on.)


6. Offer shipment options too. Something that is secure where the buyer would not feel violated about giving away shipping information.

There are many online tools that companies can use to gauge their web design’s performance. There is the Google Website Optimizer. The best thing about this is that the service is offered free!

Getting Indexed by Search Engines

Getting Indexed by Search Engines
by: Eileen Maravillas

If you read a lot of articles, guides, tutorials and any other materials about basic search engine optimization, getting indexed to search engines is the most important part of SEO after you've created your site and optimized its content.

What will you do after you've uploaded those web pages, optimized the content as well as your meta tags? Getting listed in SERPs of course! Here's what learned about indexing web pages:

Submitting to Search Engines
Many would say that submitting your home page to search engines is just a waste of time. Well, if your trying to submit on all those search engines then you really are just wasting your time. You can still do this method but my advice is to submit only to what webmasters' call “The Big Three”, namely Google, Yahoo and MSN.

You can still get your web pages indexed without having to do this method. There are other ways, which I think are much better, that can help you get your site indexed in SERPs.

The Power of Social Bookmarking
If you haven't heard if Digg.com or StumbleUpon.com then you're way behind in search engine optimization. These are samples of a social bookmarking sites which is similar to the ordinary bookmark tool we have in our web browsers' menu bar. The difference between the ordinary bookmarking and with social bookmarking are:

* you can access your bookmarks on any computer you use just by registering an account;
* and share your bookmarked sites/links with other members

Why Should I Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites?
Here are the reasons I've learned why I submit to social bookmarking sites:

1.For fast indexing - high traffic social bookmarking sites are more frequently visited by search engine spiders. If you submit your site, the higher the chance you have getting indexed.
2.For traffic - people love interesting topics, important news, humor and tutorials.
3.Increase more traffic - posts on Digg, and other social bookmarking sites, also appears in SERPs, giving you a higher chance of visibility!

Social Networking Sites
Do you like Facebook or Twitter? These are social networking sites where you can submit your links. Isn't that great?! Now the key to the successful use of social networking sites is you got to have lots of friends. Mingle with other members, join different groups, share your profile and be active, don't just login to your account to post a link. This link building technique is very helpful if you use it properly.

I find social bookmarking and networking as a part of link building technique that you can both use for work and have fun at the same time. Because you get to meet other webmasters doing link building of their own, you can exchange SEO tips and secrets, and the normal internet users you can interact with while doing work. And best of all you can even earn extra income by offering link building services to companies/sites that needs help with their search engine rankings.

Sitemaps
There are two types of sitemaps we can use, the XML and HTML sitemaps.

.XML Sitemap - This sitemap is used to inform search engines of pages that are available for crawling in a website.

.HTML Sitemap - This sitemap is for your visitors. It is used as a guide/navigation for visitors who are looking for a specific page, product or service you might be offering.

Now, you'll find these search engine optimization techniques quite easy to learn and do. Submitting your site or blog to the big three search engines can take you at least five minutes to do, social bookmarking and networking can be time consuming but it's all worth it, and submitting sitemaps to search engines is a must-do if you want to get all your web pages indexed.

How To Attract Spiders To Your Web

How To Attract Spiders To Your Web
by: Karen Michelle Gatdula

First of all, let's define “spiders”. What is this term? This isn't the arachnids. These are intelligent robots that gathers information about websites in able to index it for search engine use. Haven't you wonder why Google or Yahoo can give you answers to your question in just a matter of seconds? That's the job of the spiders. Get the picture yet?

If the spiders indexed your website then you are listed in search engine's database and your website can be searched using that certain search engine – this means a lot of prospect visitors because there are millions of people who uses Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

So how would you lure spiders to visit and index your website?

One thing you must remember if you want your website to be visited by spiders – put more attention on content and less on images. Why?

Spiders can't read images as well as text in the images. They only read the texts. Notice that most of the websites that rank on the top ten of search engine results has one thing in common – they repeated the keyword that you typed several times in the documents.

Another thing you should remember is to manage your META tags, title keywords and the first paragraph of the web's content well because spiders also prioritize these things.

3 Types of SEOs

3 Types of SEOs
by: Karen Michelle Gatdula

Here's an article giving a brief description on the three types of Search Engine Optimizations.

3 Types of SEOs (White Hat, Black Hat & Gray Hat)

Let me first give you a gist of what are white hat, black hat and gray hat – they are the types of Search Engine Optimization. They could be ethical but not so effective, they could be highly profitable but risky and they could be somewhere in between.

To compare these three hats briefly, let me give you a quick explanation:

White Hat SEO – the ethical but tedious way of building website traffic through using methods that are considered honest and with accordance to the search engine's link building principles. This may take time to have noticeable results. Some examples are: backlinking and keyword analysis.

Black Hat SEO – the complete opposite of White Hat and a risky way of building website traffic because it violates search engine's guidelines. It guarantees very fast results. Some examples are: keyword stuffing, invisible text, link farms and doorway pages.

Gray Hat SEO – somewhere between the two. The result is also somewhere between the two. Some examples are: duplicating contents of other websites and having a thick keyword density that's not considered normal but less than what a Black Hat has.

Building a website popularity is like starting a business. To make your business work out you have to exert a lot of effort, time, money and hire the right people. You will have to deal with difficult decisions all the time in able to keep up with your competitors. Sometimes the progress could be very slow that you will think of other risky measures to make the capital returns faster, even to the point of paying the price of jeopardizing your business because the method you chose violated the government's guidelines.

Let say for instance that the government is the search engine and you are building your website's popularity considering the search engine's ethical link building rules. What would you do?

- You would go for the White Hat method which adheres to the search engine's requirements.

But let say that you want a faster result. You want to topped Google in no time without considering some ethical standards, what would you do?

- Do it the Black Hat way, but be ready to risk the possibility of your website to be banned by search engines.

If you want to have the benefits of both without or maybe lessen the risk, do the Gray Hat technique.

You can never rush your ROI. And so do a website's popularity. If you are planning to have your website searchable in search engines for a long period of time (or even for eternity) then you will have to choose giving the White Hat method a shot. Hire a very good SEO and see your website climbed the organic results in search engines in a given decent amount of time.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
by: Eileen Maravillas

As the Google Webmasters' Guide tells us:

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer."

Basically, SEO is the method or strategy used by webmasters to improve their website's ranking in Search Engines (SE) in order to increase traffic and sales. Basic things such as review of web content and structure, are a part of SEO.

It's in the early 1990's where website owners began to realize that having their sites highly visible in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) brings them more traffic and sales.

People who began to notice this have created techniques to manipulate Search Engines. Spamming and hacking Search Engines' algorithm were the main idea at that time, though it was highly discouraged by Search Engine Owners.

Due to this, the banning and decreasing of website rankings began. The people who did the aforementioned unethical way to increase their rankings realized that by following Search Engine's guidelines, they can also come up with satisfactory results, all that they need is patience.

Search Engines were made to provide quality information to its users, that's why they fight back and bite hard those webmasters who practices SEO the wrong way.