Effective Living > Technology > Resources
Summary. This page offers a variety of resources for Search Engine Optimization and Internet promotion including manuals, guides, tips, software, and other resources. These are the methods that we use at ResourcesForLife.com to acheive Top 10 Rankings for most of our pages.
- Diversify. Your website represents a huge investment of time and probably money. As with investing money, you should diversify your content. If you’ve not yet settled on a domain name, consider creating one that is unique as well as broad enough to present a variety of products, services, and information. As your business and brand expands in reach and scope, you’ll want to broaden your reach and the scope of content. The more quantity and variety of documents, articles, and pages you have on your site, the more likely it is that people will find you. As a result, a variety of different searches on different topics should potentially lead people to different pages, documents, and articles on your site. For more on this topic, read Website Hosting and Choosing the Right Name for a Blog or Domain.
- Images. People like clean, bright, colorful, happy, inspirational images. While stock photos are sometimes helpful, they can have a sterile, impersonal, and fake appearance. As much as possible, use your own photographs. This is why companies like Walmart use employees in their advertising. Gateway computer shipps their computers out with desktop images that are photos taken by their employees.
- Navigation. Search engines explore your website using the navigation you have designed. It’s helpful to design website navigation like a tree with your home page being like the trunk of the tree. Have a few main branches from the main page, then branch out from those. This helps keep your site organized, easy to navigate, and also easy to manage. Navigation links should be simple, and consistently anchored so they can be found in the same place all the time — preferably at the top of the page.
- New Content That’s Never Old. It’s very imortant to have new content on your website regularly (monthly, weekly, or daily). The new content can be in the form of a new page/article/document, or additional information added to existing pages, or when a single page becomes too big, it can be broken into two or more sub-pages while maintaining the original page as the trunk of the tree. One of the challenges with creating fresh new web content is that it soon becomes old and stale. This makes it irrelevant when people land on it, or, worse yet, the links are broken and other information is incorrect. Write with longevity in mind in terms of content and writing style. Link to only websites that have been around for a while and be sure to link to the final destination pages and not temporary pages. Be thoughtful about how you name your pages. For example, in the days of printed media, it was useful to use a clever play on words to peak the reader’s interest. In the days of the Internet, your page title should convey exactly what the page is about. It may even end up looking like a string of keywords. For more information on this read Website or Blog Content Posting Workflow Best Practice Guidelines.
- Newsletter. People are overwhelmed with email these days. Try consolidating all communications into a single monthly newsletter for those who don’t need frequent updates. Otherwise, if people feel you send them too much, they will simply unsubscribe entirely.
- No Advertising. Traditional advertising is a nuisance. People really dislike banner ads on web pages and spam in their inbox. So, when your advertising appears anywhere, make sure it is tastefully implemented and relevant to the page it appears on. The best form of advertising is to have your website and businessess mentioned in articles and listed in directories. Similarly, your site visitors don’t want banner ads or pop-up ads. The only advertising that might be useful would be content relevant ads such as Google Adsense. For more information, read Internet Website or Blog Advertising, Stores, and Affiliate Programs.
- Social Networking. Create a presence in online social networking sites for your business/website and also for yourself. Use these to help spread the word about news and new content.
- Store. Even if your website is simply informative, or focused on presenting information about your brick and mortar store, you should consider offering an online store. Someone coming to your site with an interest in appliances may end up wanting to purchase kitchen items as well. You can satisfy that need by offering a secondary store that contains a variety of products even if they aren’t your central focus. This way, when you refer to products in articles and documents, you can link to those products in your store where people can learn more and purchase if desired. The other important aspect of having a store area on your website is that it can be a launching place for advertising, links to affiliate programs, and other such things. This keeps the rest of your website free of obtrusive and bandwidth stealing advertising.
- Subscribe and Share Buttons. Using a services like AddThis.com, Google Feedburner, and ShareThis.com, you can make it easier for site visitors to subscribe for updates and tell others about your website. Software such as Internet Business Promoter is used by Fortune 500 companies such as Ebay, Lexmark, Canon, Zurich, Reunion, Siemns, and more to help promote online awareness.
- Video. As much as possible, include an interesting and high quality video presentation on each page of your site. This may require producing the video yourself, or utilizing existing quality videos from Blip.tv, Vimeo.com, YouTube.com, or similar services that allow you to embed video on a page. Documents and articles that include reference and how-to videos are very popular and they provide a valuable service to your site visitors.
Customer Service. What does customer service have to do with search engine optimization? Ultimately success in business comes down to customer service that leads to customer satisfaction. If your customers are complaining, you’re doing something wrong. Even if your customers aren’t complaining, you may be doing something wrong. Your customers should be so satisfied with your product or service that they can’t help but tell someone else about it. Only then are you doing something right. When this happens, you’ll end up with a level of Internet name recognition and brand awareness that can’t be bought at any price. People will be talking about your business on their blogs, in chat rooms, on discussion boards, in newsletters, and with friends.
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Document History. This document was first published on 20091021at0925. It was updated on 20100708th1451.