Many new webmasters, and even seasoned web designers sometimes create web sites that are very inefficient in regard to updates. Updating your site keeps visitors coming back day in and day out, while at the same time giving search engines plenty to index. Yet if the task of updating your web site is not an efficient one, hundreds and thousands of hours can be lost. Using simple solutions, such as content management systems, the efficiency of updating a web site can be improved dramatically.

The Trap of a ‘Simple’ Web Site

An inexperienced webmaster makes a web site using HTML with no Content Management System, no Style Sheets, no includes, then finds things need to be updated and goes through and changes every single page on the site. Meanwhile, an experienced Webmaster using includes or a CMS is able to update his or her site in a fraction of the time.

Fortunately, the trap is very easy to escape, and if the problem is addressed right away, not much time is lost at all. The downside is that if you get stuck in the trap, you can spend countless hours making changes to your site that otherwise could have taken minutes.

Getting Out of the ‘Simple’ Web Site Trap

To get out of the ’simple’ site trap, simply transfer your site to a CMS or use includes and style sheets. There are huge numbers of CMS solutions available. Some are free, some charge a one-time fee and others charge a subscription fee. Having someone there to answer your questions when you need them answered is a huge plus. Spending the extra money to get the extra service is often well worth the investment. If your budget is tight, Open Source CMS solutions are available for free. A good programmer can do a basic installation of such a system in a few hours. PHP Nuke is an example of one popular Open Source CMS.

Conclusion

Many CMS solutions do much more than just allow your web site to be updated easily. A top-notch solution will include email marketing, web forms, e-commerce, members’ areas, lead management, and more.

The title you choose for your web page plays an important role in the ranking of your site in the search engines. When you add a title to your page, you are telling the search engine what the page is about. Doing this allows the search engines to know about the content on your page. Adding the correct title to your pages will play an important role in your SEO strategy. If you visit a lot of websites online, you will find that many of them have titles which say “untitled.”

Having pages which say “untitled” will tell the search engines nothing when they come to your website. Each page on your website should have a title which is unique. While you will also want to add quality content, having a good title will let both visitors and search engines know what your page is all about. If you are selling more than one product, you will want to have a title which says something about each product you sell. If you don’t take the time to optimize the titles of your pages, it is unlikely that they will rank high with the search engines. It is also important to place high quality keywords in your titles when possible.

Using important keywords in your title tag will allow your pages to rank better in the search engines. It is a good idea to use 2 to 3 keywords in each title. You don’t want to make the title too long. The search engines will reduce the weight of each word in long keyword phrases. It is also crucial to make sure you think of your readers when you design your titles. If you use the wrong phrase for your title, people may never type it into the search engine, and your pages will never show up. Your biggest challenge will be to add titles to your pages which are useful to both search engines and humans. Once you’ve done this, your pages will begin receiving visitors from a large number of keywords.

Having a good design for your landing pages is one of the most important aspects of web designing. The visitors do look at how a page looks and how quickly it loads, and this can even determine whether they leave the site or end up either bookmarking it or making a purchase. In order to improve the design of your landing pages, you should follow a few recommendations.

First of all, the page should load fast. Not everyone has broadband Internet, so you can’t assume that it will load fast for everyone. If a page doesn’t load in quick time, the visitors might get bugged up waiting and will leave.

The font for the text should be very easy to read, the font size should be proportionate, not too big not too small. Nobody likes to go to a site and have to squint to read the information. Most visitors will leave if that’s the case. Remember that the background should not obscure the text. Choose your colors carefully to make sure it is easy to read.

Your landing page should be easy to navigate. The buttons and call to actions should be easy to access and easy to read and use. It would be sad to have someone leave because they couldn’t figure out how to use your page.

Be sure to have a consistent layout and design. If you use more than one design type on your landing page, it won’t look neat and tidy. You want something visually appealing to the eye that flows together.

Avoid music or sounds. Visitors don’t necessarily appreciate music being blared at them, especially if they were already listening to something else. This just isn’t necessary. If you truly feel you need to have music, turn it off by default, and let them turn it on if they choose.

You should design your landing pages to be compatible not only with Internet Explorer, but also with Mozilla Firefox and Opera and other browsers.

Remember to design for all screen resolutions. Something that looks perfect in high resolution could actually be impossible to view in an 800×900.

The best way to make sure your landing pages are good is to test them out over and over again. Use people who are not familiar with your site to help you look for things you may have overlooked.

Knowing where and how to use your site’s keywords will greatly improve the efficiency of your search engine optimization process. The 5 places in a web page where you can use keywords are - the Title Tag, Keyword Meta Tag, Meta Description Tag, Alt Tags for images, Body copy on the page.

Title Tag is one of the tags in the head section of the html code of your web page and lists the title that is displayed in the web browser. Most search engines will index this tag for information about your site and many search engines will use this tag as the title of your listing. The Title Tag can include the company name, especially if it is a well known company, and should include your most important keywords.

The Meta Tag used to be the main way search engines indexed your page few years ago but nowadays it’s believed many top search engines simply ignore this tag. Some smaller search engines still take a look at this tag to help categorize your site. So it’s better to use them than nothing at all as proper use of Meta Tags won’t harm your site, The keywords should be separated by a comma. Put more specific keywords first then put the less important and general keywords later on.

The Meta Description Tag is still a valuable place to use your keywords. Many search engines will look at the Meta Description tag for keywords to compare against your body copy. Yahoo goes one step further and will use your description tag as the description of your site in their listings. The Description Meta Tag is a concise description of your site. Keep it short and precise.

Alt tags are text descriptions that are included with the code used to display images on a page. Basically an Alt tag is the Alternate Text version of the image in case the image is not displayed. Alt tags are also displayed as a quick popup when you hover your mouse pointer over an image. Many search engines, including Google, will index the Alt tags along with the rest of the body copy, making these ideal places to slip in a few more keywords. Just keep in mind that the text should accurately reflect the content of the image.

The body copy on the page is the main place to use keywords. Its the text that your visitors are reading when they visit your site. The major search engines will no longer give you a top placement just for having the most instances of a particular keyword on your page. They will give top listing to what they believe is the most relevant page on a topic. Work your keywords into the text frequently, but appropriately and make sure the page doesn’t look spammy. Select one or two keywords and make the page specifically about those keywords.

With so many websites already online and new websites popping up every single day, the competition level has rised to such an extent that a visitor can make a decision in a second whether to browse the internal pages of the site or leave after just browsing through the homepage. As a result of which many websites nowadays have extremely busy home pages. Webmasters nowadays try to sqeeze in every important information into the homepage of the site. So once you get there, you’re so overwhelmed with text and images that you have no idea what you want to do. So what can you do to ensure your website does not get that cluttered?

First off, how can you tell if your site is cluttered? While none of the following necessarily is an indication in and of themselves, they may be a sign that your site is getting cluttered.

- You have to scroll down a lot to view the whole page.

- There are more than three columns.

- The column count across the width of the page changes as you go down.

- Your site’s pages are not organized into categories.

Your site may have been growing this way for years, and now it seems impossible to fix. But there is always a way out of the mess.

First, archive anything on the front page that you have to scroll down pretty far to read. At the bottom of your page, you can put a link to older news.

Reorganize the layout of the front page so that there are three columns or less, and so that the columns stay the same all the way down the page. This will make the front page much less cluttered, so it will be easier for site visitors to pick out the information they need.

Make a list of all the pages in your site and separate them into categories. You may even need subcategories. Rework your menu system so that everything is organized into those categories. It may even help you to organize your site’s folder/directory structure so that they reflect the new categories and subcategories. You can also take the original list and create a page that is a site map. While not always necessary, this often helps search engines like Google index your entire site.

It might even be time to implement a content management system if you have enough information. Having a dynamic site ensures that this sort of thing will be unlikely to happen to your site again.

Cross-Browser compatibility means compatibility with all of the major web browser software. If a web page is completely cross-browser compatible, it will look more or less the same in all of the existing web browsers. The most commonly used browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox and Opera. Depending on the web browser used and the version of that web browser, a web page can be interpreted very differently. This is because different web browsers are compatible with different technologies and some have different syntax for the same technologies. Therefore it is important that your website is cross-browser compatible.

The general tips to create a cross browser compatible site would be

Use only standard compliant code
Do not use browser specific HTML tags and features as these only work in the browser they were created for.
Validate your HTML/XHTML coding and your cascading style sheets using W3C free validation service.

Once you finish the development and the design of the site, before going live you can use a browser check service for your site to checkout the screenshots of your site in popular browsers. Although some of these services are not free to use but they do offer a free trial.

It’s true, creating a site that is compatible with a wide range of browsers can be an arduous task but the benefits translate into more visitors and if you are an ecommerce based site, this will translate into increased sales.

On-Site-Optimization as well as Off-Site-Optimization both are important and major factors in SEO of a site. But what many webmasters do is concentrate only on Off-Site-Optimization and not on On-Page-Optmization which is totally wrong. As a webmaster, one must strike a proper balance between Off-Site-Optimization and On-Site-Optimization. On-Site-Optimization (on-page SEO) refers to what can be done on the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the on-page content. On-site-optimization factors are the ones that you can control in your site like:- keyword density, text, and links. Off-site-optimization (off-page SEO) is what can be done off the pages of a website to maximise its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the on-page content and keywords in off-page direct-links.

One of most critical element in On-Site-Optimization is keyword density, and if you can manage to get it right, it you can get a higher rank position for your site. Keyword density is the ratio of the number of occurrences of a particular keyword or phrase to the total number of words in a page. The total number of words does not include only the words in your title, description, or even in the body. But it also includes Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Visible Text, Alt Tags, Comment Tags, Domain Name, Image tags, Linked Text, Option Tags, and Reference Tags.

Keyword density tolerance is not the same for all Search engines. Simply because every search engine’s algorithm differs, and for that you must choose an average keyword density that would make your site rank in the top position in all major search engines. While the exact percentage of keyword density tolerance is still not known, density in the range of 5-7% would be safe for any search engine. It’s up to you, you may choose to optimize your site for just one of search engines, or to target all the major search engines.

You must balance between Off-Site-Optimization and On-Site-Optimization. Also you should give proper attention to keyword density in order to make a site successful.

ActiveX Controls are small programs that are also a set of rules for how applications should share information, which can be automatically downloaded and executed by a Web browser.

ActiveX is not a programming language but sets of rules that guide the way applications run on windows. You may have come across some web sites sometimes that ask you to download ActiveX controls in order for some of their downloadable programs to run. ActiveX controls have full access to the Windows operating system. This gives them much more power than Java applets, but with this power comes a certain risk that the applet may damage software or data on your machine. To control this risk, Microsoft developed a registration system so that browsers can identify and authenticate an ActiveX control before downloading it. Downloading these controls enters them in the Registry of the system but after a period, the system does not actually need these controls for those programs. But these controls are there taking up space and slowing down the system so these controls need to be cleaned out from the registry.

How Do ActiveX Controls Work?

It is not as easy as it may sound but here it goes. When the browser loads a web page that has embedded ActiveX components, the browser uses the ‘CLASSID’ information on the Web page’s ‘OBJECT’ statement to ascertain if the control is already present on your system. If not, the browser uses the ‘CODEBASE’ information to download the control and install it. Once you are done with the download it lodges in the system registry. It is not actually needed here but is there all the same. Downloading a free registry cleaner to clean the registry is one way to solve this problem of clogging up the registry with unwanted controls.

So How Safe Are ActiveX Controls

Many programmers started embedding ActiveX components in their programs and web pages. It must be remembered that ActiveX controls are capable of doing anything a normal Visual Basic program can. In other words they can seem to be linking to some program but may be malicious software. A Registry cleaner will help remove the installation from the registry. Because you never know what the ActiveX control has been programmed to do.

Microsoft Helps Out With Security Measures

Microsoft has provided some measure of security for identifiable ActiveX controls. This is achieved through a signature scheme. Designers of ActiveX controls digitally sign the ActiveX controls they author. When the user accesses a web page that uses that particular control, the user’s browser can verify the person that has signed it wrote the control.

To get a site indexed by the Search Engines a lot of people submit their site to Google and other top search engines. But it takes a long time just to see the new website to be placed into their index (about 6 weeks or even more).

The use of Google Submission Form at the following URL http://www.google.com/addurl.html shouldn’t be done if you are looking for quick indexing of your site. You should never use this form or any other of the top search engine’s submission forms.

There are 2 quick ways to get your website indexed by Google:

1. All you will need to do is write one, possibly a few more articles based on the topic of your website, once you have done this, search for the most popular article directories on the web, and simply submit the article(s) to those directories. Once they have added your article and link to their site, the search engines when visiting their website, would then follow all the links on their site. One of those links will be a link to your site, then your website is indexed by Google and other search engines.

So always try to submit your articles to other article directories to get more links. The more links you get, the quicker your site will get indexed.

Some of the popular article directories include:

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.articledashboard.com

2. Try to get high Pagerank website to link to your website. If you manage to get 1 PR6 website to link to your website, your site should be indexed by Google within the next 3 days. If you can get 1 PR7 website to link to your site, in most cases your site will be in Google’s index within the next 24-48 hours.

To persuade someone to add your link to their website, you must give them a good reason to do this. Try to contact sites that are highly related to yours and always think of a way that you can offer them something their visitors would benefit from if they add your link.

Another way is you can purchase links from high Pagerank websites.

Since people associate particular colors with different emotions, the colors used on your website can have a psychological effect on visitors to your site. By using specific colors geared towards the emotion you want to invoke, you can actually increase product sales.

Here are some colors along with the emotions and symbols they stimulate:

1) WHITE- purity, innocence, peace, perfection, chastity, sterility, cleanliness. In general, white creates a cool and refreshing feeling.

2) BLACK- night, space, authority, sturdiness, reliability, power, constancy, prudence, wisdom, classy, elegance, submission, mourning, demons, witches. Black is a controversial color as it can symbolize both good and evil.

3) RED- love, excitement, warmth, heat, fire, blood, passion, power, aggression, action. Red color can be used as an attention grabber. It works better as an accent color rather than a background one.

4) PINK- romantic, affection, sensuality, tenderness, calm, soft hearted, softness, femininity. Pink tends to reduce aggression.

5) BLUE- sky, ocean, water, temperature, ice, coolness, mist, shadow, travel, freedom, truth, solitude, wisdom, trust, loyalty, peaceful, calmness, intelligence, dedication, masculinity. Different shades of blue convey opposite meanings. Light blue is peaceful while dark blue is depressing.

6) PURPLE- royalty, dignity, luxury, wealth, sophistication, feminine, passion, romance, sensitivity, coolness, mist, shadows, mysterious, mystic.

7) GREEN- money, calm, envy, greed, nature, life, youth, renewal, hope, vigor, fertility, rebirth, freedom, guilt. Different shades of green have different meanings. Dark green-cool. masculine, conservative, wealth. Emerald green- immortality. Olive green- peace. Green is the easiest color on the eye.

Yellow- light, purity, understanding, brightness, warmth, playfulness, creativity. Lemon yellow is the most eye fatiguing color. Yellow can increase irritability so yellow should not be used as a main color, only as an accent. Yellow enhances concentration.

9) ORANGE- autumn, youthful, fire, warmth, contentment, fruitfulness, wholesomeness, strong, generous, endurance, strength, ambition. Orange is the color most associated with appetite so it would be a good color choice for a website selling food products. Orange also makes a product seem more suitable for everyone and more affordable.

10) BROWN- wood, comfort, strength, earth, solid, reliable, credible, maturity, humility, conservancy. Light brown conveys genuineness.

11) GRAY- exclusivity. Enhances the psychological response of other colors.

In general, red, orange, and yellow are exciting colors while purple, blue and green are calming ones.

Use the color that symbolizes the emotion you want to convey as the primary color on your website. Add 1-2 other colors to reinforce this emotion. The colors used for your background, header, graphics, text, highlighting, headlines, etc. will all contribute to your website’s influence on your visitors.