Tips for Freelance Web Developer

Volunteer

Often, the best way to get your foot in the door is to offer to do the job for free. This will not be a great way to pay the bills, but it will enable you to take on some initial clients that will, in turn, become the first subjects in your professional portfolio.

You can often find companies and organizations to help out locally. Visit websites and Facebook pages of local stores, ask around at volunteer organizations that don't have an existing or modern site currently up. There is a good chance you will stumble across someone that has wanted to have a site made, but simply doesn't have it in their budget.

Bands and freelance professionals are a big area of opportunity. Every band that wants to make a name for itself should have a presence on the Web, but relying entirely on a site or service that they have no control over can be a risky play. By offering to help them out by putting together a demo for them, you will be doing both them and you a favor.

Another form of volunteering involves creating cool things and releasing them to the public. Djamil Legato, one of RocketTheme's developers, suggests, "If you make some tool that is incredibly cool and think that anyone can benefit from it, gift it to everyone."

He said, "I owe everything to MooTools. I spent two years contributing to that open source project. It was fun, and I learned a lot. Then, JS took off."

You can do this in many ways. You can release the project on GitHub, your personal blog, etc. and people that download/use it will have you to thank for it. Many developers go on to enjoy very profitable and successful careers based on the work they did on projects that were made freely available.

Brian Towles adds, "Don't assume what your doing isn't worth sharing, but be willing to accept feedback as people discover it."

Network

The word Network has been thrown around a lot lately, and it has almost entirely been taken over by social media, but the reality is that there are a lot of local events in just about every moderately sizable area that professionals go to in order to meet each other and build their own network.

If you are in the business of helping these folks get their name out there on the Web, you should most certainly consider going to an in-person meet-up to network.

Meetup.com is a great place to start looking for these events. You can also find plenty of local groups on Facebook that have regular meetings in your area. Small business owners are always attending these events in order to meet the people that they may want to do business with in the future. So should you.

Build a Great Portfolio Site

If someone is considering hiring a freelance Web developer, the first place they are going to look for information is their personal site. Your home page should not be a third-party owned social media profile if you are in the business of creating websites.

Your portfolio should be easily accessible from the front page, and a contact form should appear anywhere someone might be if they are making a decision to reach out to you. Your site is your chance to showcase your work. Take advantage of it.

Take Advantage of Pre-Designed Templates and Extensions

Having a strong base on which to build a site for your client is a huge time saver. It can also spare you the headaches involved with creating brand new components from scratch, which will take away from the time you can spend sorting out the client's specific needs.

Not every developer is also a designer, and vise-versa. If you can find a good template that provides a visual base that meets your customer's expectations, you can focus your development efforts on making it more powerful and customized for the client.

A template is a starting point. It's really the canvas on which custom development and design can be used to create a unique masterpiece.

The same would go for extensions. It can take a long time to create a Joomla extension or WordPress plugin that does what many freely available options do out of the box. You save many hours in development and the client gets a tool that has benefited from plenty of real-world testing.

Keep Learning

Strive to learn something new, every day. The world of Web development changes at an extreme pace, and it takes constant practice and discovery to keep up. Trends of tomorrow are built on the advances of today, and you can benefit greatly by staying ahead of the curve.

When a new method or code release comes out, spend some time in a sandbox environment seeing what you can do with it. If you can create something new or especially useful early on, share it. Your reputation and skill will benefit from the experience, and that is a win-win for any freelance Web developer.

Web Development Tips for Increasing Online Sales

Make sure your shopping cart is visible

If the customer adds an item to their cart, they want to have the peace of mind that the item was actually registered. Therefore, somewhere on the page at all times during the shopping process, your store should have an area listing the number of items in the customer's cart and other relevant check-out information.

Having checkout data visible and readily available also helps ease the transition from shopping to checkout. No matter where the customer finishes shopping, it's important to have a quick link back to the checkout page.

It isn't enough to simply have shopping cart information somewhere on the page, however. Make it pop so it's easier to find. Contrasting colors from the color scheme on the rest of the page is a good way to help the cart stand out.

Optimize your "add-to-cart" buttons

Site visitors and customers respond differently to different calls to action. For instance, if your "add-to-cart" button says "more details" or "learn more," our experience has been that customers don't react as well to this kind of indirect call-to-action. In contrast, an "add-to-cart" button that says "buy now" is a specific, direct call to action that elicits a much more positive response from shoppers.

Coloring is also an important design element here. Blue and green are gentler colors that usually cause people to follow up, whereas orange and red can hurt the performance of your "add-to-cart" button. Using colors that flow with your site's color scheme helps further clarify the call-to-action.

Clean up your product pages

The organization of your site's product pages is a crucial part of ensuring that your customers are drawn in by the information that is most appealing to them.

Have you ever thought about where your customer reviews reside on the product page? Sure, customer reviews are an important part of gaining the customer's trust-but they don't have to be the first thing that the shopper sees. So many elements on any given page mean a complex organization process.

The first element should always be the product images. The shopper wants to see exactly what he or she is getting for the money. After that, make sure to feature the product name, description and the price to get the customer's attention. Keep elements like customer reviews and links to similar products closer to the bottom of the page.

Clarify your navigation paths

Hidden menus and other elements on the page are very ineffective and can sometimes lead to shopper frustration. One of the most important parts of clarifying your navigation is by avoiding hidden elements on the page.

If you have too many categories, this can be a difficult task. However, fly-out menus (that "fly out" when you mouse over them) are an effective way to keep your page from getting too cluttered while giving the shopper the opportunity to access any category page at any time.

Don't get caught up in getting too artistic about how you design category and other navigational elements; shoppers will always thank you through better conversion rates when you make practicality a priority.

Using bread crumbs so shoppers can trace their way back from where they came is another way to ensure the shopping experience is a smooth one. Make a path between categories and subcategories somewhere on the page. After shoppers add something to their carts, a "continue shopping" button makes returning to shopping as intuitive as possible.

Eliminate distractions from your checkout page

When your customer proceeds to the checkout, you want them to go in a very specific direction. So, when you're designing your checkout, this is the time to remove items like left sidebar navigation to define a clear path to the goal.

Ignore the urge to continue selling into the checkout process. Every second between landing and checking-out is precious to ensuring the sale is actually made.

Single-page checkouts tend to have the highest conversion rates. Simplifying the checkout process and making it easier for the shopper is a great way to ensure the sale is completed. In one page, the customer should be able to fill out their shipping, billing and credit card information. One-click checkout is also a great way to keep customers coming back. A good checkout experience will stay in the shopper's mind.

Jimmy Rodriguez is CTO and co-founder of 3DCart, developer of an e-commerce suite for businesses of all sizes. As an authority on e-commerce best practices, Rodriguez combines more than 8 years as an e-commerce developer and web programmer with Microsoft certifications in database development and business intelligence. 

Structure of a Robots.txt File.

The structure of a robots.txt is pretty simple (and barely flexible) – it is an endless list of user agents and disallowed files and directories. Basically, the syntax is as follows:

User-agent:

Disallow:

“User-agent” are search engines' crawlers and disallow: lists the files and directories to be excluded from indexing. In addition to “user-agent:” and “disallow:” entries, you can include comment lines – just put the # sign at the beginning of the line:

# All user agents are disallowed to see the /temp directory.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

The Traps of a Robots.txt File

When you start making complicated files – i.e. you decide to allow different user agents access to different directories – problems can start, if you do not pay special attention to the traps of a robots.txt file. Common mistakes include typos and contradicting directives. Typos are misspelled user-agents, directories, missing colons after User-agent and Disallow, etc. Typos can be tricky to find but in some cases validation tools help.

The more serious problem is with logical errors. For instance:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /temp/

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /temp/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

The above example is from a robots.txt that allows all agents to access everything on the site except the /temp directory. Up to here it is fine but later on there is another record that specifies more restrictive terms for Googlebot. When Googlebot starts reading robots.txt, it will see that all user agents (including Googlebot itself) are allowed to all folders except /temp/. This is enough for Googlebot to know, so it will not read the file to the end and will index everything except /temp/ - including /images/ and /cgi-bin/, which you think you have told it not to touch. You see, the structure of a robots.txt file is simple but still serious mistakes can be made easily.

What is Robots.txt?

It is great when search engines frequently visit your site and index your content but often there are cases when indexing parts of your online content is not what you want. For instance, if you have two versions of a page (one for viewing in the browser and one for printing), you'd rather have the printing version excluded from crawling, otherwise you risk being imposed a duplicate content penalty. Also, if you happen to have sensitive data on your site that you do not want the world to see, you will also prefer that search engines do not index these pages (although in this case the only sure way for not indexing sensitive data is to keep it offline on a separate machine). Additionally, if you want to save some bandwidth by excluding images, stylesheets and javascript from indexing, you also need a way to tell spiders to keep away from these items.

One way to tell search engines which files and folders on your Web site to avoid is with the use of the Robots metatag. But since not all search engines read metatags, the Robots matatag can simply go unnoticed. A better way to inform search engines about your will is to use a robots.txt file.

best Reasons Why Responsive Web Design is the Best Option For Your Mobile SEO Strategy?

1. Recommended By Google.

With 67 percent search market share, when Google speaks, search marketers listen. Google states that responsive web design is its recommended mobile configuration, and even goes so far as to refer to responsive web design as the industry best practice.

This is because responsive design sites have one URL and the same HTML, regardless of device, which makes it easier and more efficient for Google to crawl, index, and organize content. Contrast this with a separate mobile site which has a different URL and different HTML than its desktop counterpart, requiring Google to crawl and index multiple versions of the same site.

Additionally, Google prefers responsive web design because content that lives on one website and one URL is much easier for users to share, interact with, and link to than content that lives on a separate mobile site.

Take for example a mobile user who shares content from a mobile site with a friend on Facebook who then accesses that content using a desktop, which results in that user viewing a stripped down mobile site on their desktop. This creates a less than optimal user-experience, and because of the large emphasis Google is now placing on user-experience as a ranking factor, this is essential to take into account with regards to SEO.

2. One Website, Many Devices.

One of the most appealing aspects of responsive web design is that a responsive website can provide a great user-experience across many devices and screen sizes. This is an important characteristic, since it is impossible to anticipate all the devices and screen sizes searchers will use to access your site. A site that works well regardless of these variables will provide a better and more consistent user-experience than a separate mobile site that is designed for a specific device and screen size.

Let’s take the following example. Someone searches for a product on their smartphone during a lunch break at work. They find a site that has the product they’re looking for, and decide to continue researching this product on the same site when they get home. Except, when they get home, they will use their desktop instead of their smartphone.

If the site in this example is responsive, this person will have a positive user-experience when transitioning from mobile to desktop because they will view the same site on their desktop as they did on their smartphone. On the other hand, if the site is a dedicated mobile site, this person will become frustrated with the fact that they have to locate the desktop version of the site, and find the product all over again.

3. Easier to Manage.

Having a separate desktop and mobile site requires having separate SEO campaigns. Managing one site and one SEO campaign is far easier than managing two sites and two SEO campaigns. This is a key advantage a responsive website has over a separate mobile site.

That being said, there are benefits to having a mobile-specific SEO strategy, such as optimizing for keywords that are more likely to be searched when someone is on their smartphone.

For example, someone performing a mobile search for a local restaurant may be more inclined to use the word “nearby” in their search query. However, a separate mobile site is not a requirement for a mobile SEO strategy, and there's no reason why mobile-specific keywords can't be incorporated into a responsive design site as well.

Free Online Marketing Tips to Capture the Market

There are free online marketing methods you can use to get your business noticed - all you need is time and a little creativity to put them in motion.

In the online world, where getting lots of attention means cash in the bank, it is getting increasingly difficult to even get your target market to notice you. Not only do you have to compete with large companies that have strong marketing departments, but you also have to compete with social media and many other distractions. However, this does not mean your online marketing efforts have to be over the top, or cost you tons of money to get you in front of your prospective buyers.

Below are five inexpensive and creative ways you can market your business online.

1. Create Your Own LinkedIn Group

Creating a LinkedIn group is absolutely free, and it enables you to give your target market and other professionals in your industry a useful and engaging resource to go to. This, in turn, provides you with a way to drive traffic to your website and increase your sales.

As well, you can use your group as a venue for your members to network online. However, you must be careful not to make hard sales to your group. They may become leery about doing business with you. You will have to put in a lot of time and effort to get your LinkedIn group up and running, but the benefits will be well worth it.

Online Marketing Goal: Your goal with this free online marketing method is to get people talking, while at the same time becoming a trusted resource to your LinkedIn community.

2. Make YouTube Videos

With more than 800 million monthly visitors, YouTube is an effective online venue to market your business. In order to successfully do this, you have to go beyond just posting product videos or sharing your random thoughts. Be focused and determined with your message.

YouTube marketing videos need to have the following essential features:

• A catchy headline with researched keywords
• A clear, concise, and engaging message - don't attempt to put too much information into each video
• A strong call-to-action

Although you can spend thousands of dollars on high-tech cameras, editing software, and lighting equipment, your smartphone camera is good enough to capture a video that will do the trick. To edit your video, you can use free downloadable software if your laptop or desktop computer doesn't have one built-in.

Online Marketing Goal: This free online marketing strategy will capture the attention of the video market. Nowadays, people's attention spans are short, so quick videos are very popular. If they're created using the above features, they are a great way to show your expertise to your target market.

3. Get a Local Celebrity to Endorse You and/or Your Business

Online businesses usually want to get high-profile celebrities to endorse them. Rather than trying to get a mega star to endorse how wonderful your business is, look for a local celebrity.

How to Find a Local Celebrity

If a local celebrity in your niche doesn't instantly come to mind, check out your local paper and see who they write about in your area. Since they live within your neighborhood or city, it will be easier to make contact with them over the telephone or personally. When you contact your local celebrity, tell them you want to send them a gift that will make their life easier. Then send them a sample of your service or product.

Online Marketing Goal: Use this method to get exposure in your local market. With any business, online or off, it is a good strategy to market yourself close to home. Later, or at the same time, you can use other methods provided to reach your global market.

4. Write an E-Book That Discusses Specific Issues Within Your Industry

Thankfully, with the Internet you don't have to hire the services of a publishing company or spend any money to get a book distributed. For example, Amazon is a platform you can use for free and they only take a certain percentage of the sale price every time someone buys your book. If you're short on time, or lack proper writing skills, you can go to websites like Odesk and Elance to hire a professional ghostwriter to turn your old blog posts into an engaging e-book.

In order to successfully sell your e-book, make sure it's priced for less than $5. To promote it, you can use your existing email list, social media accounts, and online marketing strategies listed here. To get more leads, you should know that Amazon provides your prospective buyers with a sneak peek of the first couple of pages of your e-book. So you need to make sure you embed links in these pages so you will be able to capture leads, for when prospective buyers decide not to buy your e-book.

Online Marketing Goal: Your goal with this free online marketing strategy is to use your e-book as a way to get leads. Use it to direct readers to your website where they can opt-in and get more information and tips on your industry topic.

5. Get Your Articles Published in a Niche Blog or Online E-Zine

Although it's difficult to get your articles published in popular magazines, it is possible to create your own online marketing platform by getting an article featured in a high-traffic niche blog. Find at least three blogs that target your ideal target market and contact the blog owner. Give them a couple of suggestions on how you can add value to their readership.

• Tell them about some blog post ideas you have and let them know how your knowledge will benefit the readers of their blog.
• Ask for an interview. Once they know about your product or service, this may prompt them to promote it for you because it highlights their business, too.
• Offer the owner of the niche blog a sample of your service or product for free so they can offer it to their readers. This is better than asking for a product or service review because it offers more than just written information. They get to experience an actual sample.

5 Web Development Tips for Increasing Online Sales

Some merchants might not realize it, but the design of their online storefronts-from the landing page to the shopping cart-has a direct effect on sales. Even the smallest of design elements can improve or harm conversion rates, and this tutorial will tell you five things you can do as a web developer to increase online sales.

Think about it from a shopper's perspective. It seems pretty clear that you want your shopping process to be as intuitive as possible-but a lot of online storefronts don't practice what they preach. Sometimes, web stores get too artsy with their designs. Others use flash animations that can slow down the shopper's browser. Still others use color schemes that send the wrong signals to shoppers.

Performing A/B testing on your online storefront is an important part of making sure your site appeals to customers and makes shopping as intuitive as possible. There is a range of ways that different design elements can affect online users, and testing helps put those ways in perspective. With more than ten years of experience designing online storefronts, we've seen enough to know what the "dos and don'ts" of web store design look like.

Here are five tips on how you can turn more visitors into customers and seriously improve conversion rates using some simple design techniques.

Make sure your shopping cart is visible

If the customer adds an item to their cart, they want to have the peace of mind that the item was actually registered. Therefore, somewhere on the page at all times during the shopping process, your store should have an area listing the number of items in the customer's cart and other relevant check-out information.

Having checkout data visible and readily available also helps ease the transition from shopping to checkout. No matter where the customer finishes shopping, it's important to have a quick link back to the checkout page.

It isn't enough to simply have shopping cart information somewhere on the page, however. Make it pop so it's easier to find. Contrasting colors from the color scheme on the rest of the page is a good way to help the cart stand out.

Optimize your "add-to-cart" buttons

Site visitors and customers respond differently to different calls to action. For instance, if your "add-to-cart" button says "more details" or "learn more," our experience has been that customers don't react as well to this kind of indirect call-to-action. In contrast, an "add-to-cart" button that says "buy now" is a specific, direct call to action that elicits a much more positive response from shoppers.

Coloring is also an important design element here. Blue and green are gentler colors that usually cause people to follow up, whereas orange and red can hurt the performance of your "add-to-cart" button. Using colors that flow with your site's color scheme helps further clarify the call-to-action.

Clean up your product pages

The organization of your site's product pages is a crucial part of ensuring that your customers are drawn in by the information that is most appealing to them.

Have you ever thought about where your customer reviews reside on the product page? Sure, customer reviews are an important part of gaining the customer's trust-but they don't have to be the first thing that the shopper sees. So many elements on any given page mean a complex organization process.

The first element should always be the product images. The shopper wants to see exactly what he or she is getting for the money. After that, make sure to feature the product name, description and the price to get the customer's attention. Keep elements like customer reviews and links to similar products closer to the bottom of the page.

Clarify your navigation paths

Hidden menus and other elements on the page are very ineffective and can sometimes lead to shopper frustration. One of the most important parts of clarifying your navigation is by avoiding hidden elements on the page.

If you have too many categories, this can be a difficult task. However, fly-out menus (that "fly out" when you mouse over them) are an effective way to keep your page from getting too cluttered while giving the shopper the opportunity to access any category page at any time.

Don't get caught up in getting too artistic about how you design category and other navigational elements; shoppers will always thank you through better conversion rates when you make practicality a priority.

Using bread crumbs so shoppers can trace their way back from where they came is another way to ensure the shopping experience is a smooth one. Make a path between categories and subcategories somewhere on the page. After shoppers add something to their carts, a "continue shopping" button makes returning to shopping as intuitive as possible.

Eliminate distractions from your checkout page

When your customer proceeds to the checkout, you want them to go in a very specific direction. So, when you're designing your checkout, this is the time to remove items like left sidebar navigation to define a clear path to the goal.

Ignore the urge to continue selling into the checkout process. Every second between landing and checking-out is precious to ensuring the sale is actually made.

Single-page checkouts tend to have the highest conversion rates. Simplifying the checkout process and making it easier for the shopper is a great way to ensure the sale is completed. In one page, the customer should be able to fill out their shipping, billing and credit card information. One-click checkout is also a great way to keep customers coming back. A good checkout experience will stay in the shopper's mind.

Jimmy Rodriguez is CTO and co-founder of 3DCart, developer of an e-commerce suite for businesses of all sizes. As an authority on e-commerce best practices, Rodriguez combines more than 8 years as an e-commerce developer and web programmer with Microsoft certifications in database development and business intelligence. 

Content Is King

1. Write eye-catching headlines.
2. Write excellent content — make a name for blog as a source of informative, useful, funny, entertaining, or inspiring articles.
3. Write longer posts — expand on your content, fill out your blog posts and create truly epic content.
4. Write shorter posts — follow Seth Godin’s example with short but sweet posts.
5. Write more often — the more content you can produce, the better.
6. Blog on a consistent schedule so your readers know when to expect new content.
7. Write list blog posts — they get more traffic than any other kind of post.
8. Write about current news stories.
9. Write about topics trending on Twitter and in Google trends.
10. Search forums in your niche to see what people are talking about and write an article about it.
11. Ask your readers what they’d like you to write about.
12. Write about something controversial and start a debate.
13. Use link bait techniques to write content that promotes massive sharing.
14. Explore your analytics, find out which is your most popular content and create more of the same.
15. Interview influential people in your niche/industry.
16. Create a “best blogs” list post and let the bloggers know you’ve included them — a bit of flattery can go a long way.

More on search engine optimization for the B2B and industrial marketplace:

What is search engine optimization, and how can it help your online business presence?
Search engine optimization (SEO) consists of tested methods and strategies of working with your website to get it to rank higher in the search engine results and bring relevant traffic to your site. The higher a website ranks in the results of a Google search, for example, the greater the chance that site will be visited by a potential customer. 

Perhaps you’re familiar with the concepts of optimizing your business website, but you’re not sure how to make it as search engine friendly as possible? That’s where we step in!  Our team of search engine optimization experts in our Minneapolis, Minnesota headquarters provide B2B SEO services and SEO consulting to help you gain the exposure you need for your website.

With headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota and sales offices in the Los Angeles area of southern California, our SEO team works with companies across the US, specializing in the B2B and industrial markets.

The search engines need help finding your website and determining what content on your site is most relevant to people searching for your products or services.  Ecreative Internet Marketing can help you increase your visibility in organic search results and increase traffic to your website.  We’ll guide you step by step through the site optimization process and collaborate with you to create ‘sticky’ web content that brings both search engines and visitors to your site and keeps them interested!

In addition to the B2B search engine optimization work we do on your website to make it as accessible to users and search engines as possible; we take advantage of off-site techniques that saturate the web with your online business presence.  Search engine optimization can easily be coordinated with other marketing initiatives, such as Pay-Per-Click and Social Marketing, to boost its effectiveness.

Better rankings “guaranteed”?
We believe that ethical search engine optimization is the foundation of a successful website marketing campaign. You may have heard about ‘black hat’ search engine optimization techniques or many of the recent Google penalties for these actions. These unethical SEO tactics might get you short-term results, but won’t set you up for the long-term success you’re looking for and may get you penalized or banned from a search engine index altogether. 

Don’t take the risk on quick fix marketing schemes! Our business and industry-focused search engine optimization is based on solid research and knowledge of website design and accessibility standards, optimized content creation, and deep knowledge of what it takes to make a site attractive to the search engines. Our Minnesota SEO team is constantly researching the latest SEO trends and best practices for all regions. We use only those techniques that will benefit your website over time and establish a positive online reputation for your business. 

Give Ecreative Internet Marketing a call today at 1-888-234-5071 or contact us online. We can help your business website exceed its potential in the search engines.  We guarantee it!  We have offices located in the Minneapolis, Minnesota area and Southern California for search engine optimization services.

SEO Basic Terms & Terminology Definitions

• Above the Fold: Refers to an organic search engine result that is high enough that a user can see it without having to scroll down. Which ranks appear above the fold depends on user hardware, and what kinds of search results are being listed under that search phrase. See full details on ourAbove the Fold definition article.
• Analytics: Typically referring to Google Analytics specifically, though there are several different analytics softwares. Analytics refers to tracking software that provides statistics on your website’s usage, including how much traffic the site is getting, where the traffic is coming from, what keywords users are entering to reach your site, and much more.
• B2B: Business to Business. B2B refers specifically to businesses that provide products or services to other businesses, as opposed to providing products or services to consumers. A company that manufactures forklifts to sell to other companies would be a B2B business.
• B2C:Business to Consumer. B2C refers specifically to businesses that provide products or services to end users, or consumers, as opposed to providing them to other businesses. A company that manufactures toys told to consumers would be a B2C business.
• Backlink: Backlinks refers to links from other websites that link to your website. Backlinks specifically exclude links from your own site that point to other places on your site. In general, the more backlinks you have, the more authority search engines will assume your site has. It is worth noting, however, that not all backlinks are equal and backlinks from generic directories that are not industry-specific can give no benefit at all.
• Black Hat SEO: Black Hat SEO refers to SEO practices that are in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Black Hat SEO attempts to manipulate their search engine rankings through means specifically and implicitly forbidden by Google. This can result in the sites being banned by Google, and no longer showing up in the search results of Google or its partners. Black Hat SEO marketers take this risk in hopes of getting fast results, typically on sites where it doesn’t matter if they get banned a month or two later. Sometimes also referred to as “algorithm chasers.” See our full Black Hat SEO article for details.
• Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is an analytics term that refers to someone who visits just one page of a website, and then leaves. Bounce rate does not pay attention to how long they were on that page — it could be seconds or hours — but if they only looked at one page before leaving, it’s considered a bounce. While low bounce rates are desirable, a bounce is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s entirely possible the user found the information he or she was looking for on that page. See our SEO Basics article explaining bounce rates, including what is a good bounce rate and what you can learn from bounce rates.
• Conversions: The term Conversions can have a couple of different meanings in the internet marketing world. Typically conversions refers to “converting” someone to goes to your website into a customer — meaning they actually made a purchase. Thus if 3,000 people visited your website, and 30 of them purchased anything, you’d have had 30 conversions. Conversions are not necessarily purchases though — often in the B2B world and the B2C services sector, there aren’t strictly defined products that customers can purchase from a shopping cart. In these cases conversions are often tracked as the number of people who filled out a request for quote or contact form.
• CPA: Cost per Acquisition. A paid search engine advertising term meaning the total amount you’d have to pay to acquire a customer. Thus if you were paying $1 per click, and on average one out of 10 clickthroughs purchased from you, your CPA would be $10.  CPA is calculated as: CPC ÷ Conversion Rate.
• CPC: Cost per Click. A paid search engine advertising term meaning the amount you have to pay each time a user clicks on one of your ad links. This is usually determined by bidding in an open market.
• CPM: Cost per Thousand Impressions. A paid search engine advertising term meaning how much you would pay for 1,000 impressions of an ad. Once a common way of purchasing advertising online, now most online advertising is paid by clicks, rather than by impressions.
• CTR: Click Through Rate. A term usually used with paid search engine advertising, but that can also apply to organic search engine optimization. CTR is the percentage of users who actually click on your ad. So if your ad was displayed 100 times, and 10 people clicked on it, you’d have a 10% click through rate. CTR is calculated as: # of clicks ÷ # of ad impressions
• eCPM: Effective Cost per Thousand Impressions. A paid search engine advertising term meaning how much an ad that your site is displaying earns you, on average, every 1,000 times it’s viewed. eCPM is calculated as:  earnings (in dollars) ÷ impressions * 1,000.
• Hits: A measure of traffic on your website. Every time a page is viewed, that is considered a hit. If the same person loads a page 8 times, that would count as 8 hits. Also referred to as pageviews.
• Impressions: Similar to hits or pageviews, impressions is most commonly used as a paid search engine advertising term meaning the number of times that an ad appeared in search engine results, or as affiliated website ads, but can also refer to the number of times a webpage was viewed, making it synonymous with pageviews or hits.
• Indexed Pages: Also used as Indexed Content. This refers to the pages on a website that a search engine has explored and stored. If a page, or site, has not been indexed by a search engine, there is no chance that it can show up in search engine results.
• Keywords: Used throughout SEO in both organic and PPC, keywords refers to the actual words or phrase a user enters into a search engine. Websites and PPC campaigns are optimized around specific keywords.
• Longtail: Frequently used as “longtail searches,” longtail refers to search phrases entered into a search engine the include certain keywords as well as a number of additional keywords. So if your site is optimized for “Tasty Apples” you might also rank for a longtail search of “Tasty Apples to Bake in Pies.”
• Meta Tags: Meta tags are website code that is invisible to users, and in SEO specifically refers to the Keywords and Description tags, which are designed to help search engines better understand and explain to users what a website is about. See the article What is a Meta Tag? for more.
• Organic Search Results: The word “organic” refers to search traffic that is not paid for with an advertising campaign, but rather searches that come up normally as a result of the search engine’s algorithm. See the Ecreative IM article What are Organic Search Results? for more.
• Pageviews: A measure of traffic on your website. Every time a page is viewed, that is considered a pageview. If the same person loads a page 8 times, that would count as 8 pageviews. Also referred to as hits.
• PPC: Pay per Click. A term used in paid search engine advertising referring to purchasing ads for certain keywords. PPC campaigns pay every time an ad is clicked.
• PR: Google Page Rank. Page Rank is Google’s way of assigning a number to the relative authority of a site. Sites are assigned a Page Rank of 0 – 10 by Google, and a high Page Rank implies that Google views that site as more authoritative. The primary variables in how Google assigns Page Rank are the number of relevant links pointing to a site, and the Page Rank of those sites that are linking in — though many other variables are also considered. Page Rank isnot, in any way, an indication of the ability of a site to rank well in Google’s search engine results.
• Reciprocal Link: Also known as a link exchange, a reciprocal link is a link that is posted to another website in exchange for that website posting a link to your site. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
• RFQ: Request for Quote. A common way of tracking conversions on a B2B website is the request for quote form. The assumption is that if a users interest has been piqued enough by the content of the website and the call for action succeeded in getting the user to contact the company for pricing. At this point the website has done it’s job, and it’s now up to the sales team.
• Sandbox or Google Sandbox: reference to the period during which Google lowers the rankings of a brand new site. See full details in our Google Sandbox Effect article.
• SEO: Search Engine Optimization: the ongoing process of changing the content and code of a website, as well as its interaction with other websites, to increase the likelihood that it will rank well in search engine results. See the SEO Basics article, What is SEO?
• SEM: Search Engine Marketing. A broader term of gaining search engine traffic to a website combining both SEO and PPC techniques.
• SERP: Search Engine Results Page. When a user searches for something in a search engine, the pages listing websites related to that search is the search engine results page.
• Sitemap: A file on your website primarily intended for search engines, that informs the search engines where to find all the pages of your site that the search engine should be aware of, so that they can show up on the search engine results page. Sitemaps are usually a XML file.
• Social Media: Social media refers to websites that create a community of users who can interact and share information with each other. The primary social media sites that impact SEO include Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Social media has grown exponentially in recent years.

• What is PPC and how does it work?

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an effective means of marketing your site. By PPC, your site is immediately on top of search engines for your keyword sets.

Pay per click or PPC is a model of online advertising in which advertisers pay only when the user to their ads and visit their websites. The prices for advertising space on a basis of the number of clicks on a message of value. PPC ads are often in the search engines, the content of websites, blogs and other networks. RPC, the management of research, analysis and management of PPC advertising.

In a model for PPC, which advertisers bid on key words or search terms, and they expect to believe that their goal, the user at the same time, the goods or services in connection with theirs. They offer on keywords and a budget for their advertising campaign CFP. After the campaign is underway and the movement, which advertisers pay only for the "truth" clicks on their ads. This is why every campaign is - pay-per-click or PPC. Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Engine Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter are some of the largest networks for advertising.

 

• How can Pay Per Click management services help you?

 

PPC sells its services cheaper. In fact, the advertising at its best. Although the advertising is simpler and easier by the CPC, PPC is only effective if campaigns are carried out effectively. Increase in traffic flows, the business of generating and targeted the visitors are only possible when paying per-click advertising is done after a thorough analysis. PPC management combines a number of difficult task with a series of studies on the queries, analysis of key words, the analysis of keyword analysis of competition, the trends in research, etc. With detailed and thorough research and monitoring of CPM or CPC, CTR and improve the quality of their impressions of ads on one side.

Payment is done by our service management Click PPC illustrate, advertising campaigns and to organize and manage PPC for you. With Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Engine Marketing adCenter and Microsoft is trying to advance its activities and an increase ROI. Your PPC campaigns is your company of generators. Through simple and easily affordable prices, our management services, CFP Skyrocket your business and make profits of the company seeks to easy success.

• What Affiliate Marketing

When two websites start sharing revenue to sell a product or service, it is known as affiliate marketing. Most of the affiliates get paid around 25-50% for sales generated through their websites. Payment is made on the number of clicks, registrations, leads, sales etc or as agreed between the two parties.

When a person clicks on the advertisement on a website the cookie is saved in the person’s computer, which is tracked and if a sale is done then the person gets paid the amount of commission agreed. Anybody having a website which has good number of visitors can join an affiliate program. There are many affiliate marketing websites through which you can choose the products you would like to promote through your website. Commission Junction, Click bank and Link share are some of the well-known affiliate marketing websites. Thousands of publishers join affiliate marketing daily. They want to promote other products or services and start making money. The affiliates get their daily statistics and reports on the number of clicks, sales, leads etc. Affiliate marketing connects buyers and sellers. This is how online marketing works. The amount of money spent online is increasing day by day. E-commerce is picking up at a very fast rate worldwide.

Seo tips, assumptions, observations

   - Outbound links. Publish links to authoritative resources in your subject field using the necessary keywords. Search engines place a high value on links to other resources based on the same topic.

   - Outbound links. Do not publish links to FFA sites and other sites excluded from the indexes of search engines. Doing so may lower the rating of your own site.

   - Outbound links. A page should not contain more than 50-100 outbound links. More links will not harm your site rating but links beyond that number will not be recognized by search engines.

   - Inbound site-wide links. These are links published on every page of the site. It is believed that search engines do not approve of such links and do not consider them while ranking pages. Another opinion is that this is true only for large sites with thousands of pages.

   - The ideal keyword density is a frequent seo discussion topic. The real answer is that there is no ideal keyword density. It is different for each query and search engines calculate it dynamically for each search query. Our advice is to analyze the first few sites in search results for a particular query. This will allow you to evaluate the approximate optimum density for specific queries.

   - Site age. Search engines prefer old sites because they are more stable.

   - Site updates. Search engines prefer sites that are constantly developing. Developing sites are those in which new information and new pages periodically appear.

   - Domain zone. Search engines prefer sites that are located in the zones .edu, .mil, .gov, etc. Only the corresponding organizations can register such domains so these domains are more trustworthy.

   - Search engines track the percent of visitors that immediately return to searching after they visit a site via a search result link. A large number of immediate returns means that the content is probably not related to the corresponding topic and the ranking of such a page gets lower.

- Search engines track how often a link is selected in search results. If some link is only occasionally selected, it means that the page is of little interest and the rating of such a page gets lower

   - Use synonyms and derived word forms of keywords, search engines will appreciate that (keyword stemming).

;    - Search engines consider a very rapid increase in inbound links as artificial promotion and this results in lowering of the rating. This is a controversial topic because this method could be used to lower the rating of one's competitors.

   - Google does not take into account inbound links if they are on the same (or similar) hosts. This is detected using host IP addresses. Pages whose IP addresses are within the range of xxx.xxx.xxx.0 to xxx.xxx.xxx.255. are regarded as being on the same host. This opinion is most likely to be rooted in the fact that Google have expressed this idea in their patents. However, Google employees claim that no limitations of IP addresses are imposed on inbound links and there are no reasons not to believe them.

   - Search engines check information about the owners of domains. Inbound links originating from a variety of sites all belonging to one owner are regarded as less important than normal links. This information is presented in a patent.

   - Search engines prefer sites with longer term domain registrations.

• Google PageRank – theoretical basics

The Google company was the first company to patent the system of taking into account inbound links. The algorithm was named PageRank. In this section, we will describe this algorithm and how it can influence search result ranking.

   PageRank is estimated separately for each web page and is determined by the PageRank (citation) of other pages referring to it. It is a kind of “virtuous circle.” The main task is to find the criterion that determines page importance. In the case of PageRank, it is the possible frequency of visits to a page.

   I shall now describe how user’s behavior when following links to surf the network is modeled. It is assumed that the user starts viewing sites from some random page. Then he or she follows links to other web resources. There is always a possibility that the user may leave a site without following any outbound link and start viewing documents from a random page. The PageRank algorithm estimates the probability of this event as 0.15 at each step. The probability that our user continues surfing by following one of the links available on the current page is therefore 0.85, assuming that all links are equal in this case. If he or she continues surfing indefinitely, popular pages will be visited many more times than the less popular pages.

   The PageRank of a specified web page is thus defined as the probability that a user may visit the web page. It follows that, the sum of probabilities for all existing web pages is exactly one because the user is assumed to be visiting at least one Internet page at any given moment.

   Since it is not always convenient to work with these probabilities the PageRank can be mathematically transformed into a more easily understood number for viewing. For instance, we are used to seeing a PageRank number between zero and ten on the Google Toolbar.

Common search engine principles:

To understand seo you need to be aware of the architecture of search engines. They all contain the following main components:

   Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web pages.

   Crawler – a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page.

   Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler.

   Database – storage for downloaded and processed pages.

   Results engine – extracts search results from the database.

   Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components.

Specific implementations of search mechanisms may differ. For example, the Spider+Crawler+Indexer component group might be implemented as a single program that downloads web pages, analyzes them and then uses their links to find new resources. However, the components listed are inherent to all search engines and the seo principles are the same.

   

Spider: This program downloads web pages just like a web browser. The difference is that a browser displays the information presented on each page (text, graphics, etc.) while a spider does not have any visual components and works directly with the underlying HTML code of the page. You may already know that there is an option in standard web browsers to view source HTML code.

   Crawler: This program finds all links on each page. Its task is to determine where the spider should go either by evaluating the links or according to a predefined list of addresses. The crawler follows these links and tries to find documents not already known to the search engine.

   Indexer: This component parses each page and analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers, structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc.

   Database: This is the storage area for the data that the search engine downloads and analyzes. Sometimes it is called the index of the search engine.

 Results Engine: The results engine ranks pages. It determines which pages best match a user's query and in what order the pages should be listed. This is done according to the ranking algorithms of the search engine. It follows that page rank is a valuable and interesting property and any seo specialist is most interested in it when trying to improve his site search results. In this article, we will discuss the seo factors that influence page rank in some detail.

   Web server: The search engine web server usually contains a HTML page with an input field where the user can specify the search query he or she is interested in. The web server is also responsible for displaying search results to the user in the form of an HTML page.

What Is SEO - Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a  web site from search engine via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search. This gives a web site web presence.

Search engine optimization, the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user. It is common practice for Internet users to not click through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is essential for directing more traffic toward the site.

Need for Social Media Optimization for your Business

It is no exaggeration to say that, in today’s scenario, social media optimization is a compelling necessity for all business houses regardless of their size and scale of operations. It is widely acknowledged that social media optimization is one of the most effective ways to attract maximum traffic to your website.

First and foremost, social media optimization makes you more visible and helps you promote your brand image in a big way. It is pointless having web presence that draws nil or scant visitors to the site. Social media optimization is the tool that will do the magic to attract visitors to your site.

To derive maximum benefits through social media optimization, you need to make use of some of the hottest and most sought-after social media. Let it not be forgotten that social media optimization is a cost-effective internet marketing strategy comparable to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

It may not be incorrect to state that social media brings you visitors more through word- of-mouth technique as they are not commercialized. The popularity you gain by way of social media is lot more personal and the big advantage is it does not add to your marketing or sales promotion expenses as social media optimization can be mostly achieved free of cost. Even assuming you want to engage the services of an online marketing professional, it will not cost you much.

Of course, you will have to do some research and pre-study visiting various relevant sites to enrich your knowledge about how things are done. Any hard work you do in this direction will help you in building rapport with many customers as well as other business houses.

To avail the full benefits of social media optimization, you should make your website content more interesting and incorporate some social media features that will keep the visitors glued to your site. You can provide sharing buttons, social news, polling tools, RSS feeds and even user-rating.

You can also enhance social media optimization through blog posting and encourage customer-generated content. Remember that link exchange is yet another effective way to promote your site link. In short, you should master the various strategies to promote your website through social engine marketing.

It is of paramount importance that you know your audience as without knowing them, it is virtually impossible for you to do any meaningful social media optimization.

Do not be misled into believing that social media optimization is only concerned with increasing traffic. The social media optimization coupled with certain other imaginatively worked out strategies can make your site rank high in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

You can gain huge business advantage if only you can handle social networking optimization efficiently. By social bookmarking, sharing videos and photos you can surely expect to obtain tangible results that will reflect in your sales figures.

Some of the chief advantages of social media optimization are:

• Reaches the right targeted audience
• Connecting with the right audience in real time
• Maximizes exposure for you business, products and services
• Generates meaningful sales leads
• Can offer opportunities for new business partnerships
• Boosts website traffic and subscribers
• Improves your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for higher ranking