Creating a Good User Experience

Creating a good user experience is important when developing a site. Making sure the site is easy to navigate through and easy to understand is important. Avoid using image background if possible because it takes away focus from the reader and the content from the site. It could also slow up the load time on the site which creates a bad user experience.These days people who use the internet want fast loading pages and almost everything done at an instant.

Make sure the site is organized in columns and rows. An unorganized website can lay a bad impression on the company whether it be the order of words or links loading to the wrong pages. Along with this try to keep track with clicking. Make sure you can minimize clicking, too much clicking can become annoying to the user because of the constant loading. To minimize clicking you can consider making the pages longer or shortening paragraphs.

To make searching easier you might want to put a menu on every page about specific tops and include a “home page” link in a consistent area of your sites pages so that the user does not have to constantly click the back button. Don’t make your pages too wide, you want to prevent the user from using the horizontal scroll bar as much as possible.

When using links that are within your site make sure they load on the same page rather than a new window and avoid pop ups because we all know that this can be annoying. With all these tips you can get an idea of how to create a site that allows a good user experience. They key is to make sure that the user will not get annoyed and making everything as easy as possible for them.

Website Design Examples

There are a lot of sites out there that have great content but they lack the eye candy needed to keep their users interested. But isn’t Content more important? Yes, But a page full of words is far more boring and uninteresting compared to a page with content and pictures.

We must understand that users do not read everything but they do SEE everything. Because seeing everything is inevitable rather than reading everything there are sites that guide the user through their content with pictures. This is a very smart move because at a young age with comics, newspapers and children books we are naturally accustomed to reading content in this manner. Lets view some websites that do this well.

MSN.com – Msn does a great job of using contrasting colors. The colors they use are blue, red, yellow, and bright green. They all stand out on the blue background and there are pictures all over the site to get the users attention. Its all news, so why put picture up? Because MSN knows that pictures and content work well together._

They use bold font and titles like “Why losing weight can cost you thousands” or “Keep investing or start over”. Notice the pictures, they show dollar bills. We are attracted to money because its the one thing that keeps us going daily, its today’s biggest issue. The sight of money grabs our attention right away. Notice that for every title there is a picture beside it. MSN uses the method of attracting the user with picture in order to read the content.

NFL.com - The NFL even notices that the user is much more likely to read their content as long as there are picutres to guide them through.

Such sites like MSN.com and NFL.com have tons of pictures, bold titles and colors that go well together ultimately grasping the user and getting them to read their content and click through tons of links to other pages. The variations of BIG and small font catch your attention.

Website Tips

So we have talked about getting traffic to your site and the basic things that should be used to develop a site: Keywords, title, and content. These are a few of the most important things for a site to become successful. But there is also the look towards a website that gives the site value as well.

A site with nothing more than text is boring. What makes a good page besides its content is eye candy. People can help but to look at things that attract their eyes. Look at the way malls are set up, billboards and restaurants. All malls consist of small stores which have windows that display their product with manikins or just shelf display and billboards have bright contrasting colors.

Restaurants use big windows to show off their product as well. Not only the furniture looks presentable, but have you noticed they always put tables by the windows? This is not by mistake, they purposely do this to site customers by the window and when you pass by you can see how delicious their food looks. Its all eye candy to pull you in.

When developing a website you want to choose colors carefully. Having loud colors like red and lime green is too much on the eyes. You want to have something that is more relaxed. Depending on what the content of your site may be color choice may vary. For example, if you develop a site that offers daily news you might want loud colors like red, light blue and yellow. These colors attract the eyes right away and forces the user to read your content.

A site that wants to sell furniture might wants to use cool and neutral colors. The purpose of this is to make the users eyes relaxed. For example, look at Ashley Furniture’s website at AshleyFurniture.com.

This creates an image to the user that the furniture being viewed can make them relaxed as well. It might seem ridiculous but things like this do work on selling a product and this is what makes the sites so successful.

10 Ways to get Good Site Results

So you want to get more traffic to your site? Well i have done some research and some thinking. I have come up with ideas that can possibly get you the results you are looking for. Please look at the following list to learn how to get more traffic to your site.

1. Make posts in forums that have links to your site
2. Advertise in a category with craigslist.com
3. Manually submit your site to search engines
4. Add a “bookmark this page” link to your site
5. Create content that is crazy enough to make you go “huh?” and go viral
6. Participate in a program where u can swap banners or links
7. Create a software program and give it away for free
8. Start a page on social bookmarking sites like Myspace and Facebook
9. Advertise on a sites thank you page.
10. Get referrals from sites that are not competing with you but are similar.

Getting Traffic

One of many steps is to buying traffic on the internet. this can gradually produce a steady stream of traffic to your site. Having a well placed text link or banner of your site on a popular site may attract visitors but it is not cheap. Some deals can be negotiated depending on the popularity of the website and other factors might make it worth while. However, some methods of website promoting are more reliable than others. Buying bulk traffic might pay off if your site makes income by per click but if not you might as well find another way. A good way to getting the site out there is to buy and sell  links. Do this with sites  that are popular and this is a way that users can easily gain interest and visiting your page.

Using Website Keywords

A careful and effective choice of keywords can work to ensure the success of a website by generating traffic to your site. Along with developing a website you should research keywords. How do you go about this research? Well to start think of words that are relevant to your content.

Think of what a person my type in a search engine to find information that your site may contain. With a list of keywords you can also use online keyword tools that some search engines provide. These tools come up with the maximum number of keyword combination’s so that your site may become easier to locate. With the use of keyword suggestion tools there should be an idea of the potential traffic that your site can generate with these specific keywords within a month.

When generating these keywords make sure they are a set of focused words. For Example, if you are running a site about piano lessons keywords would be “piano” and “piano lessons” or “learn the piano” these are good potential keywords. Do some searching for yourself over the search engine to see the potential competitors.

Learn what kind keywords work and don’t work for specific sites. By typing different keywords you will notice that some websites appear more than others. This is an example that the person who developed the site has some idea of what keywords users are likely to type. To get a good idea of how to select good keywords put yourself in the users shoes and figure out what that user might type in order to find a site about piano lessons etc.

Here is a site that can help you find keywords (from Google) -

http://www.google.com/sktool/?utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-bk&utm_medium=ha&utm_term=google%20keywords#

Just type words that you think might work for your site.

The Trick to SEO

Well in my past posts we have discussed the importance of Black SEO, White SEO and how to use the two for quick hits on you site. Now that people have seen the site we want to keep them coming. New content, new ideas and visuals are crucial to a web based site.

No one wants to see what they have already seen and no one wants to read what they have already heard about. Depending on what kind of site you are running sometimes updating your keywords is necessary along with your page descriptions. Am i saying delete all of your keywords? No, I am just saying that adding and taking away a couple of keywords can help people find your site through search engines as long as the content is relative to the keywords.

Bold titles and graphics attract the usual and new visitors. Look at the gaming magazines, weight loss magazines or any other magazine. Pictures are the key to gaining someones interest. When they see an attractive male or female in a magazine they start to imagine. “What if i had a body like that?” In a game magazine they would imagine the type of game play experience they would have. When reading an auto sports car magazine They would imagine what it would be like to drive in a car like that.

Whether its presenting a product or a new idea. If you can create a site with an interactive design,  a user friendly interface and get the users attention they will visit more often. Its all about grasping the users imagination.

Using Both Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO

When working on your website consider using both White and Black Hat SEO Techniques. I would like to make it clear to not use Black Hat SEO right away but rather use it when you are in need of more hits to your site. Try White Hat SEO and see how far you can get and if you are not satisfied with the results put some of the Black Hat Seo techniques to use.

The trick is to use the techniques as a first aid. Having a good tags, title and content dictates the success of a web based business. But for those times when White Hat SEO is not enough that is when Black Hat SEO thrives. You have taken your site as far as you can within the search engine rules and regulations and now its time to go one step further with Black SEO.

An important key to the success of your site is not to overuse these techniques, try using Black SEO techniques one at a time. If you use too many Black SEO techniques simultaneously will make your blog attract the search engines much too often. this can be very risky and not worth all the money and work you put into your site.

After achieving satisfactory results you can go back to White Hat SEO. With this method your site will remain at a good rank, using Black Hat SEO to get the boost you need and then going back to White Hat SEO making it hard for search engines to ban your site.

Black Hat SEO Techniques

There are many techniques when using Black Hat SEO. Although some techniques are more preferred and suggested than others. Keyword Stuffing: Packing a list of keywords on your site and nothing more onto your site. Eventually you will get penalized by search engines.

Invisible Text: This is a method of putting lists of keywords into their background. Basically you would be making the font and background color the same so that it would appear invisible. Sure this would attract a lot of searchers but also search engine spiders which are very smart at tracking invisible text. This is not something i would recommend because these spiders search for this type of technique as a standard. Such a technique will just get you banned from the search engine eventually.

Doorway Pages: a page that is considered “fake”. The user will never see the page that was expected and they are redirected to another page. this is technique is used to trick search engine spiders. Finally Cloaking, there are many different cloaking techniques when applying Black SEO your site.

IP address cloaking: A method based on IP address and delivering different results. Search Engines with certain IP addresses are shown one version of a web page while all other IP addresses are shown another version. This method is very effective even today.

User Agent cloaking: it delivers different versions of a website based on User Agent. If a search engine is trying to gain access to a website that is relying on its user agent signature a cloaked version of the website will be shown.

JavaScript cloaking: users that have JavaScript enabled are shown one version of a website while users with JavaScript disabled (like the search engines) are shown another version. With that being said, some of these techniques are more affective than others but it is up to you to decide which one will benefit your site the most and how often you want to use these techniques to get your rank up at a competitive position.

Black Hat SEO

What is Black Hat Search Engine Optimization(SEO) and the importance of it? Well, for the people who are new at this it is simply breaking the search engine rules and regulations to optimize the number of hits to a particular site. The idea is to get as many people as possible to view your site, gain their interest and gain potential clients daily. Although there is always a risk in using Black SEO methods there are positives.

The objective is to gain popularity with search engine results and be listed within the top ten to fifteen. Although White Hat SEO does do the same thing it is more of a gradual development of popularity within the search engine. The results are not immediate but in the long run it will serve its purpose to get you results down the road. But during these times of economic change it is sometimes suggested to use Black Hat SEO methods to gain fast results. Do not get the wrong idea, there was a time when using Black Hat SEO was acceptable but over time some people went a bit overboard and now these methods are frowned upon.

Black Hat SEO is great for a business that wants to get some popularity using the internet. Sure the popularity can last for a short amount of time but if you have a good understanding of the Black Hat SEO methods you would be surprised on how long you can really last in terms of still remaining in the high ranks of a search engine. There just need to be a balance between the two methods of White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.