Key #1  Make your website interactive.

As the internet continues to grow and evolve it’s becoming more important to create a community around your business. To accomplish this you want to engage your visitors and customers.  This can be accomplished a number of ways.  You can:

* Provide a forum
* Post surveys or polls
* Enable visitors and customers to review or rank items.  For example a “How valuable was this article?” question and a scale of 1 to 5 stars or a ranking from 1-10.
* Offer a blog and inspire comments and feedback
* Host contests and sweepstakes
* Publish video and audio content as well as written content.  This gives users another way to access you and your personality.

Key #2  Make sure your website provides value.

People go online for a number of reasons.  They go online to research a potential purchase, to seek solutions for a problem they’re having and to be entertained.  If your website provides all three; products, information, and entertainment then you’re in tip top shape.  The good news is your content can provide both the information and the entertainment and when written well, can also inspire purchases.  Here are a few ideas to provide value for your customers and prospects:

* How to articles, videos, and audio
* Tips articles, videos, and audio
* Case studies
* Workbooks and reports
* Interviews with experts
* Product reviews

Key #3  Make sure your website is easy to navigate.

It takes a visitor about 20 seconds to make a decision about whether they’re going to stay on your website or click away. If your site is laid out nicely, with products and services, information, prices, FAQs, and content easy to find then people are more likely to hang out – the longer they stay on your site the more likely they are to make a purchase or to return again.

To make your site easy to navigate consider:
* Keeping your site simple.
* Keep your pages uniform with the same options and appearance.
* If you have a lot of content, great!  Use drop down menus and organize your content by topic for easier access.
* Offer a search function where users can search for products, services, or content topics quickly and easily.
* Provide a way for users to easily go back to previous pages.  A back key is an option however if every page has the same options and drop down menus, including the ability to quickly return to the home page, a visitor will always be able to find what they need.
* Test your website’s appearance on different browsers to make sure every visitor has a good experience.

Key #4  Make your website easy on the eyes.

Ever visit a website and the text was so small or the colors so incompatible that you couldn’t read a word?  Readability is critical to a selling website.  Make sure:

* Your colors are easy on the eyes,
* Your graphics aren’t distracting
* And keep formatting like underlining, bold and italics to a minimum.
* Spacing between sentences and paragraphs is adequate
* Font size is large enough for people to read and font is easy to read

Key #5  Give them a soft sell.

People expect to be sold to and they’re looking for it – they’re wary.  Instead of hitting website visitors with a hard sell, provide information, solve their problems and show them the benefits of your products or services.  They’ll be much more receptive and appreciative.

Creating a website that sells requires a structured approach and a desire to create the best experience possible for your visitors.  Once you’ve created your website, consider testing it and asking associates, friends and family for their opinion.

I thought I would do my own notes and even considered to get a new note book for that. However, the truth is I didn’t write a single word inside my note book for the study of Niche BluePrint. Why? The reason is very simple, they have compiled all the important points into PDF files and I can just refer to the files in future.

Ok, just some quick share with you what I have learned. I feel that this is a must learn if you want to have your own home business selling products online. The most powerful is the niche finding and market research! They show the great way to find the profitable niche market and I must agree that this is the most important step that an online businessman must do. :)

They really have shown the whole process in a detailed procedure. You just won’t fail set up the e commerce site by follow their step by step guide. Like my earlier sharing about the modules, they also include the ways to generate traffic with free methods.

This is really a great course and it definitely helps in my online business. :)

Education is a powerful tool in any field of the career or business. :)

This is a very simple and user friendly software that allow you to create your own animated button. You just need to download the sotware from MS GIF Animator and prepare yourself the photos you want to use. You need at least two photos to make your tag animated. Once you get your photos and software ready. You can now start to create your button.

Just import your photos and set the timing on how fast you want the tag to change from picture 1 to picture 2. Within few minutes you get your own animated tag ready. :)

Suggestion: Use photos with same file sizes so that to have better quality.

Tips: You can add words or website address inside the photos using Microsoft Office Picture Manager, Paint, Photoshop or other software you are familiar with before you import them into GIF Animator.

I’ve talked to my sis once and I knew that some of them only want to share their blog to few of the close friends and they are not intend to “market” their site. In this case, I recommend you don’t read the following suggestions for building a high traffic website. In fact, I believe when the time they saw my title of “build a high traffic website”, they don’t even click on this post. :)

Recently, I have some friends ask me about how to attract more traffic to the website. Remember, build a site for your business is only the very first step. After you have a website for your online business, the process won’t just stop there but now is just the beginning. I still remember why I want to learn about internet marketing. When the time I joined some programs, I thought everything was just so simple like stated in their site that I don’t need any experiences or knowledge. But after I’ve explored more, I found that many things I needed to learn about and one of the thing I needed to know is how to build a high traffic website or blog.

Here are my 3 simple basic suggestions to attract more traffic to our sites.

1. Create valuable content
Strong content is universally valued. It’s always hard work to create it, but in the long run it generates lots of long term referral traffic. It’s not easy for me to understand the sentence of “create valuable content” when I was just get started. It seems so easy yet so difficult. I don’t know what content should I write about for this blog. I have then decided to share my learning experiences on internet marketing and hope others may gain some ideas from my blog.

Every time I write my content, I would assume that I’m writing for my friends who are interested to know what have I learned in internet marketing. Assuming they are reading my blog and they will get something from the reading. It’s very important when I have this in my mind. It’s kind of motivation and also my way to have better content articles.

I believe when you focus on providing real value content, your readers will notice.

2. Create timeless content
It is always better for us to write about something still providing real value and may still be read by people after many years. Unless your site is doing about news or current events, otherwise you should try to write content that is intended to be timeless.

I always try to have content that may be readable in future and at least when people read about my post one year later they still feel that it’s useful.

3. Know why you want a high traffic site
Only knowing the way to attract traffic to your site is not enough and it’s only a bridge to your main purpose. What is your main purpose of having the high traffic? You must know very clearly what kind of traffic you want and what the traffic can bring you.

If you have a business website that offer some products or services at your site, you should know that once you get the high traffic, the traffic must be able to bring you sales. Otherwise the high traffic would means nothing. Therefore, if you succeed in building high traffic website, you must respect this position and serve the best.

Of course there are many other factors to take into consideration for website traffic. However, I think the above are the most important and basic rules that we should take care of. If we could consistently apply the above to our sites or blogs, I believe it helps in long run.

I would like to share with you the two videos about website traffic that I find them very useful.

For more about website traffic, you can read my posts at Website Traffic at Mompreneur Asia.

Google Alerts is very user friendly and it is kind of email updates based on your choice of query or topic. From the form, you just need to key in the search terms that you would like to receive email updates. For example, you want to know the latest relevant Google results for SEO. So, you just need to key in SEO or Search Engine Optimization in the Search terms . “SEO” and “Search Engine Optimization” would give you totally different email updates from Google.

There are few types for you to choose from. The choices included News, Blogs, Web, Comprehensive, Video and Groups. You may wish to choose the type of information you like to get based on the search term and your niche. Also, you could receive the mails on daily or weekly basis.

I’ve read an article by Saikat Basu about “10 Uses of Google Alerts For A Freelancer”. He has very good points about why we should use Google Alerts and also some tips to manage Google Alerts.

Make Google Alerts your virtual research assistant

So, what does this mean? I could customize my search results with the rankings I want? I could put my own website to the rank of #1? If it can simply change the ranking, how about the effort of doing all the SEO and LSI? Many questions just appear in my mind. I then found a video that explain more about Google SearchWiki.

And also a post on Google SearchWiki Kill SEO Ranking? – It says that the changing only affect the particular computer and only if he log on to his google account.

I do a test by myself for the keyword “how to do social bookmarking”. My website rank #6 originally but after my “adjustment”, it ranks #1.

Before Using SearchWiki

After Using SearchWiki – This result only effective when I log on to my google account.

So, what do you think about Google SearchWiki? Any advantages and disadvantages of boosting the websites’ ranking and it can only be viewed by ourselves?

Google Friend Connect is very user friendly and it allows you to sign in with your Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account. You can interact with other visitors by making friends, sharing media, posting comments, playing games, and more. Another great thing is you may invite friends from other social networks and contact lists to join your site or blog.

Here is the video by Google

If you have joined this social site,  I would like to connect with you too. Just leave me a message here and I will join yours.

Happy Connection!

Of course I’m not mean that we should totally ignore SEO and only focus on Social Media. Search Engine Optimization is more technical but it’s always good in keywords research, keywords targeting and attract free traffics for our website/blog. For long term advantages, we really need to look into it seriously and can’t ignore it’s importance.

Social Media on the other hand is very powerful and here’s some of my reasons:

1) Get indexed within 24 hours – Your brand new website/blog will get indexed by Google within 24 hours by using social media. See my posts:

• Power of Social Bookmarking – My Babymoon Travelling Information Guides
• Just A Casual Blogging

If you only focus on SEO and the new website may need to get up to 4 weeks or longer time to get indexed by Google.

2) Networking – I like networking and enjoy the online atmosphere. We can share ideas and goals with each others and people will also get to know you more personally. It gathers like minded people together in a community and we grow by learning from others ideas.

3) It’s kind of Viral Marketing – You can get very up to date information through social media. Twitter is a mini blogging that gives very updated information and once you put your information on to social media, it is shot to websites all over the world.

4) Broadcast – All you need to do is just to do a broadcast on all your social media sites and all your networks friends get the information you are trying to deliver. It’s a very easy way to drive traffic and without any spamming.

5) Branding – The last thing I love is social media helps in the branding. Branding is important in Internet Marketing and you don’t need to be the professional in your niche but you should be the authority in your niche. Social media is a great tool for branding.

Sooner, I found that almost all WordPress themes aren’t designed with SEO in mind – in fact they are very poor for SEO.

6 SEO Problems Common In WordPress Themes – by Court

1. Multiple use of the H1 tag. The H1 tag should only be used on each page of a site. Most WordPress themes use the H1 tag multiple times on each page.
2. Excessive use of H2 tags. Most WordPress themes use H2 tags for almost everything in the sidebar. This causes H2 to be used nearly 10 times on each page. They should be used for the 2nd most important heading on each page, which is probably going to be your post title. The H1 tag should be used for the main heading on each page, which is probably the name of your site.
3. Weak use of HTML title tag. On most WordPress themes, the HTML title tag appears as: the name of your site: category: post title. Since you will often have keywords in your post title, this is poor use of the HTML title tag. The post title should appear first.
4. The code for the sidebar often appears above the content. This results in all of your pages looking the same in search engine listings. It also dilutes the power of your content and post titles, because they’re moved down in the code for each page.
5. The comment section is poorly setup. Many of the themes use H1, H2, and H3 tags in the comments. This is a huge mistake that would lead to dilution of the intended H1 and H2s.
6. Archive and category pages produce duplicate content. If full-text versions of the posts are shown here, it can cause post pages to show in Google’s supplemental index. I would set category and archive pages to show excerpts only, or add ‘noindex’ to their head.

One way to optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization) is to use the All in One SEO Pack.

The features of All In One SEO Pack:

* Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
* Generates META tags automatically
* Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
* For WordPress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
* You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
* You can fine-tune everything
* Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

1) Be Prepared.
2) Avoid Javascript.
3) Content is King.
4) Build Backlinks.
5) Don’t obsess over PageRank.
6) Focus on Titles.
7) Keep Content Fresh!
8 ) The Key to Good Links.
9) Phrasing it Correctly.
10) Don’t Design in a Vaccum.
11) Keep Adding Keywords.
12) Don’t Split Your Link Juice.
13) Ditch the Long Names.
14) Forget About Frames!
15) What Really Counts.
16) Get Indexed Quickly.
17) Start a Blog.
18) Quality Counts.
19) Don’t Abuse The System.
20) Guilt by Association.

10 Simple Steps To Achieve High Search Engine Rankings

-Know your geographic market and ensure your domain has the correct TLD.
-Include keyword in Domain name (using hyphens if necessary).
-Create as much content about your products or subject as you can.
-AFTER you have your site content start keyword researching
-Decide on 4 or 5 primary keywords to use as main sub-sections
-Sit down and sketch out your navigation system
-Re-write content using knowledge previously gained about keywords and phrases
-Structure each individual page
-Proof read your completed page and get a 2nd opinion
-Construct your site.

Remember

1. Be Patient, Things will take time
2 Don’t Overdo anything – it Can harm you
3 Automated Link Exchange Programs are Dead
4 Never spam as It don’t work
5 Don’t do BlackHat unless you know what you are Doing
6 Don’t buy too many softwares/ebooks
7 Never participate in any kind of traffic exchange programs
8 .edu Links from blogs are Useless
9 If something looks unreal, than most likely, it is