Check out the short demo below and see how easy it is to create and edit professional newsletters yourself.

Use the right trigger words

• Use trigger words to match your user’s mental model. Users have a mental picture of what they look for, often a so-called “trigger word”. If they scan, but don’t find these, they might leave the site/page.
• Use findings from analysis phase above to define the right “trigger words” and use them for key elements such as headlines, call to actions etc.
• Using the right trigger words helps you to be found when people are searching.

Write meaningful headlines

• Headings are the most important piece of content:
• The heading is often used as title metadata. This is what the search engines use on the search results page.
• The heading may be placed on a homepage as a link to the content.
• When writing headings:
• Keep them to 8 words or less.
• Make sure you include the most important keywords / trigger words.
• Cut out as many adjectives and prepositions as possible (and, the, a, of)
• Be clear and precise. Avoid being clever
• Convey the story of the paragraph below to help user’s see what’s in for them.

Keep it short and simple

• Start with the key idea / main topic and then elaborate (inverted pyramid). This ensures that your readers can grasp the main idea when they just scan the first paragrapgh.
• Try to not exceed the following content lengths:
• Headings: 8 words or less
• Sentences: 15-20 words
• Paragraphs: 40-70 words
• Documents: 500 words or less
• Write simply and directly. Get rid of fancy words. Writing effectively is about communicating. It’s about driving actions. Get to the point. Then stop.
• Structure articles with anchor links on top which link to the sub headlines below. Start with the right trigger words from a user’s perspective.

Write in an active voice

• Write from the point of view of the reader. The reader has come to your website to do something. Your content should be written in an action-orientated style. Every sentence should be moving them towards a purchase, a subscription, a solution.

Format to support scanning

• Let the reader get a quick grasp of the article by simply glancing at the page. Techniques to help readers look down the page are:
• sub-headlines
• small paragraphs (one thought per paragraph=
• tables
• bullet points
• links
• Bold-face words (preferably trigger words)
• Start an article with a summary: who, what, where, when, how. Get the facts across in 50 words or less. An objective of a summary is to make people want to read on. Keep them punchy and factual.
• Always lead off a paragraph with a factual sentence.

Write great metadata

• Metadata gives web content context. You need to see metadata as an extension of grammar. You might say that metadata is web grammar.
• Classification (categorization) is metadata. Focus on what classification terms are used on your website. Focus on how your content is classified. It is your responsibility to ensure that your content is properly classified. Misclassified web content might as well not have been written.
• Headings and summaries are metadata. Date of publication and author information are metadata. If there’s one piece of metadata that every webpage must have, it’s title metadata which precisely should describe the content on that page.

Use pictures to explain complexity

• Text is not the best medium to convey all types of information. Consider whether your information can be conveyed better via pictures, numbers, models, statistical diagrams or the like.

Use a two- or many-layered strategy

• If you must convey a demanding text, consider doing it over two different pages: Create a summary which explains the key facts and then create subpages, going more into detail.
• The detailed subpages can be both a web-page and a downloadable document, which makes it searchable by search engines and easier to handle for those who want to download it, print it out and read it on paper.

Watch ouf tor typos!

• It is hard to catch your own mistakes, so set up routines whereby a colleague double-checks your work, if possible.
• Remember that a misspelled word not only looks stupid, but can also confuse a search engine.

The very first thing that we discovered is that blogging, especially in terms of aiding one’s ability to communicate online is not truly dying. First of all, the statistic of kids somewhere between the ages of twelve and seventeen blogging less doesn’t actually mean that blogging is going to go away. What is in fact happening is that people in this age group are just migrating over to Twitter and, particularly, Facebook–the service that offers people the power to create “notes” which can act in much the same fashion as blog entries and allow the user to control who is able to see what they have written down. Adults are much more likely to develop their own web properties than kids particularly because pesky things like parental consent will not be an issue.

We also wanted to take the belief that blogging is challenging under consideration. Blogging is just not something that can be done once and quickly. If you want to make money online, particularly when you are in Internet Marketing, you ought to be willing to actually commit to the activity if you want to find success with the activity. While running a blog arrived at the peak of its popularity in 2004-2006, lots of Internet Marketers jumped onto the bandwagon believing that they could make a site really fast that, because it looked like a blog, they could slap up some advertising and sit back and collect earnings. It rapidly became clear to everybody who tried this that the only way to make true money in blogging is to constantly update your site with new information. This is the reason a large number of Internet marketers have stopped employing blogging as a key income source.

Google has also been working overtime to crack down on the individuals who have stolen content from others and used it for their own blog and site purposes. This shows that on a daily basis hundreds of blogs are being de-indexed by Google these are generally the blogs created by people who use software to steal the content off of other sites and put it on their own. With countless blogs being taken off the radar, it is easy to believe that blogging is dying and that the sites are merely being shut down.

The serious fact is that blogging isn’t dying. Blogging is just being far better regulated so it is a lot harder for people to earn money using these mediums. While this will affect some basic data, we predict that blogging isnt going anywhere. It’s still coming into its own for precisely what it is really supposed to be: a tool for communication. Blogging is a lot better method for those who want to share information than it is for someone to earn money.

By Hannah George
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

With so many options for web developers, how do you know which to choose? When you’ve decided it’s time to build a new website to showcase and advertise your product or service, you will probably consider hiring a website developer or firm so you can be assured of a high-quality, functioning, and professional website. Because your website is your online extension of your business – it’s a very unique representation of your business, its message, and its products or services. So, it’s important that the website developer you choose be experienced and professional.

What are some of the key things you’ll want to think about before you talk with a website developer? Sydney web developers will ask questions like the following – and these are the questions you want any website developer to ask:

• What is the site’s goal and primary purpose?
• Who is the site’s target audience?
• What is your time frame for going live with the site?

In addition, what are some of the items you’ll want to have in hand before you talk with a website developer, whether it’s an individual or a firm? You’ll want to have a website plan that answers these questions as these will guide your web developer:

• What is the reason you are building a site, and how the site is intended to support your business: by bringing in money, by gathering new leads, or by supporting the products and services (or all three)?
• If possible, list some of the competitor sites and what features you like and/or hate about each – this will serve as a discussion point between you and the web developer.
• You’ll want to ensure that your company owns the rights to all the design work when it’s completed. You’ll also want to specify that your company owns the rights to the domain name and has administrative rights to the server after the website developer team is finished.
• You’ll want to specify your time frame and budget, as well.

Before you consider choosing any web developer – firm or individual – you’ll want to see their portfolio. It’s less of a concern whether any of the sites in the portfolio are live or outside the firewall, because designers sometimes design sites to showcase their work or are asked to design websites that are internal to a particular company. It’s most important to see how the site they have built works. Is the layout easy to navigate? Do the links work and are they logically understood?

What is their process and do they show you their progress as it develops? This is an important question because you’ll want to provide feedback as the site develops. Almost never does a client see what they wanted the first time and website developers are used to that – they build into the process feedback loops if they’re smart so they can hear feedback from the client. If they don’t have a process that allows for incorporating feedback, reconsider. You’ll likely get a website that does exactly what you wanted it to, but you’ll want to make changes after seeing it. That’s just human nature.

As we noted above, many people think only about getting a reliable and working website, but they don’t think about such legal details as ownership. It’s important that if things go wrong, you have the rights to the web development as far as it’s gotten so you can get someone else to finish the job. Without this protection, the web developer can leave your business in the lurch with no recourse and money already spent.

By: Grace
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

However, these marketing activities will deliver small and sporadic volumes of traffic. The single biggest thing you can do to drive traffic is search engine marketing. Here is why: it is estimated that 80% of traffic to most websites comes from search engines. There is roughly 500 million searches performed everyday and 88% of that traffic comes from the top 4-5 search engines, Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing. Of these, Google is by far the largest. Approximately 90% of people searching do not go past the third page of results and few go beyond the first page.

Therefore, if you want to drive traffic to your site it is imperative that you get onto the first three pages of Google and the other top search engines. Surprisingly, the majority of small businesses have not figured this out yet and for those who have, the majority are asking the question: how can I get my site to appear on the first page of Google search results?

Different Options

There are two main methods of appearing on the first page of search results.

Paid for results or Pay Per click (PPC)

This is where you pay to appear in the sponsored links section of the results page. In Google, this is at the top of the page and the right hand side. You decide which search keywords e.g. London restaurant, you would like to appear in. You appear in the search results and you pay for every user who clicks through to your site. The cost will vary by keyword and can range from 10p to several pounds or dollars per click, depending on how many other companies are bidding for that keyword.

Natural results achieved through SEO

Natural results are when you appear in the main list of results. You do not pay to appear or when a user clicks on your link. However, to appear on the first three pages of results, you need to implement a number of design and content changes to your website, which are termed Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

Which is best?

Both have their merits, but natural results are by far the most preferable because once you have invested in SEO, you do not have to pay for the traffic that is generated.

PPC is a great solution if you:

Have just launched your website and you need immediate presence on the first page of result or if you have not yet successfully optimised your site to appear on the first page. Remember, there are thousands of websites all looking to appear on the first page of search results for certain keywords.

Spiders and Links: The Basics of How Search Engines Work

Without getting bogged down in the technical details of how search engines work, here are a few basics that you should be aware of.

• Search engines want to ensure that the most relevant sites are displayed to customers who are searching for keywords e.g. London restaurants.
• Each page is ranked by the search engine on different criteria.
• Each search engine uses different criteria when calculating the ranking of the site, but there are some commonalities such as:

Automated Spiders are sent by the search engine to index each page on your site. These spiders log the content of your site. This allows the search engine to know whether the key words that a user is searching for appear within your site and on specific web pages. However, in addition, the search engines have decided that it is not sufficient to simply have the keywords appear in the site. They believe that the most useful and relevant sites for the person who is searching are those which have a lot of other relevant sites linking to it.

The important points you should take out are:

• You want to make it as easy as possible for the spiders to visit and index your site.
• You need to have relevant keywords on your site that are easily found by the spiders.
• You need to have many other sites linking to your site.

Four Components of SEO

In order to optimise your website to appear in natural search results, there are four components that you will need to address.

1. Design: What to do when designing your website

Many small businesses make the mistake of designing their website and then start thinking about driving traffic to it. The problem is that the way you design your site can result in your site being ignored by the search engine spiders, which means you will receive very little traffic. When designing your site, ensure you avoid the following pitfalls and ask your marketing agency to confirm that they have been avoided.

Avoid flash sites

Sites are designed in HTML or flash codes. The spiders that are sent to your site by the search engines cannot read flash.

No frames

Some agencies design sites within frames. For example, the menu on the left might be within a frame and the main body of the page within another frame. It makes designing the site easier as the only thing that changes from page to page is the content within the frame. However, spiders cannot read what is inside a frame so you will not get indexed and noticed by search engines.

No dynamic pages

Some sites are developed with a database which generates dynamic pages. You can tell if there are dynamic pages on your site if there is a ? within the page URL. Again, most but not all of the search engines can read dynamic pages.

Text within graphics

To ensure text is read uniformly by different browsers, design agencies often put text within a graphic. It looks great, however, a spider cannot read what text is in a graphic and simply moves on.

Keywords

At design stage, think about the keywords you want to be found by on search engines and incorporate that into your design. For example, if you were to design your site so that a page was allocated to the most popular keywords, it would be easier to include more keywords on the page which would be found by the spiders.

2. Content: What to do when developing your content

Keywords

Choosing the keywords that you want to appear in search results for is one of the most important things you can do. Think of it as planning the location for a physical shop. Choosing keywords that people search for a lot (i.e. generates a lot of potential traffic) and then ensuring that those keyword are peppered around your site (i.e. more chance that the spiders will index them giving you a good chance of appearing high in search results) could result in your being positioned on Oxford street as opposed to a back alley.

Invest time in choosing the keywords. Think about how you would search for your product or service. If you are running a restaurant, you should immediately think beyond the generic search keyword of restaurant and consider descriptive keywords such as seafood restaurant or family restaurant. You also need to think of target keywords, so consider London restaurant or London seafood restaurant.

Once you have decided on your keywords, you need to place them throughout your site. The main areas are:

Web page title

This is what you see written in the title bar of the browser. It is also what you see when you bookmark a page. This should explain what the purpose of your site or your page is and include keywords, but always in such a way that makes sense to a user who reads it.

Meta tags

The tags are not visible to users but they explain what the content of the page is. Keywords should be placed in here as they are easily searchable by spiders.

Homepage content

Your homepage is searched by the spiders and you should ensure that your keywords appear near the top header. They should also be sprinkled throughout the homepage. See keyword density for guidance on this.

Keyword density

A question often asked is how many times your keywords should appear on a page. The guidance for SEO is that each page should have a minimum of 250 words; your keywords should account for 2 – 8of the word on the page. That means they should appear between 4 and 16 times.

Two important points to bear in mind are:

• You need to balance the need to write your copy for your users, in order to sell your product, and the need to write your copy for search engines, in order to be found.
• To help you achieve both objectives you should focus on a couple of keywords for each page rather than a large number.

3. Links

Inbound links are key

To combat a lot of sites achieving high page ranking by simply stuffing their sites with keywords, the search engines have placed a higher weighting on the value of the number of sites which link into a site. The rationale is that if a site is linked to by lots of other sites, then it must be offering popular and relevant content.

Therefore, your site might be designed in a way that is easily searchable by spiders and your content might be sprinkled with keywords, but you need to have other sites linking to you in order to achieve success.

Audit your links

Ensure you know how many other websites are linking into your site and set a goal for increasing that figure. You should have at least 100 quality links.

How to get links

There are many creative ways to generate links to your site:

• Ask friends, customers or suppliers to link to your site.
• Post comments on forums or discussion groups with a link back to our site.
• Register your site with sites such as stumbleupon and if users like your site, they will bookmark it, creating a link to your site.
• Issue an online press release which should result in online media coverage and links back to your site.
• Register your site with multiple directories.

4. Maintenance:

Once you achieve a high ranking in the search engines, it is important to realise that you need to maintain your ranking. The criteria the search engines use in the algorithms constantly change and what works today may not work next week. Your site will need to be tweaked to bring you back up the rankings

By Evan Mangan
Article Source: Article Base

Brand awareness

There are many websites on the Internet offering the same products or services. Now it is difference in the website that can make you noticeable by the prospective buyers. The web design should be made as appealing and user friendly as possible.

Communication

The website is one of the best ways to communicate with your buyers especially when you have something new to offer them. A website can be designed in such a way as to not only sell the product or services but also to receive feedback about its utility.

Marketing oriented

The website can be designed to address what user needs. At the end of the day it is the buyer who runs the business, whether it is online or offline. If the user’s needs are not met through the website it is of no use for him/her. The website needs to be marketing oriented and not sales oriented.

Indexing on Search Engine List

The website design should be search engine friendly so that there is maximum return on the efforts put for search engine optimization. The traffic to any website can be maximized by rerouting or redirecting from the search engine list.

Increasing Scope of business

A website can take your business to anywhere in the world where there is Internet connectivity. This is in contrast to the convention system of marketing where a person had to travel physically to expand the scope of business to various other locations and domains.

Niche Traffic

A quality website makes it clear in the first click whether the visitor is going to find in the website what he/she is looking for. This filters the unwanted traffic from the genuine prospective buyers of what is offered by the website.

Conversion

A good website is so appealing and buyer oriented that the presentation is successful in converting the visitor into a buyer. If the visitor is not properly convinced about the product, its utility or pricing the conversion is not possible.

Customer retention

The expenses for customer retention are much less than that required for creating new customers. Most of the businesses have realized the relevance of this aspect and a quality website helps in retaining the customers.

Brand Image management

A quality website can be very useful for managing the brand image. If a customer is not satisfied, timely corrective measures can be taken to minimize the negative impact.

Maintenance

A quality website with content management system (CMS) is easy to maintain. The visitors can be made aware of every development of the business.

Quality web design will hold your visitors as well as it attract the new ones too so its an important part of the website development. The reasons mentioned here and many other will be very handy to add a better and appreciable quality on to the websites.

By Bryan Bell
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

2010 was a happening year for web development when we saw the emergence of several new technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. Year 2011 is predicted to be a consolidate of emerging technologies which would enable designers to design flexible websites which can be successfully served on any type of media including tablets and mobiles. The year would also see the emergence of professional online networking enabling people to network with fellow professionals as well as prospective or existing clients. The trend would particularly benefit tech-savvy professionals in the field like dentistry, law, architecture, fashion designing and creative writing.

Emergence of HTML 5 and CSS3

HTML5 is a major revision of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) while CSS 3 (currently under development) is a Cascading Style Sheet presentation. These technologies are used to create web pages. You would see wider adoption of HTML5 and CSS3 in 2011, both by web designers and developers as well as browsers. Web giants like Google and Facebook have already started implementing HTML5 standards and the rest can be expected to follow suit. This would help developers build Web apps that do things which could previously be done only by desktop applications.

Sophisticated Website Platforms

The days when people surfed the Internet only on desktops are gone. Now, people can visit your website on laptops, netbooks, palmtops and smartphones. The devices on which the Internet can be accessed are only expected to get more sophisticated. The web designers would have to ensure in 2011 that the sites designed by them conform to all platforms.

Flexibility

Flexibility will be the mantra of any successful website design. Sites would be designed in such a manner that they would serve several media (conventional browser, iPhone, iPad, mobiles etc.) The trend right now is to utilise CSS to serve device based multiple layouts and screen dimensions so that the website is displayed properly. Developing technology would make it possible to design websites that would be served successfully across browsing platforms.

Measurement of Websites

You can measure the performance of your websites with data rich analytics. With the number of online competitors growing, this year you may have to learn how to best utilise analytics data. You will have to find out what is working for you and how you can take care of shortcomings. Analyse where your best visitors came from and which campaigns worked well for you. Put your resources into the areas where you have performed well.

Professional Networking

2011 will be the year of professional networking on the Internet. For instance, a dentist could become part of an online network of dentistry professionals. Such a network would enable him/her to connect with co-workers, other professionals in the region, and prospective or existing clients. People with common interests in the field of medicine can be part of such networks. Such networking system would allow one to increase exposure in the community by sharing stories and information. Such kind of professional networking would become effective for strengthening web presence and increasing the web traffic.

Simple Aesthetics

Web designers would forsake complex visuals and overdone design techniques. Clean and simple web designs with high attention to detail would be preferred. There would be a greater emphasis on typography, with the open web font format (WOFF) specifications being implemented. Stronger interaction design would help users to get richer and more captivating experiences. Simple aesthetics means better experience on mobile devices as Internet connectivity is less reliable on mobiles in comparison with the traditional broadband connection. For professions such as dentistry, simple website design suits better.

Whether you are a business person or a professional such as dentist, you can tap the potential of the web by adapting the design of your website to the emerging trends. Choose a trusted dentist web design firm which can incorporate the latest features in your site and help you score over your peers.

By: Gretchen Stoecker
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

What is the significance of link building? Most importantly, links into your website increase your rankings in search engines, as each one of the search engines in the market must determine which sites appear when showing the search results and which not. Search engines operate on a complex mathematical formula to assess which websites crop up in search results and the order in which they make their appearance. A prominent factor in the calculation is the number of other websites that include links to the site under evaluation.

As well as helping to improve your website’s score in the arithmetical formulae, link building creates instant new traffic streams for your site. Because every article that you send out for distribution will have in it a link to your website, it follows that every time that article is posted on another person’s website you have a fresh potential traffic source.

Yes, there is a downside to link building; the process is a laborious one, and the link is actually the biggest expense that the average site will incur. But you must have one for your marketing to be productive. There are several ways to build links, but the four commonest are article marketing, directory submissions, link requests and press release distribution.

Directory submissions are easy enough to manage, but it is time-consuming researching and locating on-line directories that suit your precise needs. The directories are only of any value to you if they are focused on the same topic to which your website is dedicated.

The link request is a manual process, and it calls for considerable effort. It is incumbent upon you to identify every site from which you wish to seek a link, and then contact the site owner to request that he add a link to your website. The return rate from this course is small.

Press release distribution can certainly have a favourable impact and a good return, but it is costly. The press release distribution agencies charge like wounded bulls for their services.

There are some free distribution services to be found, but they do not allow links, so the value of their service is severely limited. That leaves you with the highly vaunted article marketing, and, quite frankly, article marketing is hard to fault. If you write your own copy you face no expense other than your time, and if you do feel the need to employ a professional writer you will not be up for much expense at all.

Distribution of the articles involves simply sending them out to distribution services, most of whom will allow you to incorporate that all important link, and from there something of a snowballing effect takes over. Traffic generation to your website will take you very pleasantly by surprise, make no mistake, and in combination with search engine optimization and social bookmarking you will find yourself part of a business community that has no shop front on High Street and no signage around town – but enjoys as cost-effective a return on investment as one could ever imagine.

By Fred Holt
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com