Blog Design: What Can You Do To Increase Website Traffic
Posted on 21. Aug, 2009 by admin in List Building
Today, in this fast-paced world, people get annoyed when they visit a blog that doesn’t look good. They get frustrated and leave. That little X box is clicked on and you have lost a potential visitor. We all want our blog to look good, I know I do.
To get your visitors to read your content and to want to come back for more there are some simple blog design strategies that you can do.
#1: Design
You have a very short time for your blog to make an impact on your reader. Does it hit them in the face with bright colors or does it draw them in so they want to stay and read your content. Having a simple or minimalistic design can create harmony for the reader.
Is your ‘above the fold’ area too cluttered? Does your text tell the reader what the blog name is and what the blog is about?
The use of white space is very effective in drawing your readers into your blog. White space means the empty space on your blog. The human eye needs this space so that we can easily see what is there.
#2: Does the design compliment the content?
Blog design and related content go together. If you visit a blog that sells dog blankets and they have an article on trout fishing, would you stay? Most likely not, I know I wouldn’t. It would confuse me and I wouldn’t go back to that blog.
Font and font size needs to be considered as well. Are your fonts modern or are they curly and old-fashioned. Images are another important factor in designing your blog to be visibility enticing. Keep your images to one size and place them in the same place in your posts. This gives the reader familiarity and confidence so that when they go back to your blog things will be in the same place.
#3: Is Your Design a Platform for your Content?
The purpose of your blog design is to draw your reader to the content. Are your posts easily found? Or are they buried under uncategorized categories. Do you have ads that detract from the reader and make them want to run from your blog.
#4: Is your design functional?
Blog readers want to know about you, they want to know your story. Have you got your ‘My Story’ and ‘About Me, on your blog.
Navigation Bars – Is your navigation bar on the right side, left side, top or bottom of your blog. Books read from left to right so it makes sense to have our navigation bar at the top and on the left side. Eyetrack research has shown that our eyes are most often fixated on the upper left of the page. Only after looking at the top of the page do our eyes explore further down the page. It makes sense then to put your navigation bar top and left of your blog.
Take a look at other blogs to give you an idea of want you want your blog to be. While you are looking, write down what you like and don’t like. Then and only then change your blog or get your web-designer to do it. It will be worth it.
I’m off to do this myself to this blog.
Introduction of Search Engine Optimization
Posted on 12. Aug, 2009 by admin in search engine optimization
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and is the process of designing, building, and promoting a website with the search engines in mind. The purpose is to rank well in the search engines, which will then in turn provide you with organic search engine traffic. Organic traffic means free traffic.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important if you ever want to gain decent rankings in the search engine. Even though the word “SEO” can sound intimidating, actually applying it to your blog is not as hard as it sounds. All you have to do is invest some time in the beginning into learning the basics, and soon your blog will be better than many others out there, simply because you have done what the search engines want – SEO.
SEO is not only the initial design of a website, but the promotion as well.
Before I go any further, I would like to talk a bit about the many advantages of SEO, and why you absolutely need to apply it to your websites or blogs
The Advantages of SEO:
- Free Traffic
- Makes your website more “friendly”
- A lot people don’t do it!
- It will increase your profits
As you can see there are several reasons why you should be doing SEO.
Before we start tackling SEO, I would like to first talk a bit about how search engines work. It is very important that you know the basics of how they work, because SEO is essentially all about doing what we can to please the search engines.
Search engines gather data from any website they can find. Search engines send out little helpers called “spiders” and they crawl the net, putting their webs out and gather and store information about everything that they find. The search engines then rank the websites in order of importance, based on a variety of factors. They also penalize and reward websites, based on what they find.
Important factors include:
- Number of quality of backlinks
- Freshness of content
- Uniqueness of content
- “Authority” status
- Age
Our goal then, is to provide the search engines with a website or blog that the spiders have determined to be valuable. That way we can achieve a high ranking which will in turn bring us traffic.
How to Increase Website Traffic
Posted on 10. Aug, 2009 by admin in search engine optimization
Website traffic means one of several things. Website traffic could mean the number of hits, the number of page views, the number of sessions or the number of unique visitors. When it comes to increasing website traffic you want to determine what you are looking for.
I want to focus on targeting visitors to your website that convert to a sale and the first important step to increasing website traffic is SEO. Search engine optimization has been put out on the Internet as something that only webmasters can do. Not so. Let’s forget about algorithms and other complicated bits of the puzzle and simplfy it.
SEO involves finding unique and appropriate keywords that best describes your business. Keywords could consist of single words or two-five words, sometimes known as long-tailed keywords.
The second step to increase website traffic is to consider how many times you use these keywords on the pages of your website. 5% appears to be the norm, any more than that and you will appear to be ‘keyword stuffing’. On any web page try not to use any more than 5 keywords per 100 words of text. I use the rule 5/5/100. 5 keywords/5 times/100 words of text.
When you create your webpage use your keywords in the page title and higher up in the text. Have your keywords in the Meta description and Meta keywords. Alt tags, headers and all links on your webpage will increase website traffic. Linking to similar or complementary websites will enhance your presence on the web and increase website traffic.
Free Traffic Web Bar
Posted on 03. Aug, 2009 by admin in List Building
To get traffic to your site so that you can build your list here is an amazing slim toolbar that you can add to your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser. Free Traffic Bar. It’s a system that rewards you for being on any website through Google, Yahoo, EBay and MSN and will give you free traffic no matter what you are doing on the web. You don’t have to surf at the same time. Just browse the web.
There are four parts.
Part One – Ad Headline area. This area shows a single headline ad that changes as you browse the web. Each website you visit the headline ad changes. Your headline ad will show up to the other members of which there are over 45,000. Also when you invite others to the Free Traffic Toolbar you earn credits while your 10 level downline also browses the web.
Part Two – Free Traffic Bar Info – this is where you can check your account, check and set your toolbar, check your downline, buy ad credits, upgrade your account. Help and support is also available.
Part Three - Tools – There are over 80 tools built into the system on a wide range of Internet Marketing topics like ad tracking, affiliate marketing, audio/video training, ebooks, list builders, article marketing, shopping. There is a huge list to choose from.
Part Four – A Search box that is built into the system and will search Google by default. Use the Type button and you will search Yahoo. There is a word search highlighter tool – brilliant. The type menu searches for articles, news, blogs, people, opinions, shopping, travel and more. It also searches search engines like Dogpile and MSN.
To summarise you get -
- Headline Ad area
- Extensive free training and help
- Builds your downline in over 110 programs at once
- Makes your internet browsing experience better by giving you a huge amount of search tools all pulled into one.
The Free Traffic Bar is free. If you want better ad credits and surf ratios along with higher commissions there are also pro accounts.
