Improve your Website Through the Proper use of Tags, Alt Tags, & Attributes in LinksWritten by Richard Zwicky
Improve Your Web Site Through The Proper Use Of Tags, Alt Tags & Attributes In Links By Richard ZwickyImproved web design, and search engine performance all in one easy step! Believe it or not, it is possible, easy, and really straightforward. There are 3 extremely useful tags and attributes that most people overlook, or do not take advantage of properly. Theses are alt tags, title attributes in links and tags.The reason you want to spend some time focusing on these 3 facets of your web site is simple. Two of them make web site easier to understand and navigate, for people and search engines. The third one is much cleaner than tags, and it works really well for key phrases and terms within search engines. This article deals with merits and value of each of these mostly misused, or ignored opportunities.Alt Tags The first opportunity is one that is most often used, and misused: The alt tag. Alt tags are comments that should be used whenever you add a graphic, or image to a web page. Pictures are worth a thousand words to you and me, but zero to a search engine. An alt tag should be a little bit of short, descriptive text which helps any user (and search engine) understand what reference is pointing to. If you are not aware of what an alt tag looks like, here's an example: The code to make this banner appear is as follows. 
When you move your mouse over graphic, words appear. The words tell people what graphic refers to, what it is about, and where it leads to. Internally, if you had a hardware store, you could use an image of a power tool link to a "tools" section, with words "Tools & Power Tools" in alt tag. It may be obvious, but most people don't take advantage of this opportunity. Most people don't even have alt tags attached to their images, or have alt tags that look like this - alt="" - not much good, they're blank. That's all search engines, and some old web browsers will see - blank space. Alt tags also afford you an opportunity to give search engines more meaningful content to work with. If you have a graphics rich web site, there's very little to no text for search engine spiders to use to analyze your site. If you attach a relevant alt tag to each image however, search engines will read them as your textual content, and your web site will show up in relevant searches. Even if your website is content rich, alt tags allow you to reinforce what is highly important, key terms, within content. Here's key - use relevant terms. Don't just put "About Us" Use descriptive key terms, such as "About Acme Power Tools". Tags Next, we have tags. Often, when web designers are building pages they use tags, and to emphasize page heading, and subheadings for each section. Whenever you get chance, use tags instead. There are 5 different tags. The largest two - & should be used for major title on each page, and then next three - , & for subheadings. The smallest one, will look just like regular bold text on a page.
| | Choosing The Right Strategy for your Online Business: Pay for Inclusion vs Pay per ClickWritten by Richard Zwicky
Choosing The Right Strategy For Your Online Business: Pay for Inclusion versus Pay per ClickBy Richard Zwicky Back in old days of Internet - in 1993, - there were 284 locations on entire World Wide Web. According to Bill Clinton, only 8 of them ended in .com or .net when he was sworn into office. As of January 1, 2003, there were 171,000,000 domain hosts in use. In 1995, largest search engine database was Altavista, and it had most of Internet categorized. Today Google and FASTsearch own largest databases. Yet neither one of them has even 10% of Internet covered. It's estimated that more than 8,000,000 web pages are added to Internet every day. None of search engines are able to keep up to that pace. So how will your website stand out? How will it acquire traffic it needs to succeed? There are many ways to approach issue of marketing an online business, but for sake of this article, we'll concern ourselves solely with online tools, and ways to expedite success. In that vein, we'll concern ourselves with Pay for Inclusion and Pay for Placement (or Pay per Click) advertising. Some engines, such as AltaVista, Inktomi, Looksmart and FAST, use a pay for inclusion model. What this means is that to be guaranteed to be found within that specific search engine index, website operator must pay a fee to be listed. It's similar to fee a business pays for a Yellow Pages listing. These fees vary from monthly to annual. Looksmart charges a listing fee, plus a fee of $0.15 per clickthrough. Engaging a Pay-for-Inclusion service does not come with any placement guarantees. If your website is not properly optimized, but you paid an inclusion fee, it is guaranteed to be indexed and listed somewhere within that search engine. If you want to ensure success with a Pay-for-Inclusion search engine, then your website must still be optimized. Without proper optimization, which includes an analysis from perspective of all factors that search engines look for, a pay for inclusion service will not deliver desired benefits to website operator. When properly matched with a comprehensive Search Engine Optimization regimen, a Pay for Inclusion program will result in powerful results: Qualified Traffic, Customers, and Relevant Traffic. Pay per Click advertising is process by which a web site operator can arrange for a website to be placed in a pre-defined position within certain search engines, such as Overture. Search Engine Placement is always a Pay-Per-Click solution. While advertising websites are only permitted to buy advertising in search queries that are relevant to their content, they are not sorted by relevance but rather purely based on bid value. Pay per click services allow advertisers to bid for each visitor directed through to their web site, based upon number of clicks ad receives. Pay per Click search engine placement should be realistically viewed for what it is - an online auction. Advertisers bid against each other for a fixed position within a list of search results. The advertiser who bids most is given top spot in list. Each advertiser bids according to their budget, and has to know his or her Return On Investment (ROI) to determine how much money should be spent on acquiring new customers. How Do I Know Which Strategy Is Right For My Website? For those advertisers where ROI is sensible or worthwhile, pay per click search engines are valuable customer acquisition tools. But is it right for you? While it can be expensive, here's a way for you to easily determine ROI for your online business, and determine if it is right choice for you. Take out a sheet of paper, and at top of sheet mark down average price of goods you sell - we'll use $100.00 for purpose of example. From that number, make some simple and basic calculations, outlined here:
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