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Is it best to use the color black in creating the home page. . or is it alright to use gold or purple for the search engines?

Is it better to make a lot of uppercase words?

When making a site 'sticky' does that apply for the most part to the Home Page?

Let me answer your second question first about using all UPPERCASE words.

If you are going to use all uppercase words, do it in extreme moderation. All uppercase words looks like shouting to most people, and in my opinion the search algorithms tend to categorize all uppercase words as shouting too. What I am saying, is the engineers at Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Search are always tweaking the algorithms to get the best search results possible. They don't want search results pages that look like they are shouting at people either. Now, that doesn't mean that the search results pages are not going to pick up any (all uppercase) pages in the search results, it is just a guideline to think about when you are designing your website and performing SEO Best Practices.

Try to use good writing techniques in all your published writing on the Web. I am of a strong opinion, that the search algorithms are actually being engineered to analyze writing styles, proper writing syntax, and text semantics. If you write and publish on your website using good sentence structures, then the search algorithms will tend to give your website higher marks. It's just like a writing rubric grading system at school, but this grading system is truly color blind to unjust prejudice.

Don't fret if you are not a literary genius, or have a tendency to misspell words, or have other dyslexic writing tendencies. Use web browsers that have automatic spell checkers, like Firefox, or write using Microsoft Word or equivalent word processors, and have these programs do automatic spell checks and syntax checks for you. If you want additional writing help, there are automatic programs such as WhiteSmoke that will help analyze, proofread, spell check, and edit your text to make it much more palatable to your visitors and the search engines too. The WhiteSmoke writing program has various writing modules available for help with general, business, creative, Hi-Tech, Bio-Tech, and executive writing styles. In addition, it is wise to have others check your published works. Don't take constructive criticism personally, and continue learning from mistakes. The best way to improve your writing skills is with practice; there is no other way.

What color should I make the home page for the search engines?

I'm convinced that color schemes in the website pages are not so much as an important factor for the search engines, as it is for your readers, and people that are likely to link to your website in the future. It you have body text, that is not hidden in the page, the search engines can read it regardless of what color your page is. An important point here is, don't make your body text hidden by doing some form of Blackhat SEO tactics. The search engine algorithms are getting much more sophisticated, and will likely give your website a search ranking penalty if you use Blackhat SEO tactics. You however do need to make the page easy to read for your online readers. Typically white on black is harder to read than dark on light colors. Once again this is just a guideline. I have used both at various times. If I have a lot to say, and I expect my readers to be able to spend a lot of time on the website, then I would make the pages as easy to read as possible. If I have a little bit to say, and I want to use a little bit more creative license in my web designs, then experiment with other color schemes.

For example: My Backflag site that I use for Internet shorts, is light on dark backgrounds which in my opinion is harder to read. On the other hand, my According to Jim site is mostly dark on light backgrounds, for easier in-depth reading. See Marketing-101 for an overview.

Now, if you look closely, you will see that I actually use both, dark on light, and light on dark backgrounds, at www.jimwarholic.com. The header area is a dark background and the body is a light background.

Does making a site "sticky" apply, for the most part, to the Home Page?

The term "sticky" generally refers to the ability of a website to capture the attention of a reader in order to draw that reader back to your website, and the ability to empower your reader to interact with the site by having them explore the website pages and read more content. How well you do this through out the website will determine how sticky your website is. Different types of websites have different degrees of stickiness. As far as how sticky your Home Page should be is concerned, it all depends on what you intend to do with the site in the first place. In my opinion, the Home Page should be an overview guide about your website. If someone comes to your website the first time through the Home Page, and you have very little information, they will have no idea what it really is about.

The example you gave, about the "Company of Winners" books is an example of an overview Home Page. This one is a graphic, which generally speaking, an all graphic home page is not the best from a search engine optimization perspective to be search engine friendly, but it does however show the point I am trying to make about the home page being an overview guide.

Hope that helps you.

Best regards,

Jim

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Labels: Business, Internet_Marketing, Online Marketing, Search, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, SEO, Websites

  

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The implementation of various Google business solutions for making things better, easier, faster, more efficient, more productive, improved cost savings for businesses looking for ways of searching for data within corporate intranets, and improving online collaborations between workers was the focus at the Google Innovation seminar.

Cloud Computing The Google Way

Wow, What A Google Day!

I got a chance to attend a really informative half day Google Innovation seminar held at the Santa Clara Marriott today. The conference theme was how Google is innovating for businesses in the form of cloud computing applications and passing cost savings through some really wild changes for IT departments to save tons of time and money over traditional ways of finding, sharing, and the securing of all internal data, along with major improvements in the productivity of workers and huge cost savings to both big and small enterprise companies.

Read more about the cloud computing concepts at the Google Innovation for Business seminar, along with a first hand look at what the opposition (Microsoft) had to say.

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Labels: Google, Internet, Microsoft, Search, Search Engines, Web

  

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Good advertising is a natural extension of marketing.

Marketing and advertising go hand in hand. Doing one without taking into account the other is like eating a steak without a good baked potato. Edgar Watson Howe, an American novelist and a newspaper and magazine editor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries put it this way, "Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing but nobody else does."

When the internet was in its infancy, with only a few million pages of information, getting your message in front of the right audience was much easier, as compared to today. Why the difference? The bottom line is that it mainly has to do with the billions of new webpages online today. In fact, the number of websites going online is very difficult to calculate at any given moment. But, at the midpoint of 2007, the total base of domain name registrations worldwide was 138 million across all of the Top Level Domain Names. This represents a 31 percent increase over the same quarter last year. (VeriSign) Every country has its own top level domains, with over 840 domain name registrars worldwide. Keep in mind, that while the number of Domain Names for all Top Level Domains are able to be counted, this does not accurately reflect the true nature of the actual number of websites online today. With subdomain names being considered as separate websites, the true number of websites online is substantially greater. Many Second Level Domain names have thousands if not millions of subdomains, each having hundreds or thousands of webpages. Take for example, www.blogger.com. The .com represents the top level domain name, and Blogger represents the second-level domain (SLD) names, and the www and all others represent third or higher level domain names and are also known as subdomains. Here are two other examples of subdomains on top of second-level domains. See Advertising.pwebs.net and B2B.SalesAndMarketing.ws both of which are separate websites.

How Are Search Engines a Marketing Force Factor?

So, it really comes back to understanding search engines and how they will display the results for any particular search query. Imagine how many times your particular keywords of your business are used throughout all of the webpages online. Google gives an estimate as to the actual number of pages that have a particular keyword or keywords within the webpages themselves.

As you can see, to display any business online, within the natural search results takes quite a bit of webpage and website optimization to develop the keywords within the site, and the time and Web patience in developing quality links back to the pages of a website. Quality links back to webpages effectively provide a type of authority vote online that the page represents what it is talking about. During this period of time when the website is being optimized for its keywords, there is another way of quickly getting a business found online. This is through online advertising models.

Online advertising for today represents a viable solution to bringing in new customers and leads through the internet. Advertising online also is a great tool for testing and evaluating additional horizontal or vertical markets for any business today. Advertising campaigns can probe the market places quickly and help determine if there really is an additional horizontal or vertical market or markets in which to concentrate your company's Internet marketing dollars and other forms of marketing efforts upon.

Professional Web Services is a company that has the experience for developing new markets through effective online advertising solutions and internet marketing know-how to bring in new customers via the Net. Contact Professional Web Services today for a free internet marketing evaluation of your business website.

Labels: Advertising, Business, Domain Names, Internet_Marketing, Marketing, Online Advertising, Websites

  

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