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When it comes to web design, there are so amazing designers out there.  Most web designers are very creative and have a strong artistic background.  They are able to use their artistic talents to create layouts that are guaranteed to catch the eye of your visitors.  Unfortunately, there is one major thing that most web designers are missing.  The majority of web designers are not familiar with the concepts and implementation of search engine optimization techniques.  Even if a web designer has at least some basic knowledge of SEO, the majority do not worry about implementing search engine optimization strategies into their designs.

While this may seem like a trivial detail, it can actually be the root of some major problems.  No matter how attractive your web site is, if it is not indexed by the major search engines, the traffic it receives is going to be minimal.  Once you realize this is happening, you are going to have to hire someone with SEO knowledge to fix your layout.  Therefore, you may end up paying double for something that should have been done the first time around.  Whether you are a web designer or someone getting ready to hire a web designer, here are three traits of quality SEO web design:

Usability: As a general rule of thumb, if the design of a web site makes it easy for your human visitors to navigate, it will also be relatively easy for search engine robots to access, crawl and index your web site.  Making your site user (and search engine) friendly includes minimizing (or completely eliminating) things such as Flash, Javascript navigation and layouts designed with tables.  By designing with usability in mind, you can be sure that your visitors and the search engines will be happy with your web site.

Avoid Being Sneaky: Because web designers are generally very creative people, they like to push the envelope when it comes to designing web sites.  Although this mentality can result in some truly amazing web layouts, it can also cause problems if taken too far.  When creating a web site layout, it is important to keep the web master guidelines of search engines like Google in mind.  Incorporating things like hidden text into your designs is a sure way to get penalized (or de-indexed) by search engines.  It is ok to push the envelope with your designs, but just make sure that you avoid doing anything that the search engines tell you not to do.

Onpage SEO: Although this is the last item on the list, it is actually the most important.  On-page SEO is the basis for quality SEO web design.  It is vital that properly implement things such as title, meta, H1 and H2 tags, along with internal linking and the other key components of on-page search engine optimization.  Taking the time to employ these practices will make a significant difference in where your web site ranks in the search engines.

More and more women today work from home, and even more want to. Some are single moms or widows who need to earn a living. Others just want a little extra income or a sense of independence. Particularly for women, starting a home business presents a unique set of challenges. Lesley Spencer, founder and president of Home Based Working Moms (http://HBWM.com), suggests three steps to help ensure success:

1. Consider Your Options
The first obstacle in starting a business is figuring out which one’s right for you. Before making any decisions, find out what’s available to you. Almost anything you can do—whether it’s graphic design, sales and marketing, or administration—you can do from the comfort of your home. Before determining a direction, look at all factors involved:

• Your skills and interests. You’re much more likely to persevere and succeed if you enjoy what you’re doing.

• Your personality. If you’re extremely shy, hosting home parties might not be right for you — even if you really like the product you’re selling. Many women fail because they jump into the first thing they see, and it doesn’t work with their disposition.

• Your needs. How many and what hours can you work? How much money do you have to make? How much flexibility do you need in your schedule?

Once you’ve researched your opportunities and analyzed your skill set, you can make an informed, intelligent decision about which career move is right for you.

2. Make a Conscious Effort to Develop Your Customer Base
Many women are good at what they do, but don’t know how to market themselves to reach customers. Spencer advises, “Make a conscious decision to do something to market your business daily, or at least weekly, whether it’s a mail-out, an email campaign, or offering a special.”

Word-of-mouth referrals mean more business, so focus on doing a good job for the clients you have. Always do follow-up — you want to stay in contact and remind people you’re there. Having a web site, an online presence, is another tool you can use to attract new customers.

3. Don’t Be a Lone Ranger — Find a Support Network
You don’t have to feel alone or try to handle everything yourself — there are many online communities that can provide you with support and advice. Http://HBWM.com, and many online groups, offer what’s called a ListServe that lets you post questions that all members of that site can see and respond to. Says Spencer, “You can save hours of research just by asking someone with experience.” Whatever business you’re in, there’s a forum for it. Seek out people that have already succeeded — find a mentor.

Business means communication. Communication with your clients, your suppliers, your bankers and, most importantly with your own employees and colleagues who are more often than not out of the office sealing business deals or fulfilling business commitments hundreds of miles away from the corporate headquarters.

All this means continuous communication involving follow up with all the constituents of the business environment – both internal and external.

This also means a substantial amount of your hard earned revenue going to the telecom provider of the long distance communication service. So, the amount spent in commercial long distance communication needs to be very carefully monitored and evaluated to ensure that every dollar is utilized in the most efficient manner.

In order to achieve the maximum efficiency for the dollars spent on communication, certain well planned steps should be taken.

First go through the last six months’ billing details to find out how many minutes on an average have you spent on making long distance calls. The last six months should be a fair measure of your monthly long distance telephony. This is a long enough period to take of any seasonal fluctuations your business may experience during the course of a financial year.

The next step would be to break up this amount in the areas or zones you have most frequently called up. This is obviously known to you, because area-wise communication is generally directly proportional to the geographical concentration of the business. This analysis would also help you to confirm no disproportionate use of your telephone line is taking place.

Then get down to find out the average length of a telephone call made during this period.

So, now you have three sets of data. They are: the total minutes of long distance telephone usage, zone-wise concentration of calls made, the average duration of a phone call.

Then try to project the future requirement of long distance telephony in your business. In doing this projection you take into account not only your present client base and the expected increase in business volume with them, but also expected increase in your client base and the possibility of venturing into new zones. Always provide at least a 10% cushion in all your projections.

You may want to look beyond traditional telecommunication channels and consider a voice T1 service as an alternative. This is a digital service which makes use of channels to strike voice connections as and when required. This service has the facility of using eleven such channels simultaneously, which when translated in layman’s language means that you can hold a long distance conference with eleven persons simultaneously! But this service requires complex infrastructure and small or medium sized commercial entities may not find it economical.

Whatever may be the size of your firm or business please remember that the competition between the long distance communication service providers has now become so fierce that they are willing to go to any length to woo their clients. So, be ruthless while negotiating with them and don’t get carried away by tall promises and smooth salesmanship.

Driving traffic to your website and promoting it is not easy. There are millions of websites in the internet and chances are about a hundred or a hundred thousand of those could be your competitors. Therefore, it is important that you heed these 3 steps for an effective website promotion.

It is imperative that your website should be found in almost every search engine results, social networking websites, and broadcasting websites. You have to understand that the internet’s attraction springs from the fact that it has everything. A person would only have to key in words or phrases and he would have access to any information that he wants to have.

With the internet, one doesn’t have to wait for the news on the tube to get the latest weather report. One need not open a cookbook to get a recipe. Because of this inherent usefulness of the internet, the number of internet users has rapidly grown and expanded. With this growth in the number of internet users, however, came an equally rapid increase in the number of businesses jockeying for the internet market’s attention and patronage.

— The Importance of Web Traffic —

You need to bring your customers attention to your website if you want your business to thrive. There are no ifs and buts about it. Your e-business can survive only if your website is generating traffic. Traffic means potential customers. Your website’s traffic is the lifeblood of your business.

Your website should be accessible to your intended consumers. This is a way for you to obtain a high percentage of the market size. It is very important, therefore, to promote your site so that more potential customers will be drawn to it. There are many ways to promote your website and a mixture of methods would be more advisable. Here are the steps for an effective web promotion.

Step 1: You should have a promotion budget

When you are trying to launch a web promotion campaign, you should have a budget, no matter how stringent. With online advertising though, you can use a lot of methods without spending thousands of dollars in advertising expenses.

Utilize free forms of online advertisements. Do not spend money on anything that could be done for free. Instead, channel your funds to your website improvement, for web-based applications and other natural internet marketing expenses. Pay for advertisements on parts of your websites that are not accessible to non-members. Do not advertise for the part of your website that people can get free access to.

Step 2: Employ website promotion strategies

You should use all possible promotional strategies available to you. You should promote your website to an existing market. Be consistent in promoting your website. Let your market know that your website exists. Make sure that you are promoting your website to your target market.

What is the point of advertising for different shades of lip gloss if your website is getting more hits from men? Concentrate on generating targeted traffic. Every thing you do must be aimed at generating more traffic for your website, so it is best if you would utilize the services offered by popular web promotion brands.

Step 3: Use different methods of promotion

You should use different methods of promoting your website. Write articles that you could post in your website or you could submit in other websites. Informative articles that are useful to people would arouse people’s curiosity and interest. Make sure that you optimize your site for the search engines. Create blog posts using words or phrases that people would usually key in search engines when looking for something. Build your network through social networking sites.

There are a lot of methods that you can use. The idea is to use multiple methods and to use them well.

There are many ways to earn an honest buck using the Internet, while others just try to find the best deals possible. There was a time when people that were surfing the Net were more prone to click on the affiliate links and buy stuff without thinking too much of it. Not it seems that the things are a little bit different, due to the fact that the prices are higher than they were before and some people try to “Hijack” the commissions by replacing the ID of the affiliate links with their ID.

Let’s suppose that you have an affiliate link such as www.productdomain . com/?affID, and the hijacker will replace your link with his ID, which is “newID”: www.productdomain . com/?newID. This is how he manages to take the money that is rightfully yours.

There are also cases when the hijacker will replace your ID from the link. The visitors will be redirected to the plain URL and buy the products they find there, without even seeing your ID (it would look like www.productdomain . com). In both cases, you will loose your commission.

Here are few tips that could help any affiliate business to fight back those “hijackers” and prevent them to ever “chop” your affiliate link. Those are great tips, but if someone really tries to steal your commission, it might succeed, finally.

TIP #1
You can use a java script redirect page in order to hide the affiliate link. Here is where your affiliate link can be found and the customers can have access to your products. This is a great way to avoid a maximum exposure of your affiliate link in emails or ezine ads, until the customer is redirected to the true affiliate link, where your ID is also viewable.

Here is an example of how cans this be done: http://productdomain . com/productA.html , and the ID can be seen in the address bar – “productdomain”.  Even if the hijackers can finally access your affiliate link, they will not access it directly from your websites or newsletters.  The free redirect scripts are available usually with free java scripts.

TIP #2
You can also use a zero-frame that will hide the affiliate link and give the impression that you redirect people to one of the pages of your website.  This method is used by the redirect services as “sub-domains” and you will be given an URL such as http://productA.productdomain . com .

TIP #3
The most effective way to protect you affiliate links is to use affiliate link cloaker software. Visitors will be redirected to something that looks like your web page but pulls in the affiliate link such as the sub-folder services. (Here is the url example of how it would look: http://ww.productdomain . com/recommends/productA).

Therefore, never send a “naked” link through the affiliate programs. There are always hijackers waiting for this, and they might take your commission without you eve being aware of it.