By David Lucht (Edited by Karen Di Piazza)

This morning was my granddaughter’s birthday. She came running up to me, all dressed up, and obviously excited about something. She began tugging upward on her sleeve, exposing her armpit. She said, “Look, papa!” I had no idea what she was trying to show me. She proudly showed me her other armpit. I was still dumbfounded, but thankfully, her mom and grandmother explained that she was showing off wearing deodorant.

Everyone commented what a big girl she was. She walked off brimming with pride.

I thought to myself, I wear deodorant every day and never get special attention. I thought about why, as children, we get so much attention for the smallest of details. As adults, recognition for the smallest achievements seems to go away. Or does it?

Let’s take your website design

You’ve just finished your site design and published it to your hosting company. It’s drop-dead gorgeous. You know this because you designed it or oversaw the development. The entire site is designed using Flash and the show itself is breathtaking. It moves, shakes, has a lot of cool features and has great audio, too. Everyone you give your domain address to say it’s beautiful.

Those are the compliments you hear, but what’s deafening is that no visitors are finding your site; Flash is pretty much invisible to search engines, especially content—the most important thing. Although your site is ‘pretty,’ visitors who stumble across it leave without buying or contacting you.

It’s amazing how many sites are designed to look good but fail miserably to monetize. Techie nerds—design masters—rarely have strong business sense. We all need computer technology engineers, but sometimes it’s best to consult with a website marketing expert before, during and after site development.

Five important, often neglected site development tips

The very first thing is choosing the domain name. Website names, like marylewisrealty.net, are generally a tough task to place in the search engines. Why?  Because people aren’t likely to search the words Mary Lewis when they’re looking for residential property to purchase or to sell. However, people are likely to search, say, ”Los Angeles homes for sale.” Your domain name should answer viewers’ questions and describe your products or services. 

Content is king! Most sites fail to offer good content. We live in a what’s in it for me world. You have to offer something that’s worthwhile in the visitor’s eyes; you only have seconds to capture their attention. Content must be up-to-date and proofread, a common mistake website managers miss.

Make sure that all links are working. Dead links will chase away viewers forever: search engines will penalize your site.

I once had a client come into my office who thought being able to clip a floppy disk on to someone’s shirt pocket was his ticket to wealth. Mine was the electric fork to go with the electric knife found in so many households. I suggested that he should first try to sell his clip-floppy disk idea to 10 people. He said that he was having trouble selling it locally. I told him that on the Internet I could show it to millions of people that won’t buy it. He soon realized that spending money on a product that no one wanted was a waste of money and time. Do research and find out if there’s a demand for your offering.

Don’t get too high-tech crazy. Don’t overuse graphics and animation on your site. Keep it clean; help each visitor stay focused on the desired outcome, a sale or contact. Think twice about sound, too. Some people surf the Web while at work and will close your site at the speed of light when it’s revealed to everyone that they’re goofing off.

Lead the viewer through the process, and don’t forget a call to action. Ask for the sale!

Search engine and site optimization is critical, which isn’t a one-time occurrence. Many site owners pay SEOs (search engine optimizers) to get them placed on the top 10 pages of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. The SEOs will achieve this task but usually with keywords or phrases that really does nothing for the site. Smart search engine optimization (SEO) is a science; it requires good content, creative thinking and making all the right moves. There are so many little mistakes in site design that will penalize your site’s ranking. Most site owners, designers and hosting companies are unaware of land mines.

I always suggest getting a SEO expert involved in your site development from the beginning of the project, which includes hiring good, professional writers and editors. When your website produces great results, it’s the best compliment your visitors can give you.

By the way, I put on deodorant today and I did feel pretty good about myself.

To contact Dave Lucht, visit www.Tech-Line.com.

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In today’s economy more of us are moving to the Internet to enhance our income or even replace lost jobs. All of us strive to achieve top search engine rankings, often failing because we don’t have time or knowledge to properly implement SEO tactics, or the money to pay a so-called professional to do it for us. However, the thing most of us don’t realize is that there are some very simple things you can do to get high search engine rankings. Below I list 3 easy steps that anyone can do to achieve high search engine ranking without having to invest lots of time or money.

The first thing you can do is optimize your meta data. If the search bots see every page has the same embedded title tag they often assume that all the pages are the same. If you do this you are shooting yourself in the foot. Give each page a unique meta description and keep it under 160 words. Also make sure you that all your picture alt-tags are effectively named. While your users don’t see these tags for images and graphics, the search engines do. And since the search sites can’t see your photographs or graphics, the alt tags are all they have to go by to determine what they are about and help you achieve a high search engine ranking. So rather than naming your image picture1.jpg, which does nothing for your SEO and doesn’t help you attain a high search engine ranking name your image with your keyword. That just might help the search engine’s automated bots rank you higher on your most important keywords.

The second thing that you need to do to get a high search engine rank is one thing we rarely put enough effort into when attempting to dominate the searches. Actually it is the most vital thing of all, and that is to have good quality content on your website. Your content should be geared towards your targeted viewers, not just for the search engine bots. To get a high search engine ranking by cramming keyword-laden, poor-quality content on your website may work in the short term, but both the search engines and the users will figure out what you have been doing. Displaying good quality content on your website with an acceptable word density is the best way to get high search engine rankings and maintain them.

The final and most often overlooked step to building a high search engine ranking is to have a sitemap, and to be sure to keep it current. There are wonderful websites that will build one for you. Just Google “Free xml sitemap” and you will find plenty. Site maps are great at getting good search engine ranking because they allow the search engine bots to crawl your page to get all of the information they need all in one location. You take the free site map that you created and put it in the same folder as your homepage. It will be named sitemap.xml. You then need to make certain you submit it to Google and Bing. And resubmit it every time you revise your website or add pages. Of course you need to setup a free Google account and use the webmaster tools.

There you go, only 3 things you will ever need to do to get a high search engine rank. Well, that’s not true but it’s a start. Good luck and keep working at it.

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The World Wide Web has become the ultimate and most convenient source of information for people all over the world, which explains why a lot of internet marketers are striving hard to earn a stable income through their online businesses.  Trends of all kinds have evolved, been adopted by hundreds of online businessmen and women, and are constantly being used to make sales and break quotas for many years.  But there is a new trend that enables internet marketers to actually expand their businesses and services even more, and that’s through offline internet marketing.  The term sounds like an oxymoron, but it is possible and has proven to be very lucrative to many internet marketers already.

Internet marketers all over the world are now learning how to making of internet marketing skills to make money offline.  They do this with the help of outsourcing services and automation in terms of advertising their businesses to offline customers.  This enables them to save time and effort on the actual work with regards to the website and at the same time can appeal personally to their clients the services and benefits they are going to get through their internet marketing skills.  For example, an internet marketer can set up ads about his or her business all over his or her area in order to get the potential customers’ attention.  They place the website of their business, contact numbers, email addresses, and wait for the calls and emails to start coming in.  They then hold meetings, rendezvous, and all kinds of get-togethers to be able to explain how the system will go, how the website will bring in the benefits and profits, and how much they are going to be spending every month.

Your clients will probably be wondering what they are going to get from the websites, which is your cue in letting them in on the possibilities that internet marketing can provide.  For instance, if the website you are building is for a restaurant, customers who are interested can easily access the official website, read through the content, and if they are interested can sign up in the mailing list to be able to get updates such as events, promos, new menus, etc.  Not only is traffic going to build up but sales will be booming through several well-written emails alone.  This scenario is internet marketing working at its best already. 

When it comes to making of internet marketing skills to make money offline, personality and communication skills are also very important.  This is so because you will be dealing with clients who more or less do not have an idea of how much they will be spending for internet marketing services, how much they are going to earn from the websites to be built, and the like.  By offering them a price that they cannot refuse and are very affordable as compared to the expenses on actual advertisements, you can easily get your clients hooked on to you like never before.  What’s more, you don’t have to be the one working day and night in creating websites and hosting them up online since there are very trusted outsourcing companies all over the world who can do that for you.  All it takes is a few hours per day monitoring the system and progress of your clients’ websites and you’ll be earning over $18,500 per month.

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You may already know about our Traffic Search Terms feature where you can access the top 5 keyphrases or keywords that were used to find your published articles on EzineArticles.com. [Premium members can access the top 30 keyphrases]

While this is one of our coolest tools, it has one downside: It can take 60-90 days after your article gets published on EzineArticles.com before it starts to produce really useful keyphrase referral data.

What if you want to leverage this keyphrase strategy right away? Watch this video to discover how!

EzineArticles is a fantastic website and a powerful tool. Check it out.
http://EzineArticles.com

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Here is a brief list of the very basic and most often neglected on-site techniques for search engine optimization. If you need assistance feel free to contact me.

David Lucht http://www.tech-line.com

•Meta Title - Perhaps the most important content on the web page, keep it to under 70 characters and make each page on your site unique.

•Meta Description - This is often what shows as your search results description. Make it keyword rich and something that makes viewers want to click to learn more. Use less than 150 characters.

•Meta Keywords - Although none of the major search engines use these anymore but I find over time they help my websites, perhaps by major engines indexing obscure smaller engines. I suggest using less than 10 words. The more you use the less value or weight each word carries.

•Heading Tags - Use these tags rather than just bolding you keyword rich headings and subheadings on each page. I suggest using 1) H1 and 2) H2 tags on each page.

•Alt Tags - Search engines can’t see graphics so assign alternative text to all of the graphics you place on your site. The engines definitely read and index this information.

•Content - Search engines want to see content. I suggest trying to use at least 445 words on each page. Try to use some keywords in the first 50 words and then spread out throughout the remaining content. Don’t use keywords so much that it destroys your writing style. Write like you are trying to help a friend.

David Lucht http://www.tech-line.com

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Here are a couple of samples. If you want to dominate the search engines, call me. go to www.tech-line.com

Charter Private Jets

Sacramento Lobster

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For the last 23 years I have owned and operated Tech-Line Computers. We have migrated over the years from being a computer and IT company to specializing in Internet services. I own a hosting company and do basic to mid-lever website design. My main passion now days, is search engine marketing. I can make most sites dominate the search engines. Here are a few of my sites. www.tech-line.com, www.HotBiz.net, www.CABizHost.com.

Call me and let’s talk. I love to help people succeed with their business marketing. 

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