Article Directory Website Design: Clean Up Your Content!

By: John McQueen

Article directories have taken the internet by storm. That is a good thing, as it allows authors to distribute their content and allows publishers to grab content for their website, but unfortunately, many article directories are offering a huge disservice to authors and publishers due to poorly designed directories. Listen up article directory owners; let’s think about some ways to serve our visitors in our article directory designing!

Style Elements

I have stumbled across many article directory websites where there are a number of mixed alignings, ten different color combinations, excessive bold and italicized fonts, and numerous style “enhancements”. While these different design elements can be good, there comes a time when, as the webmaster, we need to be okay with simplifying the visual end. When a visitor enters your directory, or website for that matter, their eyes cannot help but to expect unity and clarity. If they are presented with a jumbled, disorganized mess, they will do one of two things. They will either (1) quickly jerk the mouse to the back button or (2) continue to browse your site but grow frustrated from the chaotic presentation and then eventually leave. You obviously want to prevent both of those things from happening.

When applying style elements such as colors, size, and images, we need to make sure these things help bring the visitor in contact with the content and message of the website. There comes a time when a line is crossed between beneficial and distracting. I have visited some article directories in which images and graphics push the navigation bar down the page. You do not want to have your visitor scroll down the page to have to find where click to other portions of your site. Make it easy on your visitor to get around your directory. Keep your navigation bar towards the top of your site. If your visitor does not know how to get around your article directory they will get frustrated and leave. Bring your visitor in contact with the content!

To expound more on the use of font colors and styling, remember to maintain consistency. Choose three or four colors to create a color scheme for your article directory. Stick with this color scheme. This provides unity in your content and makes the visitors viewing experience a lot more pleasurable. Continually ask yourself the question, “Is my article directory home page easy to read? Is it organized? Is the directory inviting?”

Advertisements and Images

As the webmaster of your article directory or web content site, it is obvious and understandable that it is a must to push your ads and affiliate programs so you can generate income. However, do keep in mind while placing your ads that you want your visitor to receive your web site’s content. Your visitor wants to find valuable information. That is why they visit your website. They do not come for the ads! Understanding that, make sure your ads relate and apply to your directory’s content. It is vital that your ads do not block your website’s content. Integrate your ads so they do not intrude on your website content.

Before you start plastering your article directory with ads and “cool” styling, keep it mind that your website’s content is first and for most. Overall, people are coming for your content—they could care less if you used pastel pink or neon green! Article Source: www.niche-article-library.be

 

Brett McQueen is freelance author, web designer and programmer and the administrator for the Article Cat article directory at www.ArticleCat.com.

Expired Domains Targeted Website Traffic

By: gottapays

An average of 19,260 domain names expire every day. This number has increased tremendously since the same time last year when expired domain name figures were more like 1,200 daily. The expired domain name market is becoming increasingly popular with webmasters, who are locked in a fierce competition to stay one step ahead and get all the best domain names. The question is why do webmasters find someone else’s old domain name so interesting?

What happens a lot of the time is people register a domain name, or purchase it for a year, they develop a web site and advertise it, to get targeted traffic. This takes a lot of time, money and effort, then due to unfortunate circumstances they may forget to re-register their domain, either they have lost interest, over looked a reminder that domain renewal was due or changed their e-mail address during the year that they used to register. Then just like that the domain name is up for sale.

Because of this, the domain, or address that they have created and all targeted traffic with the domain name becomes available for purchase. Thousands of these expired domain names are available every day. There are several tricks to knowing how to find these domain names, and how to know which domain names are valuable and which are not, and, most importantly, how to get to them first.

There are many benefits for picking up an expired domain name, unlike a new domain name, the expired name already has traffic that can come from search engine promotion, directories, forums, back links and a whole host of other promotion methods. Webmasters are using this to their advantage, either selling the domains for a profit, selling a web site with traffic already entering the site, or use as valuable sub domains for their own enterprise, thus increasing traffic to their own sites.

Quite often webmasters will register with an online service that notifies them daily of pending expiry of domain names, that will soon be up for purchase. This can keep a web master that desired extra step ahead of competitors. Competition for expired domain names, especially one word, catchy .com names is fierce, as they are in high demand and easy to remember, having most likely been around for a long time. So it is not surprising that some of them can be very valuable, for instance, a domain name could sell for $1M, yet it only costs $10 to re-register.

Benefits for acquiring an expired domain name are numerous, depending on what you want to do with it. For a small sum of around $10-$15 you have the potential of increasing traffic to your web site instantly, saving you a considerable amount of time, money and bother. It could be the cheapest targeted web site traffic around.

Article Source: www.niche-article-library.be

 

Author, Mike Freije, contributes articles on Internet Marketing for www.GlobalNewsArticles.com and www.freeinfoarticles.com . For more information on Expired Domains, visit : www.yourexpireddomains.com

Help! My Blog is Boring!

By: John McQueen

So you have this really great idea to start a blog on a particular niche. And perhaps, maybe you even want to make some revenue off of
AdSense, Clicksor, or other contextual advertising. Super. You’ve wrote your heart out and posted some blog content. Great! No problems
there. But what do you do to keep the content fresh and insightful? Are you feeling that the content you offer on your blog just
“lacks”? Is your blog boring? Maybe you can’t even pinpoint what exactly is “lacking”, but you just feel it. Possibly, you just do not
have the time to put forth to writing 1000 word articles every couple days. If this is you, it is time you look into using other
people’s articles!

“WHAT?” you say.

No, I am not suggesting you rip or copy others articles. However, I am suggesting that you utilize websites that offer free web content
on your particular niche. There are many free web content sites or ‘article directories’ that offer free articles for you to use on
your blog or website. You are able to use these articles totally free without a problem. The only thing you are required is to give
credit to the author who wrote the article. Fair enough?

Now you ask, “Why would I want to use someone else’s articles? How lame is that?!”

It’s actually not lame at all. Think about it. There are thousands of other people offering new, unique insight on exactly what you are
writing about. You will find that people offer a different point of view or perspective on the particular subject. A different
perspective or a new idea can be very refreshing for your blog. To even go further, find those articles that offer new thoughts and
respond to the author’s thoughts.

Consider the benefits of using free content articles for your blog or website:

• When you use other quality articles, you are offering your visitor with useful content, and in effect, your visitor comes back
  for more.
• Using free web content will allow you to keep your blog fresh and updated on a daily basis with valuable
  information.
• Other people\’s articles can inspire new thoughts and ideas for your blog.

How do you find quality free web content for your blog? When you find an article that you would like to put on your website, make sure
you are permitted to actually use it. You can usually find that information right on the article page or the website’s terms of
service. When you are positive that you can use the article, read it over to make sure it is even applicable to your website. Do run it
through a spell check to make sure that level of quality is portrayed in the article. If there are a bunch of errors, do not change the
errors because that would violate the terms for the article. Instead, move on to finding another article.

So do some searching and reading. Find that interesting web content and post that interesting web content for your readers! Delight
your readers with something interesting and exciting!

Article Source: www.niche-article-library.be

 

Brett McQueen is freelance author, web designer and programmer, and the administrator for the Article Cat Article Directory and Catalog. You can begin your search for quality free web content articles at ArticleCat.com.

SEO – General Guidelines

By: Andreas Obermueller SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimizing and refers to a set of good practices that teach you how to improve your website so that it would be easily tracked, indexed and ranked by search engines. Getting your site indexed by Google and other major search engines will help you attract visitors and increase traffic.

SEO is an exciting and ongoing process that involves not only an initial optimized website, but also permanent maintenance and evaluating search results on a regular basis. With the ever-changing Internet technology, SEO experts sometimes have contrasting opinions on what makes a good website. However, there are some general guidelines most of them agree on.

Design & Content

• You should build your web pages for human beings and not for search engines. A clean design and a strong content will ultimately drive search engine spiders to your site.
• Make a clear hierarchy and provide text links to each page.
• Don’t put to many links on a single page (maximum 100).
• You should include a site map to help users navigate easily through your website.
• Make sure you have clear TITLE tags, no HTML errors and all the links work.
• You should use text instead of images to display important elements, as search engine crawlers may not recognize a text inside an image.
• While keeping your content useful and clear, do use keywords that you know users would type to get to your page.
Technical Issues
• Most search engine crawlers see your website similar to the way a text browser sees it. Consequently, you should use a text browser, such as Lynx, to check your website. If you can’t see the whole page because of JavaScript, session IDs, DHTML or Flash features, search engine spiders will probably have trouble with crawling your website.
• Check with your web host to see if the server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This header tells Google whether the website content has changed since its last visit.
• While it is advised session IDs to track visitors’ path through the website, you shouldn’t do this for search bots.
• The robots.txt file on your web server tells spiders which directories can be crawled and which cannot. Make sure it’s updated and it doesn’t somehow block search engine crawlers.

Website Promotion

• After you’ve built your website and put it online, try to get high PageRank sites link to it.
• Submit your website to major search engines (Google, Yahoo/Altavista, MSN) to get it indexed, along with a site map that will tell them the site structure.
• Submit your website to relevant directories, such as Yahoo and Open Directory Project.
• Get involved in community based websites, blogs and forums and build a strong reputation.

Whether you choose to implement these techniques yourself or go to a SEO expert, no one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google and other search engines. Search engines change their crawling algorithms often and competitor websites appear all the time. However, following these basic SEO guidelines will improve your chances of increasing your website traffic and is a better practice than looking for a way to cheat on search engines in order to get your pages indexed.

Copyright © 2006 Andreas ObermuellerArticle Source: http://www.niche-article-library.be

 

About the Author: Andreas Obermueller is webmaster of Hit4Biz.com – Marketing Related Information and recommends Marble Host as reliable Web Host

How to Get a Guaranteed Top Position in the Pay Per Click Search Engines – For Free

By: Chris Towland

Getting a top position in a Pay per Click Search Engine can often be a very costly affair. For many popular search terms, the cost for every single click can often be in excess of $1, $5 or even above $10. Figures that are out of reach for many ordinary Internet marketers.

Similarly, Google’s recent changes have meant that many marketers who have been happily getting clicks through to their sites for less than 5c or 10c are now being forced to either increase their minimum bids to $5 (or even more) or simply lose their Adwords ads. For many, this has meant that the major source of visitors to their website has disappeared, literally overnight!

However, although the outlook may be increasingly bleak for low cost, high quality PPC traffic, a ‘new kid on the block’ in the pay per click search engine world is already starting to shake up the market and really place the power back in the hands of the internet marketer.

The Search Engine I’m talking about is already seeing enormous traffic numbers but very surprisingly …….. is giving Internet marketers the chance to grab the very top spot for their choice of keyword at absolutely no cost ….. and keep it for good!

That means that your website will always show at number one in their listings for your choice of keyword. No-one can ever knock you off top spot by out-bidding you.

The downside of course, is that there can only be one free top spot for each keyword, and once your keyword has gone ……. it’s gone. The good news for us at the moment however, is that although this search engine is receiving massive traffic (it’s Alexa ranking is already below 25,500) it has not yet been spotted by most other Internet marketers.

And there’s more good news! Usually, when you open a new pay per click account you need to hit your credit card to add some funds to get you started. This PPC search engine however, is totally free to join and immediately gives you $50 in free PPC cash. What’s more, when you join you are given your own search portal and every search you do on your own portal gives you extra PPC $’s (you could use your portal as your browsers homepage for example and simply do your own searching from there) or you could add your search portal to your website so that every search anyone makes gives you additional dollars.

There’s a lot more I could tell you about this new search engine and how it is perfect for you and me as Internet marketers, but while you’re reading this someone else could be grabbing your perfect top keyword from right under your nose.

Therefore, I’d suggest that if you’re interested in getting your hands on a top spot for free, you take a look at the search engine straight away by following the link below. Then, to reserve your keyword and get your $50 in free PPC cash, simply click the link at the bottom of the page.

Here is the link you need: http://www.searchbigdaddy.com/look

I hope you’re in time to get hold of your perfect keyword so that you can always appear at position number one and get tons of targeted traffic month after month.

Article Source: http://www.niche-article-library.be

 

Chris Towland www.no-cost-software.com/
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