Author Websites 101: Make It Visible With SEO

"If you build it, they will come."

Building a website and making it work for you is not the Field of Dreams. If you want to succeed with a website, people have to be able to find you. This is done in several ways, but most importantly through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

To understand SEO, you first have to understand how people find things on the Internet. This should be a no-brainer to anyone who has surfed the web before. Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Bing (the Big Three) are the single most important source of new visitors for your website. Other search engines include Ask.com, Lycos, Netscape and Earthlink, to name a few.

The next step is for a user to type some type of search term into the search box on one of these engines. For example, if I am looking for an author website, I simply type in the author's name. This is great if you are a well-known writer, but what about if you are not? The answer is that it gets a bit harder to find you.

Let's take another example. If I am looking for a great new horror novel, as a viewer, I'm likely to get more complex with my search term. Some choices I might make include:

Horror books about vampiresHorror novelsNew horror novelsHorror writersHorror novels January 2012

You can see very quickly how complex it can get trying to second guess your audience on how they might search for you. The first step in your process as a writer or author building a website is to sit down and come up with various terms people might type into that search box to find someone like you.

Now we come to the whole idea of "optimization." There are billions of website pages. You are one website in a billion. How exactly do search engines find every website that is relevant to the search terms used? The short answer is that they use spiders or robots that crawl through the millions of sites and gather information about the websites and store it in an index for later retrieval.

The next step is more complicated - returning results to the user looking for the information and returning the results in a ranked order. For this, the major search engines use highly secret algorithms that analyze multiple factors about a website. These algorithms are not publicized and marketing specialists can only speculate about what they include and how certain factors are weighted. The rest of this article will be devoted to the two factors we know rank heavily in the formula: keywords and links.

Going back to our example, our visitor is looking for a horror writer with a good book to read. We've listed several potential search terms the visitor might use to find what he or she wants. In order for search engines to find you, your website must have the same keywords as the user's search terms. In other words, your website should contain the words horror, writer, novelist, horror novel, etc.

However, optimizing your website is about gaining the most visitors - it's about gaining the most visitors that are a) likely to be interested in what you do, and b) likely to buy what you have to sell or read the information you have to offer. That means it's important not to try to cater to every single potential buyer in the world. You want to target your audience and decide who is your most likely buyer.

If you are a horror writer, it shouldn't be difficult to come up with a likely set of solid keywords to build your website around. If you are a multi-genre writer or offer an overwhelming number of copywriting, ghostwriting or editorial services, it might be more difficult to target your audience and find the right search terms to optimize your site.

The next question is where exactly do these key words need to be and how many do you need. There are several important areas to target: the url of your website, page titles, article titles/headings, and page contents. For a horror writer, johnsmith-horrorwriter.com might be an excellent choice in domain names. This url choice incorporates both the author's name and what he does. John should also have a sales or portfolio page entitled "Horror Novels" on his site. John could even share some of his short horror pieces on a blog page entitled "Horror Stories."

Are you starting to see how this works? Placing key words in key places tells search engines you are a serious horror writer and are likely to match the needs of the user looking for a good horror novel. The tricky part now is placing key words in the content. In the old days, copywriters simply loaded the content chock full of relevant key words in order to get better results. Search engines, however, quickly caught on to this tactic. Now we talk about 'keyword density' in the marketing business. This is the ratio of key words to total words in the content. If you 'stuff' your content full of key words, search engines will penalize you for it. Most experts now agree that 1 to 3 percent keyword density is optimal.

Finally, we come to the subject of links. There are two types of links to consider: outbound links and inbound links. While outbound links are considered the most important of the two, let's look at the latter first.

Web crawlers (spiders) follow all the links on your page (unless you tell them not to). If the link leads to another site with keywords relevant to your own, you score some points that rank you higher in search engine results. The key, however, is that your links are truly relevant. In the past, black hat marketers slapped random links on their sites that had little or nothing to do with what they were offering or who they were. Again, search engines caught on to this and the practice of link farming and started penalizing sites that did this, and even banned them altogether. You might want to consider linking to writers associations and professional groups to which you belong. For a copywriter, consider linking to well-trafficked sites like Grammar Girl, a favorite online dictionary or other tools you use yourself on the Internet.

Inbound links, experts agree, are even more important. The more sites out there pointing to your site, the higher your ranking. Experts feel this is a huge factor in website ranking algorithms. Just like with outbound links, relevancy matters. If you have a website selling horror books, it may not help much that your mom's blog about celebrity stars has a link to your site. The more relevant the website linking to yours, the better you will perform.

Getting backlinks is not always easy. You can do some of this yourself. Links from social media sites, guest posts on blogs, ezines and even other sites you own that are relevant all help. Your association profile pages should always link back to your website.

Another good practice is reciprocal linking. This means that you agree to link to another person's page if he or she provides a link to yours. As a horror writer, you could like with another horror writer and you both win. If you own a copywriting service, think about linking with a complementary service or someone who provides copywriting in areas different than yours.

While there is a lot more to learn and discuss about SEO, these are the absolute essentials you need to know before you start building the copy you need to fill out your website. If you start with a plan and list of solid keywords, you will find it easier to build a successful website that works for you.

Darcie Carsner Torres is a professional writer and editor with over 20 years of experience. She provides editing and critiquing services through CanAm Author Services, http://www.canamauthorservices.com/, and editing and ghostwriting services through Pen & Pestle, http://www.penandpestle.com/. Her mission is to help budding authors improve their writing and get published.

View the original article here

Author Websites 101: Building the Website

Authors and writers are creative and adventurous by nature. When it comes to building a website, however, it's usually a love it or hate it experience. While there are numerous free programs and tools available for the inexperienced, they aren't always as easy as they seem. You may decide halfway through to throw in the towel and hire a professional. Whichever way you choose, here are a few tips that will help you get through the process.

DIY Website Building

It never hurts to try doing it yourself. If you want to have the best experience at trying this yourself, I suggest you use a free content management system such as Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal. Just to give you an idea of the power of these types of platforms, Wikipedia states:

"WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's 'top 1 million' websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites. WordPress is currently the most popular CMS in use on the Internet."

All three of these programs are built around PHP and styled using CSS. CSS is really like a master control panel that styles all of your similar content elements uniformly throughout the site, such as colors, fonts and other elements. If you learn the basics of CSS, you can go far in customizing how your site looks and won't have to simply accept the way a website template comes out of the box, so to speak. You don't need to be able to create it; you just need to be able to know how to alter it.

You will also find that your CMS comes with access to a variety of different applications you can use on your site or in your sidebars. There are literally hundreds to choose from. You can plug in slideshows, analytical tools, RSS feeds, photo galleries, contact forms, social media buttons, events managers and shopping carts, just to name a few of the possibilities. It can be a bit overwhelming, to say the least.

Luckily, authors and writers are pretty low maintenance and don't need a lot of technically complex bells and whistles, which is why CMS makes sense. However, the most important thing for you to consider (or anyone for that matter) is the need to build an attractive website that works the way you and your audience need it to.

Designing your own website can be frustrating and a bit difficult if you lack the patience for such things. This can lead you to design a 'bad' website. Here you run the risk of alienating your readers or customers by appearing amateurish, sloppy or unprofessional. If people hesitate or stutter when you ask them what they think, it might be time to contact a professional.

Professional Web Design

Professional web designers come in a lot of different sizes. You can spend anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars to have a website designed to meet your needs and desires. The important thing is to have an idea what you want when speaking to a designer. Go out and research the websites of other writers and authors to get an idea of what they are doing. The basic elements you need to consider include:

Layout (are there sidebars and if so, where and how many?)ColorsUse of media such as photos, sliders, galleries, video and audioApplications used on the site

Be advised that not all designers will include (good) copywriting in the project scope. Make sure you are clear on who is expected to create it. If it is your designer, be sure he or she is aligned with or employs a reputable copywriter with knowledge of the peculiarities of web copy and marketing. If it is up to you, you should read through the series articles on copywriting and SEO for author websites, or hire a copywriter to work with your designer.

Make sure you are clear on all the charges up front. Make sure you understand what types of things will cost extra. Many designers will tack on a surcharge for changes made after a certain stage in the design. It's in your interest to know when that cut-off occurs. Additionally, get an idea of what payments are due and when. It is standard practice for designers to charge a non-refundable retainer. After that, designers differ. Some require the balance on completion and others require payments after certain stages have been completed.

You should also obtain an expected completion date. From both a designer side and a client side, I'm well aware of Murphy's Law: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. The important thing is your designer's policy for delay. If delays are attributable to you, it may mean an extra charge or that payment comes due before the project is finished. Designers may even terminate the contract if client delays are substantial and still expect payment. While this may sound unfair, I've dealt with plenty of clients who prolong a one-month project into six or seven months, which often conflicts with other projects, so I know designers implement these procedures to protect their other clients and themselves.

Finally, the old adage applies: Get everything in writing. It is in everyone's interest to know what the project includes and doesn't, what procedure is available if the client isn't happy, the terms of billing and payments, and when things are due.

Darcie Carsner Torres is a professional writer and editor with over 20 years of experience. She provides editing and critiquing services through CanAm Author Services, http://www.canamauthorservices.com/, and editing and ghostwriting services through Pen & Pestle, http://www.penandpestle.com/. Her mission is to help budding authors improve their writing and get published.

View the original article here

Author Websites 101: Domain Names and Hosting

Most authors I know don't have a lot of experience with building a website. If you don't have a website but are considering one, this article series is a good place to start. This article is devoted to explaining domain name selection and the web hosting process.

Every author needs a website for marketing purposes. Some authors choose to create a website for each book they write as well. If you choose your hosting company well, you can host unlimited domains and websites for just one monthly or yearly charge.

The first step is to choose your domain name. Fiction authors usually use their own name for their domain name, e.g., joeblow.com. However, if you have a very common name, such as John Smith, or were named after an already famous person, you may have some trouble. The place to start for choosing domain names is the WhoIs website. Here, you can enter a domain name to find out if it's already taken or not, and receive suggestions on alternate possibilities if your desired domain name is taken. You also have the option to backorder or ask to purchase the domain name from the current owner. There are companies out there that exist solely to buy up attractive domain names and sell them at a much higher cost to the public.

If you are an article author, copywriter or any other form of writer, domain name choices may be more difficult. Here, we want to stop and talk about SEO for a moment. One of the keys to good search engine optimization is to basically have your keyword in several key places - one of which is your domain name. If you are a novel author, your name (and perhaps that you are an author) is the key consideration. If, however, you provide other types of writing or writing services, things may get difficult. You may opt for your business name - people could look for you that way. But what about people who don't know you or your writing services exist?

One of the problems you may encounter is that you end up with domain names that are a mile long. While this doesn't matter from a SEO perspective, people don't like super long domain names to type into their search bar. Attractiveness of your domain name is a factor in domain selection as well. Some other key word considerations include your location, superlatives (e.g., the "best" articlewriter.com) and what kind of writing you do (e.g., businesswriter.com).

Once you have your domain name picked out, you are ready to purchase it and your hosting company. To make things easy on you, purchase your domain name through your hosting company. It may cost less on the surface, but many hosting companies give you one free domain name with a hosting package. However, it won't hurt anything if you want to secure the domain name through WhoIs before you are ready to host and build your site.

There are really two ways to go when it comes to web host companies: large and inclusive or small and specialized. I know many authors who prefer the specialized attention they get from local providers. Small companies are also less tempting for hacking attempts. However, local companies often don't have 24/7 service or the capacity of larger providers. What you need to look for in a hosting company includes:

Unlimited domain hostingUnlimited bandwidth usage and storage spaceUnlimited MySQL databases24/7 customer support

Those are the essentials; everything else is a perk or an option we will discuss in a separate article.

Costs are generally uniform throughout the industry. However, if you opt to have a professional design company create a custom website, beware of agreeing to host your site with them. I have run into a relatively large number of these companies that design the site, host the site for an exorbitant fee and/or monthly management charges, and then make transferring the site elsewhere extremely difficult. In fact, we have had to threaten some with legal action to get them to release the sites and/or provide the website files. These black hat companies tend to be less than helpful in giving you direction in how to make the transfer. They may also lock you into their hosting by using "proprietary" designs and management systems that aren't transferrable outside their company and which will cost you hundreds or thousands to reproduce.

While most designers and design companies are reputable, service-oriented entities, it may be in your interest to use separate hosting in order to protect yourself.

The next article in this series will address all of the add-on services available to you when purchasing your hosting package. I will discuss what they are, what they do and which authors or writers might need them.

Darcie Carsner Torres is a professional writer and editor with over 20 years of experience. She provides editing and critiquing services through CanAm Author Services, http://www.canamauthorservices.com/, and editing and ghostwriting services through Pen & Pestle, http://www.penandpestle.com/. Her mission is to help budding authors improve their writing and get published.

View the original article here

SEO And PPC Work Well In Promoting Corporate Websites

The effective promotion of corporate websites can be done efficiently by SEO Companies Los Angeles. While search engine optimization is a tested method, pay for click advertising can also be relied upon to provide instantaneous traffic to a certain website. The first step is to put up the account and results are obtained instantly. Experts say that the key is to outbid competitors. By doing this, you can almost be sure to secure a top position presuming that a good advertisement copy is on hand and the landing page is appropriate.

Unlike pay for click advertising, you are not assured of immediate results with regular search engines. It requires a lot of patience and the help of SEO Companies Los Angeles to attain a prominent position in search engines. It may even take several months to get listed so the next course of action is to use pay for click advertising. Traffic produced by this process is more focused compared with organic results since web experts can control the use of keywords and keyword phrases.

This technique affords you more control and elasticity mainly because you can determine total spend for increased traffic. Bids can even be placed on marketing objectives and budget allocation. With the use of pay for click advertising, you can update the rankings of your site right away. For some internet marketers, PPC is a big risk for neophytes in the business because some promotion methods require minimal fees. There were testimonials from those who lost money before earning their initial revenues. Nonetheless, pay for click advertising is still advantageous since it is easily accessible by ordinary people.

In fairness to SEO, the results are also gratifying in the long-term. With the help of SEO Companies Los Angeles, search engines provide the system and techniques that will ultimately lead to catching the attention of new prospects, capitalizing on the value of clients and actually converting leads into actual sales. What is important is to get the attention of the public and communicate to them the right message of internet marketing campaigns.

All in all, the aspects of website promotion are vital due to the increasing number of internet users globally. While design is one of the key factors, a great deal of planning is required regarding the proper use of web tools, organic listings which serve as the focal point of search results and the types of search engines that are influenced by search engine optimization. There are strategies that professionals employ in optimizing websites and SEO Companies Los Angeles are more than willing to offer their services to online corporate entities. With proven strategies in search engine optimization and web marketing, one can build the foundation of an online enterprise and define in broad terms the requirements to guarantee the success of the business.

Whatever strategy will be used, whether it is search engine optimization or pay for click advertising, the bottom line is the outcome of the campaign and cost-savings on the part of the proprietor.

View the original article here

Content Ideas for Real Estate Websites

Content has been termed as the most important method as well as element of getting organic traffic to your real estate website or blog. But there is one question that is shot off immediately after this suggestion. What to write about that would signify as 'captivating content' for a real estate website. The ideas on the same are discussed below.

We are going to list several content creation ideas to draw traffic to your realty website. Choose the one which you think is the most feasible for you as well as your team.

1. Write about the markets. In fact do a weekly market update by interpreting data from your MLS and other observations you might have made from the general buyer mood. You can take a 5 minute video of the same too, and deliver an update about how the real estate market is behaving locally.

2. Write or post daily transaction report - You can do this on a weekly basis if you are too busy to do this every day. The task is simple enough; all you have to do is cut and paste the reported transactions from your MLS. This is a great way of getting long tail organic traffic on to your site. When you post, make sure to keep the title keyword friendly.

3. Support local businesses - This one is like you scratch my back and I will scratch yours. You can write about the local cafes/restaurants/shops in the area. This will also attract buyers as they would want to know what sort of lifestyle is available in the neighborhood. You can do a restaurant review every week, talk about your dish and even put up a picture of the dish/restaurant. You can give people a video of the shopping areas, or of other businesses that offer interesting services/products. In return you can ask the other business patrons to refer you to buyers that come across. Nothing works as well on a local level as word of mouth.

5. Write on less competitive keywords that provide important information to buyers. This means that if you write about nanny services in the area, or provide detailed information on local dog parks, people looking for them would reach them quickly. A non-competitive keyword can be quite beneficial some times

6. Do a sort of photo quiz for people. Pictures can be really appealing for most visitors. You can click a picture of you anywhere in the neighborhood and ask people to identify the place. This can come handy for your mailing list promotion too. Remember to offer an e-mail signup for newer visitors to receive your latest pictures.

7. Give a weekly neighborhood news update - Distribute the areas among your team, and have them work as news reporters for a while. Tell them to get some exciting local news. Publish it and see the traffic go up. Nothing makes a neighborhood more interesting than gossip. If you get good traffic, be sure that many first time visitors will come back for more news.

Apart from these content ideas, you can go in for the human touch by interviewing prominent residents of the area. Sometimes, their names can work for you as keywords. Your interview must be about their history in the town and what they like about it.

Some of these ideas and more are followed by the best realtor web sites too. Try it and see the difference.

The writer is associated with Intagent, the leading creators of realty website with great design and utility.

View the original article here

FEW TIPS FOR CREATING A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITES

FEW TIPS FOR CREATING A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITES:

1) Identify proper objectives for a website:
First of all you have to understand what you are aiming for with your website and also you have to be more specific that what you want when you brief your web developer.

2) Know your company brand:

Your business identity is one of your most incredible and valuable assets. It is more needed for your business as your product itself. Make ensure that your website properly replicates this and describes the right business image.

3) Learn from your surviving website:

In case of restoring an old website, safe guard your new one disables the problems or the weaknesses of the old one. Tolerate in mind what has controlled well with your preceding website and to study how it can be developed more.

4) Apply methods to measure achievement:

Consider methods by which you can display and extent how would your new websites is acting. Google webmaster tools can offer you with complete reports about any of your indexed website folios.

5) Be aware of your target product:

Found who is going to use your website. Forinstance, will they be folks existing in a specific zone, will they be small businesses or will they be users who will want specific features?

6) Drive your Unique Selling Point(s):

Learn what makes you dissimilar to your challengers and use your innovative website to stimulate your unique selling points (USPs). Make sure that the content you presented on your website communicates these evidently and successfully.

7) Research your rivalry:

Find out about your challengers, their websites and their features. Design new and inimitable ways in which you can do professional online better than our competitors.

8) Found who will manage it:

To fulfill consumer and search engine desires, your website must be frequently updated. Out dated rubbish content can be very harmful. Even before your fresh website is made, as certain who will look after it.

9) Have a marketing plan:

Even the finest website in the domain is inadequate if no one can find it! Examine the greatest actual ways to promote your website so that it can be found by its target audience.

10) Hang on in there!:

A website takes period to progress and reach maximum position with search engines. Itfrequentlyinvolves lots of probationary and error but is patient becauseperseverance will pay off in the end.

View the original article here

IP Address Search For Personal Websites

AppId is over the quota

Creating a website can be as fast as five to ten minutes. Working on details can be very tedious. However, making the website simple can be as short as a couple of minutes. Wasting time on building internet sites can be fun as well. Making it truly awesome can create more visitors to log on to it every now and then. Friends will appreciate your effort in making such artistic creation. Personal websites can be accessed by those whom you personally know. Or else, it may be accessed depending on the location of your website. This is dependent upon the web hosting service provider used or else the type of IP Address and domain. Whichever reasons that is considered it serves the same purpose.

Personal websites are quite dangerous. On the website, relevant information you have about you are contained on it. Images of you and your loved ones can be accessed too. Different blogs may be read by millions of people who have access to the internet. For this reason, security about your individuality can be known.

The danger in owning a personal website can be that various people can pretend to be you. This is especially true with celebrities, actors, models, politicians and other known personalities. There are great advantages we can get in acquiring such program in protection to our location and identity. This will preserve as a sort of protection to our safety and privacy. We deserve such respect and information of privacy. How much more of an individual who know nothing about internet protection?

Many take advantage of the internet. This is also true with many IP address abusers. They tend to get IP Addresses of certain website owners. If this is the case, you must employ IP Address Search for your own protection. You may locate the abuser and report to local police, if the hacker is only located on the same place. However, with more advanced IP Address Search, it could give specific details such as continent, country, state and city. Then, you can report the abuser to the web hosting company or else to the authorities so as to trace the scammer.

Email Checker device may also be employed. This is for those hate mails you receive. Having a personal website can create many people to send mails that may threaten you. Give yourself protection from the anonymous haters by getting their info through Email Checker devices.

For further details on IP Address and Email Checker please visit our website.

View the original article here

WordPress for High Load Websites?

AppId is over the quota

Today we will talk about high load websites: especially about high load start-up planning with WordPress CMS (Content Management System). Questions that I plan to cover in this article are the following:

Can WordPress be used for high load websites or not?What are pros and cons for choosing WordPress?What are the potential problems that I will likely face when my traffic hit the ceiling?

Can WordPress be used for high load websites or not?

Currently WordPress is the most popular free content management system available on the Internet. As builtwith.com states there are 4,488,777 websites using WordPress. 317,253 websites are within the most visited sites on the Internet.

If you look at the statistics carefully you will find that business and entertainment websites have the biggest share. This means that there are lots of successful websites running on WordPress and for sure huge part of them have high traffic and high load.

Most amazing example for me is CNN Political Ticker. But there are more.

So the answer to the first question is pretty clear. Yes, WordPress can be used for building high load websites!

What are pros and cons for choosing WordPress?
...advantages and bottlenecks of this decision

Pros. It's free! It's easy customizable, and there are armies of freelance WordPress programmers that will help you in customizing or adding a new feature to your website.

It has very big community that performs bug tracking and periodically updates the core of WordPress, which is again free and you can update your website core free of charge.

There are plenty of free and non-free plug-ins written for WordPress. The most important plug-in for non-English websites I assume is a multilingual plug-in. I've personally faced this problem many times with other CMS systems. Currently none of the free CMS systems have good and stable multilingual support except for WordPress. Plug-in is called WPML. I personally bought this plug-in for two of my clients that asked for a multilingual website.

To say the truth, this was the only determining factor, for me to choose WordPress for these websites. Because I wanted something lite and stable. So that I can setup this kind of website in couple of days. For a small, non demanding website this is really important.

Cons: WordPress is open source CMS, which means that every one can view PHP codes of the system. From time to time people find bugs in the system and publish these bugs in public forums and bug-tracks. Later WordPress team fixes the bug and releases update that will fix it. And if for some reason you have missed a critical update your website becomes vulnerable to attacks.

So, you or your webmaster should always follow bug-track and make updates on time to keep your website up-to date and secure. As I mentioned updates are free. But! Not all updates can be installed without additional headache and pain. Some updates need to be planned thoroughly and tested in a testing environment. Some plug-ins can brake because of the update of the WordPress core. Some updates could not be applied automatically and you need a smart guy to hack the code and make manual update and big fix.

All the other cons I will list under the second section: potential problems.

What are the potential problems that I will likely face when my traffic hit the ceiling?

First: Default WordPress setup is not optimized for high load. There are several reasons for this. By default nobody knows what plug-ins you are going to have in your website. This means you should manually perform optimizations tasks like combining CSS, JavaScript files, serving zipped content with caching of static objects.

Second: Nobody knows how many different blocks of content you want to use in your website. Which means that may be you need three and sometimes four different sizes of the same photo to display in different blocks. This means that you should either have the same photo scaled and distorted for different blocks or you should upload the same photo with three, four different sizes. or... you gonna hack the core of WordPress and make this scaling process pragmatically. So in either case you have to do a lot of task to achieve this.

Third: Nobody guarantees that your WordPress will still serve pages when your traffic hits 200 or 300 visits per second, even if you have bought a dedicated server. WordPress core needs a serious optimization tasks to be performed in order to be abel to survive under high load.

Conclusion

I don't want to scare you. You can go for WordPress, but just remember to hire a good consultant that will understand your future needs and can define the action plan or a change list that needs to be implemented on your website to ensure that at least in nearest future you will not have performance problems.

Read about optimisation in general. And if you have more specific questions, just ask me in comments. Thank you for your attention.

Article is written by website development expert Edgar Marukyan, who runs newly created blog "Smart Website Tips" about website performance, optimization and social media integration.
More articles for website owners can be found in http://smartwebsitetips.com/

View the original article here