Many people have websites (for their businesses as well as for personal use) and many people have blogs. The issue is whether people truly understand the difference between a website and a blog. They certainly are not the same thing.

The following explains the basic differences between a blog and a website:

Blog

• Content is regularly updated.
• Not formal.
• Interactive.
• Informative and educational.
• Interactivity about industry/customer issues.
• Some people have a blog.

Website

• Content is static.
• Formal/professional.
• Interactivity does not exist. There is only one-way communication.
• Transactional.
• Communication about products and/or services.
• Almost everyone has a website. In fact, it is almost a requirement in business today.

A good way to think about a website is in terms of it being a virtual store that sells products and/or services. A website is the perfect forum to self-promote and advertise. Promotion and buying and selling are exactly what people expect when they visit a website. When they are at the point of making a purchase of some kind, they go to a website that will satisfy their needs.

They can either purchase something online directly from your website or they can use your website to find out exactly where your bricks and mortar store is located so that they can come and purchase products and/or services from you in person. Once a customer has bought something from you, there is a very high likelihood that they will not return to your store again.

It is also basically impossible to build relationships with your potential customers and existing customers on your website because the website is static. Once a person has purchased something from you, there is no potential for interactivity so the relationship will never have a chance to develop and grow.

Blog

A blog; however, is constantly supplying potential customers and existing customers with interesting and useful content and the blog enables them to interact with the blogger and the discussions that they have together can be potentially unending. Not only can you and your customers have discussions but they can also ask questions that you can answer.

Also, a blog provides a dimension to the content that you can’t get from your website content. Through your consistent and regular blog content, you will eventually be regarded as a subject matter expert in your niche and people will turn to you for answers. This will promote more and more discussions.

What is really being done in this case is that relationships are being developed and strengthened. Some of the people with whom you interact on your blog will never become your customers. That is perfectly acceptable. They can interact with you as much as they like and do not have to worry about any pressure to buy anything. A very important fact is that the people with whom you interact are getting to know you as a person, which includes your level of integrity, your passion for what you are doing and offering and your knowledge, knowledge that you impart to them.

Blogs have a lot of useful features that are very helpful in promoting interactivity. Blogs enable visitors to subscribe to them so they can receive updates on a very regular basis. They will always be informed when new content is added or there has been some update to the social media profiles of the people with whom they interact.

In order to really be effective, blogs should have new postings at least once or twice a week. Fresh, original content is very important. The content is exactly what attracts and retains people and many of those people will eventually become customers.

The true purpose of a blog is to provide helpful, valuable, informative and interesting content that helps other people and that they find interesting. A blog’s purpose is definitely not to advertise or to do a hard sell on anyone. If you try to use your blog in that way, you will be very disappointed with the results. You will not be able to build relationships with anyone and you most likely won’t sell very much. People don’t buy from people whom they don’t trust. The only way that they will trust you is if they get to know you.

All in one

One approach that has proven very effective is building your website with blog software, such as WordPress. Blog software has the capability of providing you with both static web pages (pages) and blog pages (posts). Since both are necessary for the success of your online exposure, this allows you to design a web presence that contains a traditional website and a blog using one tool. Among the other benefits are:

• One homogenous look and feel.
• Ease of optimization for SEO.
• Sharing of add-on plugins between the pages and posts.
• Ease and speed of designing and developing the web presence.
• Ease of maintenance and updating of content since the entire web infrastructure is based on a content management system (CMS).

Conclusion

Blogs and websites work in very different ways, serve very different purposes and produce different short-term results. However, they are both necessary to increase your online exposure and to strengthen your online business reputation. It is important to have both as part of your online presence. They function well together and undeniably, you will see positive results over the long term if they are a part of your business online.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You have heard the term “bounce rate.” It is the percentage that represents how many visitors leave your website directly from the page on which they entered the website. A high bounce rate usually means a low conversion rate.

There are several reasons why you might be experiencing a high bounce rate, such as

• It takes too much time to load your web page
• Your landing page is too complicated to navigate. It is not user friendly
• The wrong sorts of visitors are being drawn to your website

With that said, there are several ways in which you can lower your bounce rate significantly, which will be good for your business.

Website and layout design

Your website design is one of the most important factors when it comes to bounce rate. Your website should have colors that are pleasing to the eye and you should try to avoid graphics that “pop out” in the middle of the page because those are very distracting. Your website content should be arranged in a manner that is logical and there should not be an over-abundance of words. You absolutely should have your website designed by a professional. Also, you need to make sure that the HTML of your website is valid so that similar results show up in all of the search engines.

Strong headline

Of course, the headline is the first thing that people are going to read when they land on your website. If the headline doesn’t entice the visitors, it will be all over. Your headline must communicate what the visitor will gain from visiting your website (What’s In It For Me [WIIFM]). In other words, the visitor needs to know that you have the solution to his or her problem.

Well-written text

You need to make sure that your title, headers and meta-tags of each of your web pages are relevant to the rest of the content. You might want to have an abstract in the first paragraph of your text or try to answer questions in your opening paragraph that your readers have asked. Optimizing your content is, of course, extremely important so that the search engines will give you high rankings.

Friendly language

The language in which your content is written should be friendly and human. You should never have content that sounds like you are a corporation instead of a person, no matter which business you are in. Short sentences are definitely recommended. You must speak to your target audience in their language.

The size of your web pages

It is very important to make sure that the sizes of your graphics are appropriate. You also need to make sure that the text/HTML code ratio is as low as possible. Try to keep the loading time of the pages as short as possible. This is important because the users will be more inclined to visit your website again and again if it is easy and quick for them.

Easy navigation

Your website must have a menu that is easy for users to navigate. When people visit a website, everything has to be simple for them. If possible, your website menu should not be on the bottom of the screen. You should have the content arranged in categories and keep important pages a click away and no more, if you can. Another sensible thing to do is to suggest relevant products and/or services on your web pages and to put links in logical and strategic places so that they can benefit your visitors.

Optimize your website for the best keywords and key phrases

When considering search engine optimization (SEO), always remember to optimize your web pages for the most relevant keywords. You should have 1 to 2 terms on each page. Your keywords should appear in important parts of your website, such as your titles, headers and opening paragraphs.

High-quality links

We all know that links are extremely important when it comes to increasing your exposure online. You need to make sure that the links that are pointing to your website contain anchor text. The links should always be relevant to your offerings and they should lead to content that is interesting and informative.

Conclusion

When it comes to your website, you need to successfully lead people to what you have to say and what you have to offer. You must consider many different things. Not only are traffic generation and website views important but bounce rate, the average amount that a visitor spends on your site and conversion rates are also extremely important and are strong contributors to the success of your online marketing campaign.

Remember that when the visitor comes to your site, they must always find what they are looking for. If they don’t find what they are looking for within 8 seconds, they will move on. That is all the time that you have to make a really strong first impression. Your content must always be clear and concise, you should never have distractions on your web pages and you should always allow your visitors to have the option to search and you should make suggestions for other pages that they might find interesting and helpful.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Link building is the process of building links back to your website. Back links are links that go from other websites back to your website. More back links mean higher search engine rankings.

There are several ways in which to build links and some methods are more effective than others. The following are tips for effective link-building.

• Anchor text that is targeted: Once you start focusing on links on other sites, you must have anchor text that is targeted. Bear in mind that you should not have the same text everywhere. The search engines will take notice of that (not in a good way). You should have a few phrases that you use interchangeably and you should also use the proper name of your website. If it is only possible for you to get an image link, be sure that the website owner places your anchor text or the proper name of your website in the ALT tag of the image.
• Keep your eye on links in and out: The search engines pay attention to where your links appear and they decide how much benefit is returned to your site. If your site has a great deal of inbound links, it will add to your credibility. At the same time, if you are linked to a website that has poor-quality, outbound links, your credibility will not be enhanced.
• The relevance of the website: It is extremely important for your links to have great relevance to what your website is all about. You need to be sure to pursue links in places that are relevant and it is important to focus on how those websites are optimized. The relevance of the links will add more and more to your credibility and to the credibility of your business. Valuable links are links that come from pages with relevant and useful content.
• The importance of page rankings: Page rankings are extremely important; however, they are not the only important thing to consider. It is very possible for a website that has high page rankings to have low value. This situation applies to websites that sell links. It is a good idea to avoid websites that use phrases such as “sponsored by” and “paid for by.” It is possible that those types of websites may not be ranked at all by the search engines.
• Don’t be generous when it comes to link building: As is the case with volume of content, it is the same when it comes to volume of links. More is not necessarily better. It is not a large number of links that will earn you higher rankings on the search engines. It is the quality of your links. It is not always a simple thing to figure out which links are higher quality. If you pay attention to online marketing consultants and take their advice when it comes to link suggestions, you will probably end up with better-quality links. The more valuable your links, the higher your website will rise in the search engines.
• The value of social networking: Getting links into places where there are opportunities to do social networking is of the utmost importance and an extremely effective approach. The search engines pay attention to websites that are very active with continually adding fresh content and you will have higher search engine rankings because of it. Social networking is also very valuable because you are establishing and building valuable relationships with people who will eventually want to do business with you.
• Clean links: You need to make sure that the links that you have on your website are clean. If your links have any extra codes that shouldn’t be there, they are of no use to your website.

The reason that you have links on your website is to increase your search engine rankings. Even though it is sometimes difficult to determine good quality from bad, over time, it will get easier and you will see that it will become second nature to you.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Are you getting a great deal of traffic to your website? Is your Internet presence strong and are people excited by your offerings? If not, it is time to make some changes.

There are many different ways to increase the traffic to your website. The more traffic you get, the more your business will increase and you will become more and more successful. The methods that you use to increase your traffic will be effective but will require a consistent and dedicated effort on your part as well.

Some small changes that you might want to make that will most likely prove effective are buying an appropriate and easy-to-remember domain name (which you will have for a long time), identifying keywords and key phrases that increase your website traffic and your search engine rankings, and increasing the amount of content that you post and will continue to post on a frequent and regular basis. Another sensible thing to do to increase website traffic is to find a blog to contribute to that is a good match for your content. Remember that when you give feedback on articles in that blog, you should always be sincere and constructive. At the same time, you should include a link back to your website as well as submitting your website link to other directories.

You will also need to use link-building methods as part of the strategy to increase your website traffic. The following are some of the most effective methods for ensuring that you drive more traffic to your website.

• Article marketing: With this method, your online marketing campaign revolves around articles. Article marketing is a very good way to promote your business through your website and your products and/or services and there is little or no cost involved. The results of your article marketing methods can dramatically increase sales and you have the potential to double, or even triple, your income. In your article marketing campaign, the topics of the articles should be in your area of expertise and should touch your target audience in an emotional and personal way. It is very important to submit your content to Web content sites that don’t charge you a fee to do so. Article marketing is one of the simplest ways to promote your business online and to generate a lot of traffic to your site and increase your business’s revenue.
• Video marketing: Video marketing is an extremely effective and attractive method of getting your word out. Once you have made a video (or several videos over time), you should put it on your website, where it can reach a very large number of people. The search engines react very favorably to videos that are part of websites and your search engine rankings will increase if you use this type of marketing. It is also very easy for you to send the video link to all of your current and potential customers. Another excellent venue for leveraging your videos is a blog, forum and other social media channels. It is highly recommended that you put your video on as many websites as possible that allow videos.
• Use Email newsletters to promote your Web presence: Newsletters are an excellent way to share company updates, new products, and provide your customers with valuable information that offers solutions to their problems. You must make sure that your Email newsletters include links back to your website.
• Participate in discussion forums and Q&A sessions: Remember to add your website’s URL to your signature on those discussions. In addition, you should always include links in your blogs that lead your audience back to your website.
• Include your website’s URL on all of your marketing materials: This includes business cards, postcards, posters, flyers, etc.
• Make sure to optimize your website for search engines: You want to do this so that your rankings with the search engines are increased.
• Make sure to change your website content frequently: Adding a blog to your website is an excellent way to ensure that your content is constantly fresh. Make sure to display the links to your most recent articles on your home page.
• Submit your website’s URL to directories and search engines
• Add your website’s URL to all of your social network profiles: Remember that your URL should be in each and every social network profile.

Conclusion

If you use the marketing methods and tips that have been discussed here to increase the traffic to your website, you will start to see results in a few months, if not sooner. There is little or no cost involved although you will need to devote some time to your online marketing campaign in order for you to see results. If you use all of the marketing methods that were discussed here, you are bound to enjoy increased success in your business.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

If you have an online presence, the reality is that it is constantly being regulated. The legal scrutiny of websites is becoming more rigorous and more frequent all of the time.

With that said, you need to understand that your website will continue to face more and more legal liability as time goes on. It is a very good idea to give your website a legal examination and to make sure that it is updated properly now.

There are several things that you can check on to make sure that your website is compliant from a legal perspective.

If you have other resellers, affiliates or bloggers promote your offerings, you are considered an advertiser according to the FTC guidelines.

On the other hand, if you are asked to become a reseller, affiliate or blogger for other websites, you are considered an endorser according to the FTC guidelines.

In simple terms, according to the FTC, advertisers are expected to provide training and guidance to endorsers regarding the guidelines and liability. Endorsers are expected to disclose their relationships with the advertisers.

• Copyright notice: If you use content that is owned by someone other than you, you must have a copyright symbol after the content, the year of publication, the copyright owner’s name and “All rights reserved worldwide.” It is very important to give the proper attribution to the copyright owner.
   
• Blogs: If your website has a blog, there is a potential for other people to post content on your website that is an infringement of the copyrighted materials (for example, text, video links, graphic images). Under copyright law, you would be responsible for the infringement even if you were not aware of the copyright situation with the content that others have posted on your website. Your liability might be serious.
   
• Security of data: Technology and security practices are constantly evolving. You, as a business owner, are responsible for maintaining appropriate and reasonable data security measures, as dictated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). You need to be sure to that your security has been updated recently and continues to be updated on a regular basis.
   
• The collection, use and sharing of personal information: The way in which you market your business determines the types of personal information that you collect, how you make use of it and the way in which you share it. It is very important to make sure that your Privacy Policy reflects your actual practices with regard to personal information. Make sure that you review your Privacy Policy as necessary and revise it to reflect the evolution in your business that occurs.
   
• Service providers: If your external service providers (Web hosting service, search engine optimization, website developer, etc) have access to the internals of your website server and your databases that archive personal information, they need to be covered by a confidentiality agreement.
   
• FTC guidelines: Because the FTC was concerned over false advertising on the Internet, it released new guidelines that explain how existing laws on endorsements and testimonials used in online advertising will be interpreted.

  If you have other resellers, affiliates or bloggers promote your offerings, you are considered an advertiser according to the FTC guidelines.

  On the other hand, if you are asked to become a reseller, affiliate or blogger for other websites, you are considered an endorser according to the FTC guidelines.

  In simple terms, according to the FTC, advertisers are expected to provide training and guidance to endorsers regarding the guidelines and liability. Endorsers are expected to disclose their relationships with the advertisers.

If you are about to have a website developed or you are developing it yourself, you need to make sure that it includes the following:

• FTC guides disclosure policy
• Legal page
• Terms of use
• Privacy policy
• Service provider privacy-security agreement
• Customer agreement

Summary

Please note that the checklists discussed here are valuable but do not represent all of the legal points that need to be taken into consideration. However, they are some of the most important points and adhering to them will protect your website and, subsequently, your business.

It is essential to be legally compliant if you wish to avoid liability in an environment that is so highly regulated.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Your business makes a promise about your brand to your customers every time they interact with you. Whether they buy online or in a physical store, you are responsible for thanking them.

Many businesses don’t properly leverage their thank you page to build relationships with their customers and to reinforce their brands. The relationship between a business and its customers goes beyond the website and its content. It continues onto the thank you page and all of the way through to the delivery of the product and/or service to the customer.

Many business people who sell their goods and services forget to say thank you after someone has made a purchase from them. It is a simple gesture that goes a long way. We know that we must say thank you in our personal lives so why do we forget to say thank you in our professional lives?

The customer comes across your website, takes time to look around at what you have to offer and makes a decision to buy something from you, sign up for a whitepaper or register to one of your seminars. What then pops up is an unbranded, somewhat generic default thank you page that leaves the customer feeling rather empty.

Your thank you page is an extremely important tool that you should make full use of when you are trying to connect with your customers.

Re-engage your customers

You should use your thank you page to re-engage your customers by letting them know about your new products and services. You should discretely entice them to indulge in your new offerings and encourage them to return to your website with a coupon for a future purchase.

Because the customer already trusts you enough to buy from you, it will be easy to introduce them to your new products and services. You need to make it very attractive for them by offering some sort of promotion. At the same time, take the opportunity to tell them about offerings that will be available in the near future. You might also want to run a contest or event. You can provide them with a link so that they can participate.

Reinforce your brand

Your thank you page is a wonderful place to reinforce your brand. You can also use the page for marketing messages, commitment and education of your customers. You can provide them with helpful information that they can apply to their own business. You can also offer a free gift. This offering will let your customers know that you have something of increased value for your customers.

The main goal of your thank you page is to leave a lasting impression on your customers. If you make it really unique and very connected to your brand, it will absolutely achieve that goal.

If customers are sent to a thank you page that has the same look and feel as the rest of your website, they will have a feeling of continuity. They will not experience that warm, fuzzy feeling if they are taken to an impersonal, generic thank you page.

A common mistake that many businesses make is that they have a great and extremely effective website, which has great and valuable content and successfully convinces people to sign up for what they are offering. However, their thank you page totally falls short. You should take this opportunity to stand above your competition and leave a strong and long-lasting impression on your customers through your thank you page.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

You have a beautiful-looking website. You originally invested a great deal of money to have a reputable firm design and build it yet you see almost no return on investment (ROI).

When you start to look into why your website is ineffective, you start to discover that not only are you not increasing website traffic but you are actually losing traffic, losing potential customers, and losing the opportunities of establishing new relationships. In fact, your website may be failing to attract visitors at all.

How to get your website to become effective and remain effective

You should have a balance between graphics and text on your website. The website should definitely be aesthetically pleasing but should have valuable content that is easy to download at the same time.

You should always test your website on more than one browser. What looks fantastic on one browser make look terrible on another browser. Many people still use text-only browsers at this point in time.

You should always remember to be meticulous with your website; keep it clean and up to date. You should look for ways to update your site at least once a month. If you let your visitors know that you are doing this on a regular basis, it will be an incentive for them to return to your website often. Even if they visit your website only because they are curious, they are still visiting.

You also need to make sure that you are reviewing your website analysis on a regular basis. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing for sure if your website is totally doing what it is supposed to do.

Issues with your positioning and branding

Website conversion rates: Differentiating and clearly articulated value propositions have a profound effect on website conversion rates. The conversion rate is a measurement of visitors who fulfill your intended outcomes. Those outcomes could include contacting you directly, buying a product from your site, signing up for a blog feed or newsletter, etc.

Your value proposition, which should be the centerpiece of your homepage, should answer the question “Why should I choose to do business with you instead of your competition?”

That is the most important question in business. People struggle with it all of the time. If you are missing an opening message that really grabs your visitors, it can seriously have a negative effect on the ultimate success of your business.

If your website visitors go to your home page and leave quickly, something isn’t right. Your content is not enticing them enough and it is not answering the fundamental questions “Can this company fulfill my needs” and “Should I explore this website further?”

An area of your website that can prove to be problematic is your landing page. The landing page is the first page that a visitor sees. The reason for this is that you generally have some well-indexed content that your visitors have found in a search engine.

It is key to understand how the visitor thinks here. Visitors come to your website to find something specific. It is irrelevant how they may have found you (on purpose or by accident). Initially, they may have absolutely no interest in you and possibly no idea of who you are at all.

It is critical that the first page that they come upon on your website engages your visitors instantly and communicates a solution to their unfulfilled needs. Additionally, your content must be compelling enough to attract them to other areas of your website. You need to make them want to learn more about you. It is not sufficient to merely give them a lot of good information. Otherwise, they will take all of that in and then they will leave.

Hopefully, your traffic reports are detailed enough to communicate to you which keywords are effective at bringing visitors to each page of your website. This helps you to understand where your visitors are coming from, mentally.

If your website visitors are reading the page and leaving, you have succeeded at giving them what they want but you have failed at drawing them to the rest of your website. This can be fixed. You need to improve your navigation and make it more compelling and you need to have calls to action on your website pages.

There are many websites that offer great information and compelling content and that’s the end of it. It is so important to guide visitors to the next step that you wish them to take. If you count on your website visitors to do this by themselves, there is a great chance that they will either make a different choice than the one that you want them to make or they will just leave your website altogether, which can impact how much business you do.

Issues with building your credibility

Testimonials that are authoritative, powerful and specific can have a serious impact on your website’s conversion rates. You must ask yourself the question “Am I potentially losing business because my website does not adequately establish my credibility and value?”

A great way to get in touch with this is to review your website for credibility by building content, for example, testimonials, case studies and client lists. You should distribute your testimonials throughout your website, using one- or two-line excerpts that are appropriate for the content on each page. The testimonials can be about a product, a service or the value of subscribing to your blog or newsletter.

Be sure that all of the content is linked to and from other pages so that your visitors can find it very easily. If, after that, you start getting more phone calls or Emails, you will know that you have done something positive to make your website more effective.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Twitter is one of the hottest social media channels today. Twitter is not only an effective way to connect with people but it is also an effective way to drive traffic to your website.

If you get a great deal of traffic to your website from Twitter, you will maximize your online exposure in ways that you haven’t even thought of yet. However, if you want to drive Twitter traffic to your site, you need to make sure to follow proper etiquette.

There are several rules that you need to follow so that your Twitter site is effective. First of all, you need to build a list of your followers on Twitter. Your Twitter traffic will be nonexistent without followers. Followers can help you to gain exposure and you can help them to gain exposure.

Build your list of followers very carefully and get to know them well and allow them to get to know you well. You want their trust as much as they want your trust. When you are posting tweets to your site, make sure that they are substantive and valuable. Your followers will find meaning in what you say and will return to your website over and over again.

Some of the advantages of Twitter (some obvious and some not obvious) are as follows:

• Twitter participants drive the process. The decision to use Twitter is a personal one. It has nothing to do with solicitation.
• Twitter operates in real time. The tweets are quick and short.
• Twitter has a 140-character limit. This keeps things moving along.
• The Twitter premise is about connections and communication.

As long as you express sincerity and an interest in your followers through your posts, you will increase the Twitter traffic to your website. If you slow down or stop posting tweets, your followers will think that you are not interested in them anymore and will stop visiting your website.

The key to your Twitter traffic volume is your Twitter participation. You don’t have to write new, original posts all of the time. You can also post comments on previous tweets. In that case, you can post links in your tweets to your website. The more followers you have, the greater your chances of getting more people to visit your website.

Is Twitter a major source of your website traffic?

Twitter allows you to track your followers as well as those whom you are following. You can also view and follow anyone listed under any other members. This gives you the ability to connect with other people in your niche through other members’ friends.

Your ultimate goal is to get all of the people whom you are following to follow you in return. You will find that a large number of them will follow you. What that means is that your followers are going to be reading your content and checking up on your status. The result of all of this is that you will expand your customer base and thus have a great deal of potential to increase your business.

The following are some helpful tips to increase your website traffic from Twitter:

• Make sure that you have a Twitter/tweet button on your content.
• Throughout your website, convey a clear message that you have a strong Twitter presence.
• Include your Twitter URL on business cards, signatures, etc.
• Be consistently active on Twitter.
• Tweet your own content. If people are following you, they are obviously interested in what you are saying.
• Mention other ways to share your content on other social networks.
• Include Twitter in your list of social media channels.
• Have someone with a large number of followers talk about your products and services.
• Post links in your tweets that lead back to your website.
• Never give a hard sell. An occasional piece of promotional information is appropriate. Encourage your followers to visit your website often in order to learn new and valuable information. Your most important goal is to provide value to your followers.

When designing your marketing strategy, all of the factors discussed will work to your business’s advantage. If you remember to constantly connect with people and to communicate, your relationships will continue to flourish. The two essential principles of marketing with Twitter are your approach to it and the tools that you use.

Twitter is a great way to drive traffic but it is much, much more than that. There is a tremendous amount of potential to drive even more traffic from Twitter to your website. You just need to tap into it.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Building HTML and XML sitemaps for your website could possibly be the easiest thing that you do to increase your web presence. It may be the first thing that gets you high search engine optimization (SEO) rankings.

For people who normally do not spend a great deal of time on SEO of their website, this is an excellent place to start. When you submit your sitemap to different search engines, you are stating that you exist and showing which pages your website has to offer the World Wide Web.

A sitemap is a list of website pages that are accessible to search engine crawlers (or scanners). It can be either in the form of a document that is used as a planning tool for web design or a web page that lists the pages on a website, which is usually arranged in a hierarchical manner. This helps the website visitors and the search engine robots to find pages on the website.

The two types of sitemaps are HTML and XML. An HTML sitemap offers a valuable directory of all of the pages that are in your website. XML sitemaps help the search engines to crawl (or scan) the pages of your website.

Sitemaps can improve SEO of a website by ensuring that all pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus, which don’t include HTML links. They also act as a navigation aid by giving an overview of a website’s content at a quick glance.

Most search engines will only follow a finite amount of links from a page, so if the amount of links is very large, the sitemap may be needed so that the search engines and visitors can access all content on the website.

We will now discuss the benefits of creating both an HTML and XML sitemap as well as how you can create them using a sitemap generator.

HTML Sitemaps

An HTML sitemap is a single HTML page that contains links to all of your website pages. Usually, you can access this through a link in the footer of your site, where it will appear on every page. If a site is very large, it can be difficult to find the page that you are looking for. If the HTML page is very well organized, the visitors to your site will be able to use it to find the page that they are looking for without too much difficulty.

From the perspective of SEO, as the search engine’s robot (or spider) crawls your site indexing pages, it might have an easier time finding various pages using the HTML sitemap instead of having to go through general navigation. Thus, sitemaps can benefit your website’s visitors and can help your website to gain increased Internet exposure.

XML Sitemaps

HTML sitemaps are designed with the intention of benefitting your human website visitors. XML sitemaps, on the other hand, are designed specifically for search engines. All of the most popular websites, including Google, Yahoo and Ask.com, use XML sitemaps as a part of their process for indexing website pages.

An effective XML sitemap will tell the search engine which pages are contained in your site, how frequently those pages are being updated and exactly when they were last modified. This helps the search engines to know which pages to revisit on a regular basis and thus do a more effective job of indexing those pages.

Creating both HTML and XML sitemaps

It is as simple to create an HTML sitemap as it is to create an HTML page that contains links to each page on your website. You should use a sitemap generator (there are many good ones out there) to help you automate this.

How often should your sitemap be submitted?

You should get into the habit of submitting to your sitemap to search engines a number of times a year. This will allow you to update the search engine on any new pages in your site. If you create new pages on a regular basis, you may want to submit your sitemap more frequently.

Conclusion

HTML and XML sitemaps are an excellent step in the direction of improving your website’s Internet exposure. You will probably find that your search engine rankings climb after you have submitted your sitemap for the first time. However, you should remember that this is only a part of SEO. There is a great deal more that you can do to increase the search engine rankings of your website pages and your website’s discoverability.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.

Many websites are designed and built with no purpose in mind. They appear to have badly fitting parts that are haphazardly put together. Those websites don’t provide a reason or inclination for visitors to stay.

When you are designing and building your website (or having someone else design and build it), you need to have a definite purpose in mind. Depending on the type of business that you have, the purpose of your website will vary. The following are some really good reasons to build a website:

• Selling your products and services
• Publishing news items
• Blogging or having social interaction
• Displaying an online catalogue or brochure
• Having a gateway or portal to other sites
• Offering public service or special interest
• Having a virtual gallery or imagery

A great deal of businesses that are in the service industry start out with a basic catalogue or brochure that demonstrates what they have to offer. This type of website is generally the easiest to build.

If you are trying to sell one of your products, you will need a sales letter on your homepage. If your true intent is to sell your products online, you will need Ecommerce features on your website as well.

Online catalogue sites that have Ecommerce are not usually as simple to build. The best example of this is Amazon, which is known as the world’s largest bookstore.

Gateway or portal sites used to be very popular. However, if you want to have a gateway or portal site, you will have some stiff competition from established sites. However, on a positive note, you may be able to do well with a niche portal that focuses on a topic on which you are an expert.

A blog site is a wonderful way to promote your expertise and knowledge, have discussions with similar-thinking people, or provide a discussion forum and customer support. Blogs are great personal publishing sites and are highly regarded as part of the evolution toward social networking and Web 2.0.

If you are a photographer or graphic artist, you can have a site with powerful images, slide shows, and videos. In this day and age, most people have broadband connections so the extra bandwidth that is needed is not really a problem anymore. Numerous businesses work much more effectively if the website presentation is artistic.

Whichever type of website you design and build, make sure that your purpose is clearly defined. Think about what you specifically want your website to accomplish and what your visitors will want to do on your website. Also consider the type of content that you are trying to present and the best way to do that.

Once you are clear on this, you need to write a couple of paragraphs that can serve as your mission statement. Your mission statement should clearly define what the purpose and goals of your business are. This will set the tone for your entire website.

We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. Please contact us at CompuKol Communications for further discussion on how we might be able to assist you and your team.