On-page optimization includes title tags, header tags, anchor text, and overall content. As a business website developer, your goal is to make sure search engines can see your website and index it under relevant search terms. To accomplish this, there are three important SEO tips every web developer should know.

1. Market research. Study your market niche inside and out. Who are your most successful competitors? Follow them and learn from the best. I’m not saying to go be a copycat. I’m telling you to find out what works and do it better. Find out how your competitors are succeeding. For example, what keywords are they using? Are they driving traffic through free or paid methods? What do their websites have in common? Look for similarities like layout, color scheme, title, header text, anchor text, and so on. All of these will clue you in on how you need to build your website.

2. Keyword research. Find out what keywords successful competitors are using in your niche. Their keywords are the first few words in the title, header, and even domain name. Find out the keywords people are typing into major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This is very important. Ideally, you’ll want to spend about 3 days gathering sufficient data. It helps to take notes and organize them using excel. Also, keyword tools like Google’s own keyword tool and SEO toolkit are perfect for this job. They contain recent and accurate data and they’re free.

As a guideline for choosing keywords, try to focus on more specific keywords in your niche. Choose keywords with less competition. This will tremendously help your website get found in search results. For example, say you’re selling shoes. “Shoes” is a general keyword that you’d have a really hard time popping up in search results for. Choose relevant keywords with less competition such as running shoes for men, women’s tennis shoes, dress shoes for prom night, sandals for the beach, kitchen clogs, children’s hiking boots, 2 inch pumps, petite high heels, etc. One thing you must be aware of is using name brands like Nike or Reebok. You could use them for organic search results, but for paid ad campaigns such as Google Adwords certain name brands are not allowed.

3. Maintain keyword relevancy. Now that you’ve done keyword research, the third thing you need to do is maintain keyword relevancy. Google, Yahoo and other major search engines rank highly for relevant content. Relevancy is the foundation to success as a business website. Your title, header tags, body content, anchor text, the content of all websites linking to yours, they should all be keyword rich and share a common theme.

SEO for website development is critically important, but it’s only maybe 30% of overall SEO. As an internet marketer, off-page SEO is a grueling, never-ending journey through trail and error where winner takes all. For the dedicated marketer, it’s a rewarding addiction.

Why building an email list is so crucial:

o It gives you an opportunity to create trust with your visitors. People don’t like to give their money to someone they don’t trust

o By keeping in constant contact with your visitors they don’t get a chance to forget about you or your website

o You get unlimited chances of offering your products to your visitors long after they’ve clicked off your website

o By delivering quality content to their email over a period of time you establish yourself as an authority in your visitor’s eyes – thus increasing your chances of responses to your offers dramatically

o Having a decent size list opens doors to some lucrative Joint Venture opportunities with other successful marketers – your list is one of the biggest assets in your business

According to extensive split tests by some of the top expert marketers, Autoresponder messages outperform webpage sales letters by over 90% in a week’s time. And that’s just in a test over one week’s span! Imagine the rates you can get in 3 to 6 months or a year’s time.

Don’t be surprised when you’ll have some of your subscribers spend a few thousand dollars with you down the road – because you’ve been consistently building a relationship with them over email sequences.

What you should know about building a responsive email list:

o Focus on writing interesting headlines – you can’t bore people into opening your messages. Even if you have the most compelling message inside your email it will never get a chance to be read if your headline is bland

o Don’t litter their Inbox with affiliate links with the fist follow-up message. Deliver value first. Offer a free course or some valuable tips relevant to your market. Nothing kills your chances of gaining trust like pushing products in your visitors face right off the bat

o Email boxes these days are full to the brim with junk mail – if you deliver value you automatically become different in the eyes of your recipients, and chances are your messages are going to be consistently opened instead of ending up in the trash like the rest

With the equality of the Internet, ecommerce business is not restricted to big corporations. Anyone with enough ambition and a little working capital can dive into this exciting industry. Ecommerce is your ticket to an affordable online business.

Here is how to get started:

Research your market thoroughly – Try to pick a market in which you know a great deal about the product you’re going to sell. If you happen to be a motorcycle buff, chances are selling lingerie is probably not the greatest of ideas. Stick with what you have passion for – it will definitely show in your work.

Make a user-friendly fast-loading website – As much as ecommerce has become more and more mainstream – many people still are somewhat wary about handing out their credit card information online to just anybody. Your site is the face of your business. Have your website built professionally, it will pay off in the long run. Nothing makes people annoyed than an amateur, hard-to-navigate, slow-loading disco ball of a website.

Spend extra to make your site secure and trustworthy – Make sure to have your website’s checkout system equipped with the latest SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Encryption. Gaining trust of your customers is everything in the ecommerce business.

Simple is good – The simpler of an experience for your customer you can make, the better off you are. If your visitors find your site too complex, they will click off of it faster than they got there. You won’t believe how many ecommerce sites I see everyday that require for a customer to create an account before you can even see your shipping charges! You can only imagine how many customers they’re losing just with that.

Creating your own unique ecommerce business will take some careful planning and thought. Be diligent in your research and focus on user experience. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and you’ll learn a lot just from that. Stay tuned for more tips from my future publications on this subject.

Research and analysis. Visit the business, talk to a representative. The goal is to gain a concise perspective of what the company stands for and what benefits they offer. What’s their “unique selling proposition”? What kind of presence do they display? This will determine the look and feel of the company website. For example, the layout of a child education camp website will have a very different layout and feel than that of a real estate website.

Design prototype. Draw a sketch of a layout plan. This will serve as a web design blueprint. It helps to come up with a proper layout if it’s tangible and it’s something you can easily change and adjust as necessary.

Consider font style. Font style is like the tone of someone’s voice during a conversation. It’s an expression of its own regardless of what is said. If someone tells you they’re really happy in low, depressing voice, how much would you believe them? Just the same, if you see a real estate website in Comic Sans (comic book font) how seriously would take that business? To establish a strong business presence, choose a font that supports the company’s message.

Consider graphics. Use graphics and photos to help sell the product. Photos help to visually relate the product’s benefits to a specific market. For example, acne-fighting products target young audiences. The benefit is clear, healthy skin. Acne product websites show off photos of young people with clear, healthy skin. Weight loss website banners show men and women with healthy, fit waistlines. Measuring tape is often added to further emphasize the benefit. Graphics and photos serve to visually prove the results of the product.

Build the website. Just like the construction of a building, first lay out the plan or the blueprint, then build it from the ground up. I enjoy this part. It’s like bringing something inanimate to life. Putting elements of a website together and making it look and function right is rewarding in it’s own way.

Marketing. This is the key to a successful e-commerce website. Marketing takes an ordinary business website to the next level. Putting your website in front of the right audience takes the most amount of effort. Keyword research, creating back-links, data, results, analyzing, adjusting…it goes on. Any successful internet marketer will tell you it’s a daily process.

Here’s a secret tip not many business website designers know. This is something professional marketers use as leverage to get ahead – and it works!

Competition research. Analyze the top 5 e-commerce websites in your niche. Your successful rivals reveal what works in your niche. Your looking for everything I mentioned earlier: font style, layout, graphics and photos. Find out what keywords they use. Look for a common color scheme in your niche business’ websites. All of this speaks volumes about who the target audience is and how to sell to them.

Business web design isn’t only about throwing some content together in a nice little package for the world to see. There’s so much more to building a professional e-commerce website than meets the eye. The research, design process, and marketing all have a major roll in determining the success of an e-commerce website.

Sadly this is what a lot of self-proclaimed PPC experts will teach you. Don’t fall into a trap of taking just any body’s advice – get it from the industry’s top pros.

When going into PPC territory get ready for war

AdWords is a lot more complicated than it looks and there are only two guides that I’ll ever recommend investing in:

o Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide To AdWords

o Kyle & Carson’s Beating Google AdWords Guide

These two guides have everything you need to know to succeed with PPC. Here is a brief overview of each one:

Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide To AdWords

Perry Marshall is highly regarded as one of the Google AdWords pioneers. He’s been honing his PPC skills way before most people even knew what AdWords was. Since then he’s made millions of dollars in sales and has written a massive library of related material.

Perry’s guide literally takes you by the hand and shows you how to start your campaign from scratch. He also rolls out a real life case study he’s with all of the statistics, which helps you understand the specifics of building properly structured ads and gives you plenty of ideas for your own campaigns.

Overall it’s a nice mix of strategy, consumer psychology and specific technical information.

Kyle & Carson’s Beating Google AdWords Guide

Beating Google AdWords guide is a lot more simplified and has more recent information than Perry’s guide. One of the nicer features is the interactive table of contents. It helps you get to the section you want to read with a click of a button.

They also go in depth and reveal some of the secrets of a well planned website. Believe it or not, if your website or your landing page is weak you’re going to pay dearly with poor quality score and will get slapped hard by Google. The infamous Google Slap is covered in great detail in it’s own dedicated chapter. This problem is more common with new advertisers than most would like to believe. Quality score and Effective bidding techniques are definitely a highlight of Beating Google AdWords and alone make this one a worthwhile investment.

Though if you take your time and learn a bit more about keyword tools – you’ll realize that it’s really the wrong question to ask. Your question should really be: ” Are any of those tools even worth a single dollar?” Of course most of the affiliates who want your commission – will gladly give you gazillions of reasons on why you absolutely can’t live without one. Well, I would like to dispel these beliefs, and save you from potentially making a costly mistake.

What you need to know about keyword tools that most people won’t tell you:

Keyword research is not exact science. All of the figures you see when you get the results are predictions. Keyword tools such as Nichebot use scraped data from sources like Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery, which only represent at most 2 -3% of all the keyword searches done online.

Search engine keyword data is stored information from the past. Most of the search figures you see are searches from a few weeks ago. And those figures tend to fluctuate wildly because of search engine’s constant cycle of recording and updating its databases.

Anyone who will tell you that their keyword tool has the most accurate data is lying through their teeth. Even Google, having its firm grip on over 50% of the search market can’t guarantee 100% accuracy of their keyword results.

With all this said, most paid keyword tools scrape majority of their keyword data from Google anyway. So in essence you’re paying for re-packaged middleman keyword data.

At first glance a tool like Market Samurai may seem useful – because they organize your keyword data based on the competition and break down the daily search volume. They also offer a few other things like SEO competition and content pulling based on your search.

But it’s really nothing that you can’t accomplish yourself, with a few extra mouse clicks.

In conclusion – in my opinion – paying for keyword tools is not only a waste of your money, it’s also a big waste of your time. Mainly, because all of those keyword tools happen to be turtle-slow.

Save your cash and head to Google’s own keyword tool. It’s free, fast and has the most recent results out of all keyword tools out there.

Here are the facts you should know about Flash before committing to a website project:

1. An entire Flash website is on only one page. This comes with many consequences. First, being that it could take a while to load. Because the whole website is on a single page, you can’t view it until it has fully loaded. Most people don’t have a fast computer with quick connection speed. This means that while your site is loading…loading…loading, chances are most people will lose interest and leave before your site appears. E-commerce websites should avoid using 100% Flash.
2. The second consequence of Flash on a single page is this. There is only one URL. If a user wants to go directly to your contact page, they can’t. The user will have to go through extra steps to get there and they can’t bookmark that page. Ideally, for a business, you’ll want your site to be completely user friendly. It allows your customer to find exactly what he’s looking for quickly and easily.
3. Here’s another drawback about the fact that Flash sites are on a single page. Google doesn’t care for single page websites. Unless you have thousands of backlinks, Google will not consider your site for organic search results. It’s called “sandboxed” which brings us to the next problem with purely Flash website.
4. Search engine robots can’t see Flash content. Google, Yahoo and other search engine bots crawl website content and determine relevancy to specific search terms. If robots can’t see your content, they can’t index your site. Your website won’t appear in any search results. Again, your website is “sandboxed.”
5. People can’t copy content or right-click on it. This might seem like a good thing since no one can rip off your content, but it’s not. Clients like to be able to copy pieces of information like business hours, phone numbers and brief sentences for address books or reminders. People like to use the right click function. It’s user-friendly to have the option to “open link in new tab”.
6. Flash websites don’t work on iPhone, iPad and iPod, to name a few. How many people today browse the internet from their mobile device? I can tell you it’s a large market of people. If they can’t see your website, they’ll move on to a competitor’s site.
7. Flash needs to be updated. For naïve web surfers with outdated flash plugins, your site may or may not appear. If your website does appear, it might not look and function the way it’s intended.

As a website designer, when I use Flash, I do so sparingly. I add “alternate content” to every page with Flash content. Alternate content serves two advantages.  First, your visitors do not need to have a Flash plugin to see your web page. Second, search engines can see alternate content and will bring up your website in search results.

This is one of many tips to flaunt an impressive website while allowing your e-business to thrive.

1. Choose your font carefully and use up to two similar font families -at most. One of the worst things I see on the internet is those sites with twenty different fonts of all sizes and colors. That screams, “Cheesy sales letter – Avoid!”

2. State the benefits your business has to offer but make it short and to the point. This is your “unique selling proposition”. It should be stated clearly and visibly. Don’t clutter your site with useless text or graphics.

3. Use graphics and/or photos that help sell the products. Custom graphics are best. If you don’t design graphics you could outsource them.

4. A professional web site design is user friendly. This means easy navigation. Visitors should be able find exactly what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. If not, you lose the customers’ attention and they move on to a competitor’s site.

5. A professional website should be cross browser compatible. I always make it a point to check that my web sites look and function right in all the dominant browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Netscape, Chrome, Opera, etc.

6. Mobile device compatibility is also very important in web site design. Many people these days use their iPhone or iPod to browse the internet. These mobile devices do not support Flash. If your site is built using Flash with no alternate content, your site cannot be viewed. Potential business, lost. Flash web pages should be used sparingly and always have alternate content, which brings us to the next tip.

7. Don’t build a website solely on Flash for two good reasons. First, Google doesn’t like 100% Flash websites because they can’t see Flash content. It might look great, but if you’re trying to rank for Google search terms, you’ll have a really hard time. Second, Flash sites take awhile to load. There is still a large market of people with slow connections. Instead of waiting, waiting, waiting, they’ll lose interest before your website even loads.

Bottom line is – keep it simple, make it visible. Professional website designs are clean, simple and visible to the world. That’s the key to noticeably increase e-commerce.

Scale: new Effect.Scale(‘id_of_element’, percent, [options]);

fold: Effect.Fold(‘enter div ID here’);

Source Code:

<img id="scale_me" src="http://svigil.com/images/blogimages/Desert-Jewel.jpg" alt="(c) rvigil - www.rvigil.com" width="250" height="161" />

<a onclick="Effect.Fold('scale_me'); return false;" href="#">Click me to fold image!</a>
<a onclick="Effect.Grow('scale_me'); return false;" href="#">Reset</a>

<a onclick="new Effect.Scale('scale_me', 200); return false;" href="#">Click me to scale image!</a>
<a onclick="$('scale_me').morph('height:161px; width:250px;'); return false;" href="#">Reset</a>

View Demo:

Click me to fold image!
Reset

Click me to scale image!
Reset

Note: To reset the scaled image I used “morph”. Here’s a tutorial I did for that here: How to Morph Using jQuery.

To reset the folded image I used “grow”.
Syntax: Effect.Grow(‘id_of_element’);

Simple and sweet.

$(‘enter div ID here’).morph(‘enter morph properties here’);

Source Code:

<div id="morph_me" style="background: #03F8FB; width: 60px; height:278px;"></div>
<ul>
<li> <a href="#" onclick="$('morph_me').morph('background: #FF0058; height:60px;'); return false;">Click me for a demo!</a></li>
<li> <a href="#" onclick="$('morph_me').morph('background: #03F8FB; height:278px;'); return false;">Reset the demo!</a></li>
</ul>


View Demo:

• Click me for a demo!
• Reset the demo!