Thursday, May 5, 2011

Tips on Selecting a Better Domain Name for your Online Business


At Alltech Networks, we're always working towards creating awareness about best possible ways to start a successful online business. We often provide our customers with valuable tips & tricks to educate them about Website Designing and Search Engine Promotion process.

Proper planning and implementation of ideas is required to build a successful website. Hard work and extensive research starts from the very beginning. A good domain name for your business is as important as other aspects of website design. Few points to remember while selecting a Domain Name are as follows:

  • Always try to register Top Level Domain (TLD) for your website. Most of the non-tech literates are only familiar with .com, .net and .org domain extensions.

  • If TLD is not available for your preferred choice of Domain Name or you want to target local audience, then it great to select Country Coded TLD. For example .co.uk is ccTLD for regional visitors in the UK
     
  • It's not advisable to use dashes or underscore in the domain name. A domain name www.mywebsite.com is easier to remember then www.my_website.com or www.my-website.com.
     
  • Make sure that your domain registrar provide access to your domain name with or without www.
     
  • Use your own contact information for whois database while registering domain name .
     
  • Use of keywords or your products name in domain name helps you attract traffic to your website.
     
  • Always try to register domain name for longer period (usually five years or more). As search engines rate your domain according to its registered life.
     
  • Do ensure that the domain your are going to purchase was not black listed (for spamming or some other reasons) in the past by search engines. As its difficult to gain search engine ranking for these types of penalized domain names.
     
  • In case of multiple product range or to serve different web platforms, its good to register subdomains like m.mysite.com or product1.mysite.com before hand.

Next article will cover some tips to select hosting service providers. For any information or help on Website Designing, SEO and Pay Per Click campaigns, feel free to mail us at info@alltechnetworks.com.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Re-Incarnation - What your old website may wish.

Updating & re-designing of website is easy & rewarding too.

Once you have created the perfect website for your business and gathered a devoted group of visitors, its difficult to think about re-designing of website. A fear of losing the regular visitors & also the loss of hit count is what holds back you from going forward towards a new path.

Continuous evolution of web designing & SEO techniques turn, once a beautifully designed website in to an age old piece of information, in just few years. But, by focusing on positive aspects of redesigning your website, such as gaining rank in a search engine & attracting more visitors, will makes the process interesting & enjoyable.

The reason to change
As the business grow, overtimes, we re-evaluate our aim & strategy towards growth. We procure new equipment and even hire more hands to grow faster. But, we forget to update our website about these changes. Moreover, few  years back, a website was just an informational window for a company and now it works as a tool to attract customers, build relations and interact with prospective buyers.

Plan ahead
Its wise to invest some quality time and review your present website, page to page. Select the web page that require change. Its also possible that you may want to redesign your logo too, to display present aim of your company. Changing a static website to dynamic website is also a good decision to make as it enhances the beauty of your website. Collect the content & images for your new website at this stage and prepare your website for a new & better incarnation.

The Process
Your first site was, may be, a DIY project completed at the beginning of your business. You had plenty of time then and a long list of friend to help you out in building your site. But going on this path again will not only cost you your precious time, but you may also suffer from loss of new techniques and tricks now available in the market. The best practice is to select a web design agency, which can offer you all the service you may require. Its best to enjoy the fruit while a farmer plough the field. Make sure to select the right SEO plan suitable for you and also create a interaction channel with customers through Facebook, Twitter or Blog.

After redesigning, your new & powerful website will be ready to take over on your competitors and to serve your customers better.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Know thy neighbors and avoid their mistakes - Competitive analysis and its loop holes in while planning SEO


“Information is power” and information about competition is super power or you can say a lethal weapon. It may sound effective but sometimes, its a loss and it may be suicidal for your SEO campaign.

Competitive research before and during your SEO, PPC and SMO campaign gives you an insight about your competitors strategy and also provide you with a path to follow. Planning your SEO campaign becomes easy as you can target same keywords, your competitors maybe using and it will also help you target the similar customer base. Its a lucrative strategy to follow while marketing your product. After all you don't have to research too much and you can save a bit of cash while doing so. This is the most recommended plan of action by some armature SEO professionals. What they want to do is save their skin from hard work and mint some easy money from you.

There should be a lot of research and proper plan of action before following the footsteps of your competitors, as you may also fall for same mistakes they are making. It's quite possible that they may be missing some potential segment of customers. Therefore, workout on all the words , phrases and keywords your customers may be using while searching for your product.

It's good to be ranked for same keywords as your competitors but it's great to be in the list where they are not even present. Therefore plan ahead and reap the benefit. You know your product and your customer better. Study your competitors strategy, add your own moves and have benefit from your marketing campaign.

Blindly following a competitor sometimes, not only, ruin your campaign but can also result in loss in terms of time and money. It can also result in loss of business from an entire segment of consumers your competition may not be targeting. Also, following your competition will make you just a “me too” guy playing the catch-up game. Instead it's better to be an industry authority who is followed by other players in the field.

Plan your SEO campaign carefully and with a knowledgeable professional company, which can suggest you the right direction and effective course of action for your SEO campaign. It's good to mint gold from the same mine your neighbors are minting, but it's also better to work on a new road then to fall in the old path-hole.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Anatomy of PageRank

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page[1] and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million.[2][3]

Friday, February 4, 2011

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

SEO Success Pyramid





This is a nice SEO pyramid that can be used as a checklist on a SEO project. Main components of this pyramid are commitment, patience and planning. Read more at: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/the-seo-success-pyramid/971/

Art of Link Building in SEO

Rather than having enormous internal and external links to/from your website - you should be thinking about how to best use links - Always start with on-site navigation. Upkeep of your internal links are more important that people who are linking to you.

On-site navigation should follow these rules:
  • Always use absolute (fully spelled out) URLs
  • Always use fully-embedded HTML links for navigation
  • Always include an HTML sitemap for sites with more than 10 pages
  • Always use meaningful, relevant, but concise anchor text on internal links
  • NEVER attempt to prevent a unique page from being crawled or indexed
Badly designed on-site navigation usually incorporates one or more of the following mistakes:
  • Mixing formats of relative URLs (rather than using only absolute URLs)
  • Incorporating non-existent directories in the URL paths (bad taxonomy)
  • Incorporating unnecessary parameters in the URLs (bad taxonomy)
  • Using bland anchor text or images as anchors
  • Hiding links in onMouseOver-managed text blocks, Javascript-fired objects, and other transient content
  • Failing to link consistently and uniformly on every page
  • Using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links
  • Using “noindex” and/or “noarchive” robots directives on tag or category pages
  • Creating only XML sitemaps for large sites (rather than HTML sitemaps)
Your inbound anchor text priorities should focus on creating brand visibility and value. The best use for link anchor text is to show people that you have a Website that is important and valuable to them. If you try to prove you’re important and valuable to search engines you’re missing golden opportunities to work with visitors.

Read more on - http://www.seo-theory.com/2011/01/14/how-best-to-use-links-for-seo/#comments