Website Maintenance Service

Accessibility and Usability of Your Website

admin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:33:29 +0000

In general, usability and accessibility of a website is perceived as its integration with different elements of the website, and how easily a user can surf through it. However, website usability and accessibility are completely different things when we talk about an American website.

According to the legal obligations in the United States of America, a website must be usable and accessible. This simply means that as an owner of a website, you must mould it in such a way that a mass chunk of the population gets an opportunity to visit your website and receive maximum utilities out of it.

What is Accessibility and usability”

Accessibility of your website conveys the meaning that it is completely capable to operate well. As the owner of that business website, you must ensure that it is accessible from all the corners of the world. It must be created by using programs and designs that are specially used for creating websites, which require minimum efforts on the part of the visitors to view and go through it. For example, using JavaScript can pose some challenges and limitations in your website design because many users surf the internet with their JavaScript tags turned off. If this is the case, they will not be able to view the images or other elements that have been created by using JavaScript.

Should I Go for latest technologies in my website”

If you have tried to make your website audible by making use of music files and a flash player, it may become a challenge for your websites accessibility. Visitors with hearing problems may not be able to hear your websites audio content. In addition, if you have included flash player and some elements that run exclusively on it, the website may not be very much accessible to many people. This is because, a flash player is required to be installed prior to view or listen files that have been created using it. It is, therefore, necessary that your website convey all the relevant information in an easy and most commonly used way.

The growing popularity of mobile phones and many other devices that allow the user to access the internet also pose a threat to your websites accessibility and usability. Some features may not be fully functional if a visitor is viewing your website through a mobile device. It is important that your website is structured in a manner using special programs that easily run on such modern and handy devices too.

To put in simple terms, a website that is not well accessible is not usable too. This directly relates to a downward sloping sales graph. Your website should be clearly visible to the relevant segment of the internet users and accessible in least possible steps. Its usability affects your conversion rates because a user will quickly move on to another website if he does not find it usable enough.

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Interviewing Your Potential SEO Company (Part 2)

Sangeeta — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:57:12 +0000

Last post Part 1 of Interviewing Your Potential SEO Company covered the issues of experience of the prospective team and the process used by the SEO company to attain stated objectives. This weeks Part 2 covers the area of partnership between the prospective SEO company and your business. These questions are designed to help determine whether the company is going to take an active interest in the success of your business or just punch the clock and charge the monthly search engine optimization fees.

On the partnership:

How often will we communicate” The specific schedule for briefings isnt as important as determining that communications between parties is both open and encouraged. Reporting should be done monthly to monitor progress while other communications can take place as events warrant. The biggest warning sign here would be a Dont call us, well call you type of response. If you get that, head for the door.
What is our timeline and how will we define success” An SEO company with experience and integrity will be able to provide estimates on your timeline but will never guarantee a result. Should the company youre interviewing respond with a front page guarantee within a certain time, they are simply telling you what you want hear in order to make the sale. Success can be defined in a number of ways including a ranking on the front page of the search engines for defined keywords. While this may be the most popular measure, there are other metrics for calculating success which may be more important such as a positive return on the investment for search engine optimization, regardless of page ranking.
Can you help build my business beyond your SEO efforts” This is big one. Working with a company that can bring new ideas to the table for your business can make a huge difference in your bottom line. This ability and willingness of a company to provide advice and guidance is probably the biggest difference between a relationship with a vendor and one with a partner.

Search engine optimization is a process conducted in a competitive environment with an ever-changing landscape. The best SEO companies wont be afraid to tell you that. Ask the questions listed above and last week and listen to the answers. The separation between the companies that can deliver and those that cant will become very clear.

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Interviewing Your Potential SEO Company (Part 1)

Sangeeta — Mon, 31 May 2010 11:06:01 +0000

Once the decision has been made to hire an SEO company, the next and most important step is to ensure that youre hiring the right one. Once the search for an SEO company begins, it becomes quickly apparent that the general message from each company is very similar on three points:

Getting to page one on the search engines
How fast its going to happen
The cost of making it happen

To ensure that you are going to be working with an SEO company that can deliver the goods, its important to dive deeper into each companys level of experience, how their process works, and whether their process has been successful for other clients. The following questions, divided into Part 1 and next weeks Part 2, should provide some answers to help you clarify which company will be the best to suit your needs, drive targeted traffic to your site, and improve the conversion rates from your sites visitors.On experience and the process:

How long have you been in business” Hiring a new company always carries its share of risks ranging from how well funded they are to their in-house skill sets. Dont let a discounted price distract you from these key issues. Insist on multiple years in business with a broad client list.
Tell me about your SEO process If the process doesnt start with extensive research on keywords and the competitive environment, run away. A process that doesnt define its starting point through thorough research is not going to reach its objectives. A company that bases its SEO work on initial research will be able to define the fastest and most cost effective path to success.
Can you show me some of your successes” Front page success with targeted traffic and conversions is what youre looking for and if the company has done it with others youre on the right track. Take it one step further and see if you can talk to the companies which have had successful campaigns run for them.
How many employees do you have” Avoid one or two man shops whenever possible. Regardless of the talent level, the risk here is that, should they get more work than they can handle or a larger client, your project will end up being outsourced or put on the back burner.
Have you done search engine optimization for anyone else in my industry” Industry specific experience may not be critical as most SEO work follows similar paths. If they are working with other businesses in the same industry, determine whether there will be any conflict issues, especially if both businesses are competing in the same local area.

There are two old clichs which apply directly to SEO; You get what you pay for, and Actions speak louder than words. To be sure youre working with an SEO that will deliver, dont be fooled by discounted prices and make sure that each companys actions have yielded success.

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Three Price Based SEO Scenarios That Dont Work

Sangeeta — Wed, 19 May 2010 11:37:01 +0000

Once the decision is made to outsource your search engine optimization, the next move is to decide on which SEO company will deliver results, visitors, and conversions in the most cost effective manner. The issue which traps many website owners is that the most tangible aspect of this decision making process is the cost of the project. Under this perception, essential issues such as keyword research, analysis of the existing competition, and the development of a marketing strategy can take a back seat to the priority of writing the smallest check possible. Whether a website owner is shopping on price only or an SEO company is selling their services on the cheap, the end result is usually the same; money spent with nothing to show for it. Here are few SEO scenarios based on price first, results second:

The kid – While their intentions are probably entirely honorable, your friends suggestion that their son who is home for summer is the right man for the job at the right price isnt likely to work out well. Even if things do go well what happens when school starts in the fall”
The moonlighter He may work in the business or may just be great with computers but trusting an SEO campaign to someone whos going to do it as a side job is doomed to failure for one simple reason. Its highly unlikely that a moonlighter will have the necessary time to execute a successful SEO campaign even if he has the skill set for it.
Page one promises, low cost, no traffic There are page one listings on the search engines which generate tons of targeted traffic as a result of keyword research and the execution of the resulting marketing strategy. Then there are those which generate none. The difference is that the page one listings which generate nothing are typically based on long tail (7 to 9 word) key phrases which may have some relevance to the site but generate no searches. In this scenario, the SEO company puts up a front page listing, collects the money from the site owner, and delivers nothing.

All successful SEO campaigns start with extensive keyword and keyphrase research. This research then determines where opportunities exist to drive targeted traffic in the most expeditious and cost effective manner possible. What follows are time consuming (often 100+ hours per month) and labor-intensive activities such as link-building, article submissions, blog posting and a host of others. Over time, these activities play out resulting in larger numbers of targeted traffic which finds its way to your site through the search engines. While it may be tempting to shop on price assuming the end result will be a positive, there are no short cuts to this formula.

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Search Engine Optimization as a Habit

Sangeeta — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:41:29 +0000

The promise of instant first page results on Google by some SEO companies may work for nine word, long-tail keyphrases but the reality for long term success in search engine optimization is something quite different. What works with SEO is when it becomes a habit, an ongoing process which starts with exhaustive research and then requires constant testing, man-hours, and analysis in order to provide the best results possible.

The countless moving parts of SEO also require monitoring on an ongoing basis. These changes may include algorithm changes at the search engines, changes in the competitive landscape, the introduction of a new product from your own company, or the addition of a new search engine such as Microsoft’s “Bing”. Whatever the circumstances may be, turning the following activities into habits will improve your SEO results and increase the numbers of targeted traffic to your site, which in turn can lead to higher conversion numbers:

Research - Any SEO effort, in order to be successful, must begin with a deep dive into keyword and keyphrase research. This advance research can determine the keywords and phrases which are highly competitive versus those which may drive targeted traffic but are being ignored or utilized minimally by competitors. This allows for resources to be directed at winnable searches versus highly competitive ones, which typically proves to be more cost effective and result in a much higher return on investment. High rankings on search engine results pages, as a benefit of going after less competitive keywords, will also occur much faster.
Analysis - Analyzing what is happening on your site must become a habit as well, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. Google provides a ton of free data and tools which provide information on several areas including what keywords you are ranking for, which keywords are driving traffic to your site and which ones aren’t, which pages have been indexed, where inbound links are coming from, and where the problems are on your site. The information allows for constant insight into what is working and what isn’t both on the site and for off-site efforts.
Upgrading your site - Habitual site analysis will lead the ability to fix and improve the weak points on the website. For example, if a large percentage of visitors is leaving after visiting a specific page, it’s likely that there is some sort of issue there whether it’s a broken link, bad content, confusing navigation, or something else. Constantly looking for weaknesses, making adjustments, and making sure your site is maintained can make a huge difference in keeping visitors on your site, which in turn improves the chances for conversion.
Testing and retesting - Test everything you do in your search engine optimization efforts. If changes are made, test those too. Keyword trends can change, content can get stale, and that new shopping cart may be confusing potential purchasers but you won’t know it unless you’re constantly testing and measuring the performance of your site.

Search engine optimization requires constant attention on multiple fronts to provide consistently superior results. Only by making SEO a habitual practice can a website owner maximize efforts, resources, and outcomes to keep traffic and conversions growing quarter to quarter. In many cases, the work required for habitual SEO can be too prohibitive to be done properly in-house. GMR Web Team specializes in all the areas of habitual search engine optimization, generating superior results on a consistent basis. For more information on running a successful SEO campaign visit www.gmrwebteam.com or call (714) 731 9000.

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How to Optimize Your Videos

Sangeeta — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:03:45 +0000

Video SEO or VSEO is optimizing video for YouTube, Yahoo Video and other internet video search engines.

There has been a 120% increase in video viewership compared to the last year as released by comScore. Internet habits seem to be changing and textual content is taking a backseat especially in countries where broadband connectivity speed is good.

Video optimization has caught on. Search engines rely on factors, such as metadata within the video file, inbound links and anchor text and some other factors to determine what the video is about.

Top 10 U.S. Online Video Brands, Home & Work
February 2010

Rank	Brand	Total Streams (000)	Unique Viewers (000)
1	YouTube	5,914,160	108,776
2	Hulu	647,560	14,130
3	MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	218,684	18,992
4	Yahoo!	196,736	25,513
5	CNN Digital Network	152,406	13,567
6	Turner Sports and Entertainment Digital Network	137,468	6,116
7	Nickelodeon Kids and Family Network	130,568	5,380
8	ABC Television	116,245	6,347
9	CBS Entertainment Network	107,590	7,312
10	Fox Interactive Media	104,787	11,314

You Must

Create great video content that people like to link to or send referrals to, there is no substitute to that.

Give your videos relevant filenames and URLs. Try to include keywords in the file name.

Break down long videos into smaller units or clips and describe each of the clips videos well using the keywords. Optimize the HTML part of the video clips. This means you need to add the Title, keyword, description, h1, h1 tags if any to the video. Also add the alt text tag in the SWFObject file. Be within the title tag display limit of 62 characters allowed by YouTube.

Keyword rich anchor text carries a lot of weight. So, Use appropriate keywords in the link text for the file.

Consider These Factors

Some video sites like Yahoo Video and Blinkx accept RSS or MRSS feed. You can enter a title, description, keywords and a full transcript. A full transcript can really prove useful in optimizing your videos.
Some video search engines like YouTube, AOL Video, and Yahoo Video allow uploading of video to them. You can upload your video files to these sites by following the same process – enter metadata including a title, description and keywords. This step will prove helpful in optimizing your videos.

Bonus Tips

Choose a popular format, such as .mov, .avi, or .wmv. From video SEO perspective it is not advisable offering the file in multiple formats. So, just make your selected version visible to the search engines, and offer it to all your visitors.
Length of your video file should be reasonable (maximum 5 minutes). Your visitors may not like lengthy video files, unless your content is really compelling to keep them fully engaged.
Smartly used thumbnails will help users decide which video to watch. A quick snapshot will help your visitors to decide which video they would like to invest their time on.

Give enough publicity and exposure to your video files. This will immensely help you in their optimization. Put your videos everywhere. Publicize your video files with proper RSS feeds. Get help from social book-marking tools to enhance the visibility of your videos. Embedding of your videos on other sites will give the desired exposure to your videos.

It is significant to optimize your video files to get traffic to your web site. Although video search is in its initial stage, it is indeed growing fast. With more and more users getting broadband access, video’s usage level will grow even faster. Adding videos to a website is becoming more popular concept.

More on video optimization

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Making Testing and Analyzing a Part of Website Maintenance

Ajay Prasad — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:29:55 +0000

Website maintenance is just not adding content to your site; it also involves analyzing reasons for a site’s performance and improving upon it.

Website conversion is a matter of constant evolution and efforts. Even the best of the efforts can fail if website owners show indifferent attitude and lack of interest. In today’s world, business environment is turning highly competitive; marketing of an Internet based business has become very important factor. A competent and experienced web based service provider can help a lot in achieving your company’s marketing results significantly.

If you really want online or even offline success, you must understand the importance of correct marketing testing.

There are some basic points which you need to ponder:

What is your website strategy?

What is your ROI on each strategy?

Are you split testing your content?

Do you have tracking installed on each page of your website?

Are you aware which form placement works better?

What site links are better exchanges?

Do you know the unique visitors, time spent, page hit, etc. for your website?

Are you familiar with all the measures for your website traffic?

Reorganizing the contents, giving it a less cluttered look and assuring that visitors get the right information they are looking for, can be an effective analyzing strategy.

Have you:

Added metatags and optimized the coding by doing the keyword research before reconstructing your website?

Redirected to the new pages ensuring that no link was lost? This can be possible if your testing and analyzing strategy is monitored by a competent and experienced website marketing company.

Added verification captcha to forms so that only humans are able to fill them?

Considered Changing the look of your website to something sophisticated and unique so that your website is capable of showing a high standard, keeping spammers away?

Added a blog to ensure that the site always had fresh content?

Put the special features on the right top space where it is easily visible?

If a website fails to offer its users fresh and growing experience, that site would soon become insecure, unusable, and obsolete. Code beautification, validation of markup, making XHTML more meaningful, spell-check of your website content are best and proven SEO principles that improve your site’s overall effectiveness. A thorough analysis of your website is vital for its effective accessibility and usability.

Testing and analyzing your website bounce rate is an important feature of a good website maintenance strategy. Bounce rate is a term used to denote the percentage of visitors who leave your website immediately after linking on the link to your website. If your visitors leave soon after they click on a link to your website, it’s like visitors leaving on the doorstep of your store. Rankings and traffic are meaningless statistics if you have a high bounce rate.

If your Internet Marketing service provider is professionally competent and experienced, if he knows the importance of the basic principles of testing and analyzing and applies them effectively as part of website maintenance strategy, you be rest assured, your company’s marketing experience will dramatically improve.
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Online Business: The Four Pillars

Ajay Prasad — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:05:17 +0000

You have launched your online business and the internet is full of advice. However, there are four fundamental pillars of online business that can never be stressed enough.

Success of any business, especially internet based business, solely depends on certain basic principles. They can be listed as under:

1. Plan your marketing strategy before launching a product. Failing to plan is like planning to fail. Do some market research to find out suitable product/service that people are looking for. Some product demand may be local, some may be global. Does your product have a global market? Is your business poised to cater to the demand? For example customized tee shirts are in demand globally. However locally, people would like tee-shirts customized for their own teams. Plan your strategy. Do you have the resources to target all markets or will you start locally expanding to global markets later? Are the shipping costs feasible? Identify such groups of prospective customers by visiting different online forums. Get familiarized with the common keywords that people use. You may also visit your competitors’ website to find out the features of their products. Now you know the product or service in demand and you are ready to introduce a product better than your competitors’ products.

2. Get creative Your website is virtually your office or showroom. It should display ample sale-appeal to inspire your prospects to visit your site. It should describe the features of your product/service and how it can help them. Do the usual-emphasize on your credibility; add testimonials from your existing customers. You may add after-sales-service or some sort of guarantee to win your customers’ confidence. Your website should convey that your product or service is the best choice for your customers. But most important, it should involve visitors in a feedback-idea circle. Get your visitors involved like launching a 100th visitor coupon, a shipping discount to a certain area and so on. Your creative efforts will get written about and will result in publicity for you.

3. Be professional. Have a professionally designed website. It adds to credibility and this is the most important factor for building successful online businesses. Your website should be simple and customer-friendly. Internet users are impatient by nature and you have very little time to grab their attention. Get a professional and experienced web design company who can design and build your website based on latest SEO principles. Contents and keywords selection are main features that will attract your customers to visit your site.

4. Relevant Information. Don’t cheat on information. This is the one and only reason a person visits your website. Enrich his experience. Give him more than he imagined. Don’t promise something that you do not provide. Provide useful information on your website. Internet is a powerful media for getting information. Your website should furnish valuable information for your customers and other sites – by way of link back to your site. This will increase traffic to your website. It will improve your online business. If you get associated to different forums and social networking sites, you can share your views as an expert in your trade.

There is a lot more to internet business. This post on internet strategy for online businesses is worth a read.
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Website Maintenance: Fundamental services

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:02:35 +0000

Google does a googly and keeps changing its search parameters; SEO is no longer as predictable as before.

But, an online business is a survival business and to survive the fundamentals must be strong.

I was analyzing a few sites yesterday for the keyword “custom frames”. From the onset it was clear that the good old sites were at the top. But Surprise! Deeper analysis showed that the traffic to the ones at the lowly #5 and #7 were more than those at #2 and #3. How could this be possible? I did some research, could they be on #1 for dome other keywords?

No they were not.

So the logical deduction was that they were getting better referral traffic- either through some other site, WOM publicity or social media sites. What made others refer those sites?

The on-site analysis showed that the sites were well constructed and one could navigate them instinctively. This means that they were friendly. The first step in Great Customer Service! Their feedback section was easy. And it seemed that they were really incorporating those feedbacks.

There were no broken links, no ads popping up. No unnecessary pages and the checkout was easy.

To me it was a back to basics lesson. Search engine optimization has moved focus from customer experience to search engine experience. The only thing that this website did was to maintain their website very well. The rest followed.
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admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:38:00 +0000

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