The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 16: Updates, pay per click and patience are the ingredients for best search engine results.

To have a major advantage in the search engines, you can simply update more often. If you have a static site that doesn’t have many changes to make, instead of changing each page, add a new page each day and get a new link to your site each day. This is enough for most sites. You can update a page with on-going news to do this, or start a blog.

If your area is more competitive, you’ll probably want to lean more towards solutions that include blogging, RSS, or any other technology that allows you to incorporate changes in more than one part of your site at a time. Sometimes you can edge out a competitor in the search engines just by having more than one page updating on the fly more than once a day.

In the meantime, while you’re waiting the 90 - 120 days it normally takes for good search engine results to take hold, you don’t have to wait for traffic. Use the pay per click feature that the major search engines have to help you get more traffic to your web sites. Just be careful to set a definite budget.

The last ingredient for best results in the search engines is to learn to be patient. It takes some time for your site to reach the top of the charts in the search engines, and most site never get there. This doesn’t have to be the fate of your site. Better planning, consulting with a proven expert, and following the general rules of search engine placement can get you great results over the long term.

The most brutal mistake when waiting for search engine traffic is to change the entire site around in the first 90 days, thinking that the search engnes aren’t recognizing your site. You don’t want to resort to that until that time period has passed.

Nina

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The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 15 : More search engine friendly design tips.

Picking up from yesterday, here are some more search engine issues you should take care of during the design phase.

Why during the design of your site? Well, someone is already accessing the HTML code of your site to make your pages appealing to the eye and to the general visitor. They might as well have the additional tweaks in mind that will bring search engine visitors specifically.

In addition to choosing and using keywords wisely, you’ll also want to be sure to get links back to your site. The best links are one-way links from authority sites, but that isn’t always possible. You can also get links from article marketing, directories, a few of the minor and specialty search engines, press releases and link trading.

Be careful with trading links. The volume of links you would need to get to make a difference, versus the fewer number of high quality one-way links, means that for most commercial sites, you should exhaust all possibilities with every other type of linking first.

Another important part of being ranked in the search engines is sticking to one theme. It’s folly to sell chocolate chip cookies and granola bars from the same site if those are your only two specialties. If you have a wider variety that all fits under the umbrella “snack food” then that is what you should target. But as soon as you have more than one theme that isn’t closely related to the first one, you should have more than one site.

In part three of this discussion on search engines and design, we’ll wrap up this mini-set of tips.

Nina

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The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number 14: Consider proper targeting and placement of keywords during the design phase.

In this day and age, simply having a page with the right amount of keywords in the right places isn’t necessarily enough to get traffic to your site from search engines, but there are still a few basic things you can include when designing pages that will help.

Choose your keywords very carefully. This is the foundation of your search engine marketing plan. Don’t just shoot for the top keyword. It probably has the most competition and the least amount of sticky traffic. Instead, find out that is a good balance between ease of ranking and flow of visitors.

It’s better to rank number 8 for a low traffic term than on page 100 for a high traffic term.

You want to use a keyword rich title. It’s better if your title starts with your keywords and ends with your company name than vice versa.

Also use your keywords throughout your text copy - the search engines are less likely to rank your site for a term it doesn’t use. However, don’t go overboard. A good rule of thumb is to be sure the page sounds like normal speech when read aloud.

We’ll have more non-keyword related tips in the next installment.

Nina

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