10 Ways to make your Website more User Friendly

It is no surprise that the internet has become overcrowded and competitive. You HAVE to be on top of your game to stand out and be successful, so probably the best thing to do is to give your site all the tools and tweaks it needs to achieve your big goals and help growing your business.Check out these 10 ways to ensure your website visitors are happy, enjoying the stay on your site and always return back, Why you will lose visitors if you can turn them into a loyal readers?
Speed it up
Today’s web visitors have short attention spans. Slow websites lose visitors like Adnan Sami loses his weight hehehe… Google looks at page speed as well, so speed it up! There are many ways to do this. Simply do a quick Google search to find some tips. I’ll also be writing a post shortly about various ways to increase page speed, so stick around.
Prominent navigation
Web designers are getting really creative these days. This is great because of all the good design that is around, but sometimes designers try too hard to “break the mold” and they end up throwing out a lot of the marketing methodology behind site layout. Creative designs are awesome, hiding important things like page navigation is not. Keep it cool, but keep your marketing hat on too.
Site map
There are several advantages to using well organized sitemaps. It is great for the search engines when spidering your website to ensure they index all of your pages. It is also great for users that are looking for a specific page. They can browse your sitemap and find what they are looking for quickly and easily. I recommend that you organize your sitemap into categories.
Search
Featuring a search bar on your site is a great way to help serve up relevant content to your users. If someone visits your site and is looking for something specific, all they have to do is a quick search and they are served up the content that matches their query. There is an analytics side to featuring a search bar as well. There are ways to track the searches made on your site so you can get a better understanding of what your website visitors are interested in.
Avoid Flash heavy doorway pages
Luckily this trend is coming to a close, but there is still much of this out there. There is no reason to put a page before a page. Web surfers are too impatient to have to visit a doorway page before they get to the page they want, especially if they have to view some extravagant Flash video. Just because you have a cool Flash video doesn’t meant you need to force visitors to watch it. Use the video, just find another place for it. Doorway pages are terrible for your SEO as well, so just try to avoid them altogether.
Categorize your content
This seems like a no-brainer and from what I have seen, most websites do this well. Try to break your pages into categories and sub-categories as much as makes sense. Most web surfers are scanners and the faster you can help them find what they are looking for the better.
Break up your content
If you have a lot of content on your pages, break it up with subheadings and images. This allows visitors to scan your content and digest it fast. Put important information that you want read in bold. Subheadings and images are great to break up long articles. Many visitors will bolt if they come to a page that looks like a book. Few people want to sit on a page for 15 minutes reading web content word for word.
Put thought into your call-to-action
Why do you have a website? Surely you had some goals and objectives in mind when you decided to build a website. I’m guessing that some of those goals were somehow sales related. So, if you’re lucky enough to attract web visitors to your site that are searching for your products or services, make buying easy for them. Highlight your calls to action prominently so the user knows how to take action fast.
Check your links!
The last thing you want is someone browsing around your website and come to a screeching halt when they run into a broken link. It is unprofessional and avoidable. Check your site and have someone else double check it as well. We are all busy and broken links happen, I’m guilty of it and I’m sure you are too. Just try to make a conscious effort to get another pair of eyes on your site to help you find things like this.
Easy on the eyes
By now we can all agree that content is great for your website. With that being said, let your content be great by being easily seen and read. Make your content easy to read. Light gray text on white background may look cool, but could be hard to read. Pay attention to colors on black backgrounds as that can make you text difficult to read as well.Websites can be powerful tools, but they are surely not set it and forget it. Measuring, tuning and tweaking are ongoing tasks of today’s webmasters. Using these suggestions will help reduce your bounce rate and keep your website visitors happy and coming back.This post is part of our Guest Blogging contest, if you like it then why not sharing it with your friends by retweeting it?

SEO for Flash Websites

SEO for Flash Based Wedsites
Flash-based websites are becoming more important and popular on the Internet. Sadly, Flash websites are not exactly SEO-friendly. If you want to improve the indexing (and hopefully ranking) of your flash-based website, keep reading.
Although there has been recent good news about Google improving the crawling and indexing of Flash content, it is still a good rule of thumb not to go overboard when it comes to developing flash websites, and stick to the classic rules of search engine crawlability.

These classic rules are the following (based on Google’s technical guidelines):

a. Prioritize the use of HTML text links more than any other technology in presenting a hyperlink (such as using flash-based hyperlinks or JavaScript).

b. Search engines find new content by following hyperlinks, therefore it is more important to use HTML-based hyperlinks pointing to all of the other content on your website (even if it uses Flash).

These two rules appear to be simple but can be quite difficult to implement. This tutorial aims to provide some clues and suggestions as to how webmasters might improve the search engine crawlability aspect of their Flash website.

It is important not to underestimate the impact of indexable text content crawled by search engines because,

Based on the above diagram, before you can get a high level of search engine traffic/organic traffic (provided also that your website has that amount of trust and authority in Google), your content needs to be crawled and indexed by search engine bots.

If your website is based on Flash, it is possible that there are some crawling issues that lead to decreased or even no text content being indexed, which can affect search engine traffic.
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Title Tag for Your Pages
Let’s do this step by step so that it will look easy. The technique involves rendering some of the parts as HTML so that you can add important SEO onsite factors like title tags.

For example, this is in pure flash:

<embed>
Your uncrawlable Flash Code…
</embed>

However, it is better to use HTML title tags and other important SEO onsite elements by adding an HTML-based structure in addition to Flash.
Recommended Code Structure:

<html>
<head>
<TITLE> Your SEO Friendly Title Tag </TITLE>

< — Other head elements here — >

</head>
<body>
<embed>

Your uncrawlable Flash Code…

</embed>
</body>
</html>

Search engine bots like Googlebot can now recognize an indexable title tag in HTML syntax. Do more research and make your title tag descriptive and accurate based on your content. Keywords in your title tag are still an important SEO onsite factor.

The flash content is placed within the body tag.
Here is a screen shot of a flash page with the Title tag element:


What is Share Point?

what is share point
Sharepoint is a browser-based platform from Microsoft that allows for easier, timely and effective documents management. In many cases, it can be used to facilitate business collaboration between an enterprise and the web. Once used in a business, it comes along with several benefits that every person going to use it will enjoy because it allows the user to gain access to a lot of information. Therefore, the installation of sharepoint in an organization enables individuals to easily manage their joint websites, eases sharing of information by people across boundaries, is independent and does not make reference to any form of technology, its usage is not different with that of Microsoft word and refers to many solutions based on the website. Sharepoint As An Organizational Platform.

When sharepoint has been used in an organization, it makes it easy to create a collaborative website among the employees. This is because the skills and expertise needed for such an accomplishment are very minimal thus turns out to be more favorable in an organization set up. It is easy for a person to access and fulfill all his communication needs and it does a lot of work if used properly. Sharepoint does not handle issues like updating content and defining specific accounts since they come automatically. Sharepoint unlike other software is able to manage information in a professional and effective manner. With schedules, documents, issue log and budget, information management tasks are effectively centralized to the advantage of the user.

Using sharepoint as a business platform in an organization promotes collaboration among employees. This is because work reports are easy to prepare and present at any company meeting. What is Sharepoint furthermore enhance communication within an organization if appropriately used. There is no need for a person to walk around the company offices passing messages to specific individuals since that is centrally managed using sharepoint. Information is equally available to the intended person at the right time and there are no cases of delay or distortion. The recipient receives his message in its original form and on time which enables him to send a reply if any. Every employee is accorded specific privileges as per their needs thus everybody gains access to information that is helpful to him only. Employees will only handle what is theirs, supervisors deal with what concerns them and any other person in an organization will follow the cue.

Business processes in an organization are made automatic under a sharepoint. There is no need to stress yourself making a certain process successful when sharepoint is there to take care of that. Dashboards are in addition easy to create using specific parts of the web like charts and key performance indicators courtesy of sharepoint. The other big advantage of using sharepoint in an organization is that it is easy to integrate with other existing data sources without difficulties. If you have been having a lot of problems related to data management, communication and any other area in your organization then the solution lies with sharepoint. Buy one and you will see a change.

SEO-That is what We need, but how?

SEO – That is what We need, But how?

The desperation of website owners for promoting websites at search engines has initiated the emergence of Search Engine Companies in geometric progression in the recent past. If anyone searches the phrase SEO companies one gets a list of 18,700,000 sites. So one can just sneak a peep into this populous world of SEO. More interestingly, if one searches by SEO consultants (within quotes), then 802,000 options are available to you for selection. The figures not only indicate the need but also show the growth rate of SEO companies and consultants. The figure, which is however unavailable is the number of corporations and website owners who rely more on themselves for their own SEO needs irrespective of their primary business goals. These amazingly luring facts have obviously paved the way into creating a world of suspended disbelieve which has become the hype and the obvious in demand segment. Thus this has enhanced the chances of frauds through gimmicks like “Result in 7 days”, “Guaranteed SEO”, “1000 Traffic Exchange everyday”. We surely advise one to give deep thought before relying on the integrity of these advertisements and always accept them with a pinch of salt.
What we suggest, Why don’t you try out to follow the basic steps on your own? The obvious question – How?
(1) Define goal for each of the pages on your website
(2) Analyze the most searched keywords/ phrases (Look for parallel keywords also)
(3) Apply them in your content as Meta tags
(4) Try to design using any open source package
(5) Use Flash only for decoration/ glamour of your pages (not for keywords)
(6) Use the keyword based ALT tag for each of the images
(7) Try to reduce the size of the web pages
(8) Try to increase the number of web pages of your site
(9) If possible, try to get it validated by w3c
(10) Submit the site in different search engines and directories
(11) Seek permission/ negotiate with different site owners for one way links
(12) If you require faster result, go for Pay Per Click (PPC) management
(13) Wait patiently…
In reality, none of these tasks are too difficult for the web developers/ designers of your company to accomplish. Let us take the example where one seeks permission for link building by sending emails to different site owners/ webmasters. The essential factor being research and analysis to attract the potential traffic for link building from relevant websites that has got a higher rank in search engine and has a higher Page Ranking Value (PPV). So, the best way to achieve it is by searching the websites at the search engine by using equivalent keywords/ phrases. Look who comes higher in rung and check their PPV by using Page Rank Info (http://www.prchecker.info) sort of tools. We suggest you to avoid the websites listed in the first few pages, as they will be either not interested or charge a premium price. One needs to record a huge number of parallel websites to fulfill your desired goal as you find the success rate of finding agreeable websites at your price very limited.
However Search Engine Submissions are mostly free. So it will soothe your aching wound! But we must say, never take SEO as a time-bound project; rather it is a process that deserves continuous patient perseverance.