Website Design and Promotion

Choosing Less Popular Keywords

Darren Rouse has a post Targeting Secondary Keywords on a Blog in which he refers to a post on Workboxers titled, The Overlooked SEO Technique.

The point being made is that you shouldn't always focus on using the top keywords for your blog (or website) especially when your blog/website is new and it's difficult to get a high ranking in the search engines. It can be better to target the less popular ones as you will have a better chance of getting placed higher in the SE's.

To quote Darren:

This is a great strategy - the only thing I would add is that once you’ve established yourself highly with a less popular keyword and have built up traffic, inbound links etc - at that point you might find yourself able to switch your keyword focus slightly to the more popular keyword. This is not something you’d probably do very quickly - but in time you can build upon the success of the lesser searched for keyword with the real deal.

One method that I use is to target the less popular key words is to write articles either on your own site or on other sites with links leading back to your site.

Getting Prospect's Attention with Emails

Nick Usborne has a post on writing intro copy at the beginning of emails in order to get the reader's attention.

He points out how busy everyone is that they usually don't have time to read emails and therefore they scan as opposed to reading them. His solution is to offer the core message within the first few seconds of the email in a format that makes it stand out. Here is a example that he uses:

********************************************
Sign Up for Widgety News Today and
we’ll send you 3 FREE Widgety DVDs
********************************************

Nick makes a very important point. With research indicating that 79% of people scan as opposed to read on the web, it's becoming increasingly important to grab potential client's attention within a few seconds. On the web, information is only a click away and if prospects don't get what they want quickly, they are gone somewhere else.

I would also like to add that getting prospects attention in the subject of an email is even more important. If you fail to get their interest in the subject line, the email won't even be opened. Writing compelling email subject lines is a topic for a future post. :-)

Ways to Be Greener

Not much time for posting today, but I came across a great site for the environmentally conscious. Check out Ideal Bite. They've got some really good tips and interesting info on how to become greener. You can sign up for their daily eco-living tip, learn about environmentally friendly products, etc...

Keyword Discovery: A Key Word Analytical Tool

Lee Odden over at Online Marketing Blog has a post on a key word analytical tool that can help you with your keyword research.

Lee explains the difference between a keyword suggestion tool and a keyword analytical tool.  The former simply provides suggestions on key words to use for your website, whereas the latter gives more advanced information in addition to key word suggestions (e.g. the number of times any particular keyword was typed into the search engines and the competition for particular those keywords).

Lee then provides a good review of an analytical tool called Keyword Discovery. It sounds like an interesting tool that has a lot of advanced features.

There a few other good tools out there as well that you might want to consider using. For example, Word Tracker is a popular one.  A while back I wrote a post about a free report that was released by Word Tracker. The report shows you how to do keyword research using their tool.

If you want to improve your website rankings in the search engines a  good keyword research tool can really help.

More Search Engine Optimization Tips

Another great article by Jill Whelan of HighRankings.com — "New and Improved 10 Tips to the Top" — gives an updated list of how to get good search engine results for your site.

A few examples:

• Whenever possible, use an existing domain name, rather than purchasing a new one. These days, Google takes 9-12 months to index new sites. (Of course using their SiteMap tool can help a lot, but I've also heard stories of sites using that tool moving up and down the rankings a lot.)
• Don't write your website's copy specifically for search engines, but for your target market.
• Use descriptive labels for your text and image links (didn't we talk about this recently?).
• Work your keywords into each page's title tag.

A good and useful read.

Statistically Speaking

Nothing ever stays the same, especially in the world of the Internet. New browsers (or new versions of existing browsers) are popping up on a regular basis, computers (and their connections) are getting faster and better, monitors are getting bigger... you get the point.

If you're designing a website (or having one designed for you) it's good to know what the trends are so that most of your visitors will see what you want them to see. A great source of stats is at www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp.  It's pretty clear that Internet Explorer is still the browser of choice for most people. But, it's interesting to note that, while IE6 has hovered around 65-70% for 2½ years, IE5 has dropped from around 25% to around 6%. Not surprising that its usage has gone down, but the percentage hasn't been made up by IE6, rather mostly Firefox (around 20%). Opera's always got its following (around 1%), but that's not worth worrying about.

Bottom line is approximately 95% of Internet users these days are using IE or Firefox. So, make sure your website looks good in both of these browsers and you're pretty much covered (you can't please everyone all the time... 95% is about as good as it gets on the Web). There are some minor differences in the way the two browsers display pages (generally IE is more forgiving about certain coding) — such as some CSS elements — so you'll want to make sure everything looks okay in both (if necessary, you can have two versions of some pages).

As for other stats, such as resolution, color depth, etc., we're still moving up, which means the lowest common denominator is getting better all the time. But, it's always important to consider who your specific audience will be. If they're mostly going to be computer savvy and owning fast, newer machines, you can go big; otherwise you'll still want to cater to those with lower resolutions, slower connections, etc., to make everybody happy.

Business Gurus Write for Charity

Seth Godin is about to release a new edited book authored by 33 of the world's top business thinkers  called The Big Moo. The Big Moo is a follow-up to Seth's book, Purple Cow, in which Seth discuss the idea that in order for something to stand out in today's crowded market, it has to be remarkable, like seeing a purple cow would be.

What is especially cool about the book is that 100% of author royalties are being donated to 3 charities (Acumen Fund, The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and Room To Read). You can learn more about some of the the fund raising efforts for The Big Moo at Remarkabalize.

Due to the high profile of the authors, the book is likely to raise a fair chunk of cash for these charities.

Seth has been posting reviews of his book on his blog. There is a good one at 800-CEO Read Blog.

It's great to see successful business leaders giving back.

CSS Zen Garden

One of (if not the) best examples of the power of CSS (cascading style sheets) is the CSS Zen Garden.  If you take some time and look through the submitted designs, you'll see the incredible variety that can be applied to a website (theoretically of any number of pages) simply by changing one single file - the stylesheet.

At their most basic, CSS stylesheets allow you to apply global changes to all of the fonts used on your site. e.g., if you decide that having your paragraph text size is one point too high, you can lower its setting in the stylesheet and, voila, all paragraphs will have the smaller font.

To learn more about CSS, have a look at www.w3.org/Style/CSS/.

Even if you're not interested in the concept of CSS, the Zen Garden sure is a great place to get inspiration for different designs.