Picking the Right Domain Name.

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Joshua

www.absolutewebservices.comIt is surprising how many people do not put enough thought into picking a domain name. The domain name for your website should be thought about in depth and some key factors should be considered.

Your domain name should be easy to spell and easy to remember. If a visitor cannot remember how to spell you domain they might try a few times and then give up. A name initially may sound catchy and good to use but if you think that some people may have a hard time spelling it or remembering it, then it is time to  move on to some thing else.

Another point that continues on from this theme is to keep the name short. Remember someone has to type in this name each time they want to visit your domain. A long name can leave the door open for mistakes and errors. People are more likely to remember a shorter name and also spell it correctly so that they can reach your site!

The next point to consider is going with a dot com instead of any of the other extensions like: abc.org, or abc.net. There may be certain cases where these extensions are valid but in most instances people always think that a website has a dot com extension and will try to put it even if it is wrong. You want to make sure that every possible click comes to your site so it is best to start off with a dot com.

You also want to make sure that you don’t use numbers and hyphens in you domain name. Most people forget them and if you are using them to distinguish yourself from another website out there, you may be sending people to their site instead of yours and losing clicks in the process.

The main issue is to use as many of these points as possible so that your domain name can make you website successful. Although you may not be able to adhere to some of these points, sticking with most of them should ensure that your website is on the road to success. If you need further help designing or defining your website the give Absolute Web Services a call at 305 937-2526 to schedule an appointment.

How to Promote Your Website.

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Joshua

www.absolutewebservices.comAfter you built your website and paid for various services, your budget may be a little short to pay for all the advertising that you may need.  Here are a few tips that will help you promote your website to get it more of the exposure that it may need.

We of course will start with blogs and social media. The good news is that most social media is free and a good way to build links and followers. You must start a blog if you haven’t done so already and this should be the same name or similar to your website. You should blog regularly about things that are similar to your topics and subject matter on your site and are interesting to your readers. These blogs also need to be tweeted about through a twitter account and also linked to your face book page.

Consider buying text link ads. While many people do not consider this a key form of advertising anymore, there are great are driving up your page ranking and are considerably cheap. Banner ads are also quite cheap these days. Many people think that banner ads don’t work and the truth is they don’t work in the same way that they did before where people would see them and click on them thus giving a high click through rate.

Now banner ads are used for brand visibility, the more someone sees your banner, the more familiar they will become with your name and brand. The second or third time your banner is seen will probably lead to a click.

Finally reviews are one of the most important ways to market your website. People often read the reviews on Yahoo and Amazon before they buy a product.  Find some people to review your sites and products for you and if you need to, there are sites that you can pay for reviews at reasonable prices. A customer is more likely to buy a product that has one or two good reviews rather than no reviews at all.

What is a Bounce Rate?

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Joshua

www.absolutewebservices.comYou may have heard or seen the term bounce rate when you have surfed the internet and if you have a web site you should definitely now what a bounce rate is and its relevance to your website.

In lay terms a bounce rate is the time or the amount of minutes or seconds that someone spends on one of the pages of your website (more precisely the landing page) before clicking or migrating away from your website. This is important to know because you want people to stay on your web pages and browse your site, reading the content and potentially making a buying decision. If you find that people are only spending a few seconds on your landing page without clicking through to any of your other pages then there may be something wrong with your content or images that may be turning your consumers off. You then know what pages you may need to change or rework.

There is a formula for finding the bounce rate and this is found by calculating:

Bounce rate = Visits that left after one page / Total number of visits

Any good analytical program will be able to help you work out the bounce rate of your web pages so you will not be left trying to work out the formula each time you want to know the bounce rate of your website. Reading more about bounce rates will help you increase your knowledge on bounce rates, for example having links on your page that someone may click on, may cause them to navigate away from your page. This link would cause them to click away from your site. Even having enticing ads on your page may cause a user to click on them and not go through to another page on your site.

If you need further help with your bounce rates please visit Absolute Web Services at http://www.absolutewebservices.com to schedule an appointment to speak with one of our qualified professionals.

A few tips to improve your blog.

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Joshua

www.aws3.comBlogs can be a key point in social media for your website and while we always say good content is key, here are a few tips that can help improve your blog even more.

Don’t forget to put pictures in your blog. People are very visual. The overall look of your blog will be better with a picture and believe it or not, people are more likely to read it and Google seems to like it better too.

Imagine your blog is like a good book. It needs a beginning or introduction, a middle, which should have at least two or three paragraphs and an ending. The ending should be more like a conclusion which should summarize the overall theme of your blog.  Make your blog easy to read, keep it simple and stick to the point that you are trying to make. Some times it helps to read your title a few times to make sure you are sticking to the point!

When you are explaining some thing don’t get too technical, it is easy to lose interest in reading something if you don’t understand what you are reading. The point of most blogs is to be short and to the point.  Most readers want the information that they need in just a few minutes before they move on. If they wanted to read an article or a book they would have chosen to read one.

If you can, it really helps to put in bullet points and sub headings. This will help your reader to pull out the information that the want easily and find the sections that most appeal to them, making your blog easy to read. While you may not like to hear it most people don’t read anything, they scan and pull out the relevant bits of info that they might need.

Simple Ways to Increase Your Page Views

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Joshua

www.aws3.comUsually the higher your pages views are the more traffic that you have on your site and the ultimate goal for most websites is to convert that traffic into sales. It can be very frustrating when your website has low page views, visitors are not spending very long on the site and your conversion rates are low. So here are some ways that might work for you to increase your page views and drive up your business.

A major mistake people make with their social media is to give people a sales pitch. In other words, trying to sell your website products or services. This can be a real turn off to many people. The main point you should be trying to make is to bring information to people that they want to read and want to keep coming back to your site for. You blog is probably located on your website, therefore people know where your home page is and this will contain all the  information that is needed to do any hard selling.

Don’t forget Facebook. Most people love Facebook (maybe even more so than Twitter). It is paramount that you always share your information with Facebook and keep your page updated, this will allow your content to be shared easily.

It pays to have your blog professionally designed for SEO. There is nothing to stop you from adding content to your blog once all the plugins have been added in. Many site owners have a blog designed by a professional web design company and then take over the site. A well designed site should be easy to run and not need the help of a web developer until you want to upgrade your website. It does not make sense to have a website and blog that is not fully optimized for SEO.

SEO Terms You Should Know

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Joshua

www.aws3.comSEO stands for search engine optimization and if you have a website it is something that you should try to learn more about if you want to get ahead of your competitors.  If your web page is optimized well it allows search engines to find it and rank it highly for any searches that you would like to be found for. There are quite a few terms that are involved in SEO and here are just a few that you should be familiar with.

A backlink is where you have a website or page pointing to your website. Backlinks are very good to have as the more that you have the better your page ranking will be. They can also be called inlinks or links. The only criteria are that they have to be quality links, meaning that the site that is backlinking to your page should be a quality site too.

Anchor text is similar to a backlink in that the backlink will show on a web page as clickable text. When you visit a website that has content with different colored text that has links behind the words these are called anchor text. Anchor text is also very good for SEO and Google looks favorable on pages that have good anchor text but you must make sure that the links are good and the anchor text is relevant.

Page Rank is how high your web page ranks on a search for where it comes in search results. This ranking is calculated by Google (if you are using Google) using an algorithm which no one is quite sure what the criteria are. It is thought that the premise is that the better quality of links that you have the more likely it is that your page is of value and should rank higher.

Keyword Density used to be very important for SEO purposes but a trend is showing to be moving away from this.  A keyword is the main topic of your blog or article. If you could describe it in one word this would be your keyword. If you were to take your web page and divide the number of times the keyword was used by the total number of words used on the page, this would be your keyword density.

Theses are just a few of the terms used in SEO.  To find out more about SEO and how it can enhance your business practices then call Absolute Web Services at (305) 937-2526 or visit us at http://www.aws3.com to schedule a consultation

Google’s #1 button

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Joshua

www.aws3.comSo we think that it is official. Google wants to have a “like” button (like Facebook) when it decided to introduce the #1 button in March. After playing around with it for a while, we are not quite sure if it is as useful as Google would like you to think or more of an annoyance.

If you like a product or a website you can give it a #1 rating as can your friends. If you are signed into your Google account and do a search, your search result will be populated by #1’s that your Google contacts have made.

Yes you heard right everyone in your Gmail contacts will know show up when you do a search with their likes, is that what you want? Is everyone that you have emailed a friend or do you have acquaintances and work colleagues in your mailing list? Do you want all those different entities involved in your searches or do you want to keep them separate.

When you do a search do you want the results based on what the people in your email list think or on the usual algorithms that Google uses? The choice is yours but it is worth thinking about.

What is SMO?

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Joshua

www.aws3.comThere are all types of acronyms floating around the web these days, but there may be one that you are not quite aware of and that is SMO. What is SMO?  It is social media optimization! And it means quite simply that the content that you put out concerning your website is able to be shared by all the different types of social media out there and is of good quality.

It is not surprising that this phrase has come about. Social media has claimed a strong foot hold in the industry when it comes to internet marketing, product development and social awareness. It is thought by some that SMO and SEO will be at the same level eventually and while this may not happen, it is correct that you are no where when it comes to internet marketing if you do not have a strong social media presence.

Not everyone has the knowledge or the time to manage a social media campaign. It is something that has to be done on a daily basis and cannot stop or you may see a drop in followers or rankings!

The most important thing that you want to do is to make sure that your social media – your blogs and tweets etc. are worth reading and worth sharing and re-tweeting. If you think that you might need help with your social media campaign then give Absolute Web Services a call at (305) 937-2526, we would be happy to help you organize a strategy that will work for you and your business.

Are You Prepared for The Mobile Web?

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Joshua

www.aws3.comIf you are thinking that you don’t need to change your website to compensate for mobile devices then your customers may be losing out and you may be losing customers. As we have stated may times at Absolute Web Services, it pays to have your website available to mobile devices because a huge amount of people search the web using a mobile device.

Here are some things that you should consider regarding mobile devices.

Mobile devices obviously have much smaller screens than a normal computer, therefore text will show smaller and you have to consider that mobile devices have lower screen resolution so a web site will have to be optimized to compensate for this.

Some smart phones don’t support multi-media. So if your site has music, animation or videos, it may not be supported by some smart phones. Don’t thing that every smart phone user has access to a 4G wireless network, most people are on much slower networks.

Time is a big consideration for mobile devices. A consumer is more likely to spend more time surfing the web on a computer than a mobile device, in fact a user on a mobile device will only spend a very short time the web. You have to make sure that your content is key and to the point to keep your customer on your site and give them the information that they want.

Are You Using WordPress to Your Advantage

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Joshua

www.aws3.comWordPress is one of the easiest blog platforms to use. But are you using all the features that it has to offer? Do you know how easily it is to add different plugins into your website? Well here are a few that are available now and how they can work for you.

WPtouch: Formats your website so that it can be read from a mobile device.

Contact Form 7: You can use this plugin to create easy to use forms to install on your website.

Akismet: This is a great plugin as it helps to cut down on spam and helps to verify comments left on your site making sure that they aren’t spam. Who doesn’t need that!

All in One SEO Pack: This helps your website by optimizing it for search engines.

NextGEN Gallery: allows you to incorporate an entire picture gallery into your site.

GTranslate: Allows you to translate your site into 58 different languages instantly.

Just by looking at out short list here, you can see that these plugins are very useful and is something that is easy to use. Play around with them and see if you like them. There are many more out there so if there is something that you would like to try on your site, search for a plug in, there is one out there for everything.

If you think that you may need some help with adding plugins to your website then visit Absolute Web Services to schedule an appointment or call us at 305-937-2526 to speak to one of our associates.

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