How to add RSS feed

Day610
For those of you who bookmark blogs and sites, but then never think to go back and read them. Let me explain how you can use the RSS feed. Click on the orange RSS icon in the upper right of my blog. This will open up a choice of places you can have the feed show up for you to read. Select one and you will get the new posts there. It's an efficient way to keep up with your online reading.

Free SEO Tool

Day609
Here’s a free SEO tool that provides an SEO score for your website with custom search engine optimization and marketing advice for your website.

http://www.websitegrader.com

Submitting Your Site to Search Engines

Day606
You will find millions of opinions on the Internet. Some people say you should submit your site to search engines if you're not listed. Some people say you should NOT submit your site; that it's better to wait until your site is found and indexed by the search engine bots/spiders.

You don't have to submit your site because it will eventually be found and indexed.

As far as whether you should submit your site to the search engines that haven't found it yet, there isn't any correct answer since opinions vary. The most important or widely used search engines are:

http://www.live.com
http://www.google.com
http://www.ask.com
http://www.yahoo.com

Altavista uses the exact same database as Yahoo. Live.com is supposedly going to replace msnsearch.com. A lot of little "nobody" search engines are driven by Google. So you only need to be concerned about these four.

Submitting your site to Open Directory is good as well. They are at dmoz.org. Being listed with them seems to improve a site's position on the search engines. They're very slow to add a site though. They have humans look at the site and assign a description to it, so it gives the sites listed there a kind of legitimacy or higher "status" than the other search engines which just automatically add sites with a software routine.

The best way to help boost a web site in search engine rankings is to get quality links from other sites. Use www.webmastereyes.com to find sites with high page rank and try to get them to link to you with anchor text that's relevant to your site.(Not just “click here”)

Are You Chasing Vistors away from your Website?

Day605
Here’s a good article I found by Terri Seymour. Her information is at the end.

To keep your visitors coming back, the main goals of your website are for visitor participation and benefits. Provide an interesting, beneficial and useful website and they will come back!

If your site is annoying you can be sure they will find another site to visit, never to come back to yours.

Here are some ways you can be sure to annoy your visitors: (they might not annoy all, but probably the majority)

** Frames - Chopping up a site with frames is a great way to get your visitors frustrated. These frames are very obtrusive and make navigation and reading your site much harder. They are also disliked by the search engine spiders.

** Overbearing Graphics - Not only are these blinking and flashing graphics distracting and unnecessary, they can also cause your site to download very slowly. Most people do not have the time to sit and wait for an extremely slow site, and will leave before even knowing what your site has to offer.

** No Contact Information - I cannot stress enough how important it is to have your email address and other contact info on every page. This will add credibility to your site and always give your visitors a reason to be assured that you can be reached when needed.

** Hard To Navigate -You want your visitors to be able to get around your site without trouble. Have your links all together in a place that is easily seen. Have them in the same place on every page.

** Inconsistent Page Design - I have been on some sites where after clicking on a link, I didn't even know if I was at the same site. The page was totally different and did not have any of the same information or links as the previous page. After trying to find what I was looking for and not finding it, I left. Please keep your site design uniform and consistent. This will make it much easier on your visitors.

** Spelling and Grammar – Always proofread your web pages. Designing and building a professional website is a waste of time if it reads like a five year old wrote it. With spell checker, grammar checker, dictionaries, etc. there is no excuse for poorly written web pages!

** Too Many Banners - If you want banners on your site, set up a banner exchange page for this purpose only. Do not have your homepage or other pages so loaded with banners that there isn't room for anything else.

** Hard To Read Text - Do not use fancy text or pale text on a pale background. The easiest to read is a dark text on a light background. Also, if you use a textured or print background, be sure that it is not hard on the eyes. One site I visited had a weave look background that made the text so hard to read, after a few minutes of looking around I had to leave because I was getting a headache. If you think it is easy to see get a few more opinions just to be sure!

** Music - Music used to be very common on the web. Practically every site you went to had music. More and more people started realizing that this was a major distraction and annoyance to a lot of people. If you really want music, have a choice for your visitors. Let them decide if they want the music.

** Lack of Content -You've got to have content. People visit a website to see what the site has that will benefit them. Useful, helpful, practical content can't be beat! This would include resources, freebies, tips, ideas, information, interaction, contests, etc.

One thing you can do is visit several sites that pertain to your business. Study these sites and write down what you find annoying. Write down any reasons you have for leaving the site. Take note of what you like about these sites. Incorporate all these findings into creating a sharp, clean, useful website with nothing that will chase away your visitors!

Terri Seymour has several years online experience and has helped many people start their own business. Visit her site at seymourproducts.com for resources, $1 resell e-books & software, free tutorials, affiliate programs, and a free ezine with bonus report: 77 Ways to Get Traffic!

Why Online Stores Need RSS

Day601
This is a good article by Gabriele Clyde explaining how RSS helps your online business:

RSS opens a new gateway to ever-flooding effective business strategies, never existed before, and creates a new dimension in the way you reach out to the public. When you, as a marketer/ businessman/company, decide to promote your business through the marketing strategies of Internet, try to take the maximum advantage of this interactive medium. When your website does not engage visitors, then your web-based promotional efforts have been crippled. What are the means to attract visitors to your website, when there exists a million dollar question – whose website to visit? Given innumerable choices, just think of the visitor’s plight to decide which one and whether he wishes to really come back after his first visit.

RSS has a lot of advantages over the other existing methods, to turn it into the most sought-after, powerful, influential tool, which will take over the Internet world very soon, if understood fully and properly. It is basically a ‘push-based’ communication method, which can be published and subscribed to easily. It can be explained as a file containing the latest information and accessed by subscribers who are interested.

Consider a website as a real-world conversation. We need to adopt the same things just like while trying to sell our product to a sales prospect in person. RSS has wonderful features, which embody the techniques of conversational marketing in a very flexible way. Don’t you go through the following while reaching out to the visitors? Glance through and see how RSS helps:

• First, you decide your goal and try to analyze what kind of audience your website can get.
• What do the visitors get on visiting your website? Interview customers for their feedback, do a research and make changes to your website accordingly. The last part can be done very easily done using RSS feeds (which we will see in detail in the later chapters).
• The look of your website is very important. RSS has made it very easy to understand, see and feel your message for the visitors by mixing video and audio channels to your contents. Also, keep in mind that not only is it enough to have a good website but an appropriate one to your business also, to catch your visitor’s eye.
• Make your website work well in all the browsers. Your website is open to a variety of visitors who can prefer browsers of their choices. RSS is a convenient way since it works on all platforms. Most of the browsers may not face hurdles accessing RSS.
• Your website is the gold mine of information on how the public respond to what you say. RSS provides an unbelievable platform to discuss the views of the public without wasting time. Instead, you can spend your time on crafting quality contents. RSS has got many special features such as dialog facilitators, RSS radars, and automatic responders to enhance the significance of conversational marketing.
• You can collect a lot of information such as the number of subscribers, their interests, their reading frequency, and the topics they are more interested in etc using RSS feeds. These are definitely going to be vital for improving your standards of business.
• Your search engine ranking reflects how good your website is! RSS increases the search engine ranking remarkably and well, again helps develop your business.

And do not think it’s a super-techie thing that you cannot use! Once you are familiar with the tool, you are open to the amazing world of RSS and one day, sure to find yourself hooked to it! It’s going to be the beginning of an unbelievable era, exploring deeper and deeper the many faces of RSS and of course, the web world, through it! Though it can’t be an all-out replacement for other technologies, it can be a standard to optimize your Internet experience.

More articles from this pro: http://www.ArticlePros.com/author.php?Gabriel Clyde

Son Shine Christian Apparel and Gifts

Day591
I’ve been adding a new section to my store called Son Shine. I’ve got about half the products and designs uploaded so far and really like it. I use the half sun with a Bible verse about light to tie in Jesus the Son of God.

http://www.givitup.com