Make It Easy To Buy From Your Site

Convincing your prospects to purchase from you is not easy, but have you ever thought that you're making the process twice as difficult for both parties if your prospects are convinced but don't know how to buy from you? No matter how good you are at convincing your prospects, they won't buy if they find the process cumbersome.
First, you will want to check that people can find your order form easily and hassle-free. You can write a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.
Also, do you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, some may only want to pay with their credit card and others might want to send a cheque. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects' desired payment method. After all, it wouldn't make any sense to sell hard to a prospect only to find that they won't be able to pay you when they want to.
On the other hand, you will want to prove that you are a credible merchant. Is your order form secured using encryption technology? You would want to look into SSL for this. You can also offer a money back guarantee so that people will feel confident about buying from you. How about after sales support? Who do they contact when they have problems after purchasing?
Alternatively, you can add customer testimonials, your contact information, address, and so on to boost your prospects' confidence. Make them feel safe about buying something from you, a total stranger to them on the other end of the Internet.
As a conclusion, it would be very pitiful if you sold hard and sold well to a prospect and something goes wrong when he or she is ready to pay. Eliminate any chances of that to maximize your profits!

5 Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter". In fact, they are just that -- pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the "back" button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use so many banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion means "abandon ship"!

5) Avoid using audio on your site
Have you ever seen internet giants such as eBay,Google, Amazon, Facebook or Twitter user audio in their homepage? If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine.

top 10 list of what will drive people away from your site

1) Visitor Counters. Visitors usually don't care how many other people have visited your site but I can guarantee you that if the visitor counter shows a low number, that is a really psychological turn-off to people. It shows that your website has low traffic and therefore is not very popular. If you don’t want to take the visitor counter off your site many third party counter scripts like statcounter.com offer you the possibility to hide the counter from the visitor but you can still view it from your own statcounter admin area. Also any good web host should have detailed statistics available. If not– get a new one!

2) “Under construction” signs on your website should be avoided at any cost. Websites are supposed to be “living documents” and they are supposed to change and grow over time. Under
Construction signs on your website look amateurish and if your site is not ready to show to the public, then simply DON’T!

3) Technology Overuse. Keep your website simple and easy to navigate. There are tons of really wild and cool things you can program into your website but they are only going to distract the visitor and turn the focus away from your main message. If the tech stuff is in addition slowing down the loading time of your page, ditch it in favour of a more simple design. Avoid huge flash shows, animated graphics and other large graphics, as well as automatic loading videos and audio.

4) Copyright statements. Always make sure you include copyright statements on every page, and update the year in the copyright statement as appropriate. If visitors look at your website and see that the copyright information looks like this; Copyright 1996, it’s a real turn off and it is actually screaming out loud that your website has not been updated for years! As I wrote above websites are supposed to be living documents and if it has not been updated since 1996 it is pretty dead!

5) Long sentences can kill your website. Remember; people get easily distracted. Help your visitors by keeping your sentences short and to the point.

7) Avoid Passive Verbs. If you do not know what passive verbs are you can have a look at this link:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_actpass.html
Use active sentences and active verbs on your website as they are much more powerful and give much energy to your site than passive verbs do.

8) What are the benefits of your products or services? Lack of identifying this to your customer can cause your business to fail. People make purchases for two reasons; to get rid of pain or to get pleasure. Forget about telling your possible customer tech stuff like how your “widget” is ade out of PVC with 3 inch steel plates. That’s just a bunch of crap your customer won’t care about anyways. Tell them how THEY can benefit from your products. Appeal to their feelings and emotions.

9) No Call to Action? You MUST tell your visitors what to do – in marketing that’s called a “Call To Action.” Forgetting this may result in a customer leaving before he or she has bought anything. If you tell your visitors what to do next it is much more likeable that you will see better results. Examples: “Click on the link below, Sign up to our newsletter, Call Us” and last but absolutely not least: “Order today!”

10) I have built a website, now I’ll get a bunch of visitors! You have built a website and you think you just can forget about it and visitors will come? Actually once you have built your website the hard part begins. You have to market your website in order to get traffic. There is no use in spending lots of time and a lot of green bills on creating your website if you fail to market it. You could just as well have thrown the money out the window or given it to a homeless guy, and it would actually come to better use!

Making your website attractive, interesting and engaging

Introduction
To succeed at your online business (whether you are sellingyour own product/service or are selling for other merchantsas an affiliate), you need a Web site created just for that- a simple, focused site. One that is easy to build,maintenance-free, low cost, credible, and a powerfultraffic-builder and customer-converter.
Having the right tool and the right product alone doesn’tinsure the success of your website. There are many factorsto be considered while designing a site. Unfortunately, mostof these are easily ignored by Internet business owners.

Build It for Speed
It's a fact of modern life - people are in a hurry. Thismeans that you have between 10 and 30 seconds to captureyour potential customer's attention. Tominimize your loadtime, keep graphics small. Compress them where possible. Useflashy technology (JavaScript, Flash, Streaming Audio/Video,animation) sparingly and only if it is important to yourpresentation.

Target your Market
Know who your market is and make certain that your sitecaters to their needs. It is critical that your site reflectthe values of your potential customers. Is your marketmostly business professionals? If so, the site must be cleanand professional. Is your product aimed mostly a teenagersand young adults? Then your site could be more informal andrelaxed. The key here is to know your market and build thesite to their preferences.

Focus the Site
Make certain your web site is focused on the goal, sellingyour product or service. A site offering many unrelatedproducts is not necessarily unfocused, but this is often thecase. If your business does offer many products, dedicate aunique page for each instead of trying to sell them all fromone page.

Credibility Is Crucial
The most professionally designed site won't sell if yourcustomers don't believe in you. A clear privacy statementis one way to build your credibility. Provide a prominentlink to your privacy statement from every page on the siteas well as from any location that you are asking yourvisitors for personal information. Provide legitimatecontact information on line.

Navigation should be Simple
Make site navigation easy and intuitive. Simple and smoothnavigation adds to the convenience of the visitors. Addpowerful search and catalog features. Many times a lot ofvisitors do not have the patience to navigate through thewhole website to find what they are looking for.

Consistency is the key
Make sure the site is consistent in look, feel and design.Nothing is more jarring and disturbing to a customer thanfeeling as if they have just gone to another site. Keepcolors and themes constant throughout the site.

Make your site interactive and personalized
Make your website interactive. Add feedback forms as wellas email forms that allow your prospective customers to askyou any questions they might have pertaining to a product.Personalization of your website is another key element thatcan lead to customer delight and can increase your sales.Personalization technology provides you the analytic toolsto facilitate cross-selling and up-selling when the customeris buying online. It would give you an idea of what productsto cross-sell and up-sell. For example, when a person buys aCD player, a disc cleaner can also be offered.

Content is King
Good content sells a product. Ask yourself the followingquestions. Does your copy convey the message you wish to getacross to your visitors? Is it compelling? Does it lead yourvisitor through the sales process? Have others review,critique and edit your copy to insure it is delivering theintended message. Always double check your spelling andgrammar.

These eight, simple rules will go a long way toward theimprovement of your website and most importantly, turnvisitors into customers.

Top Search Engines 2

Lycos
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internettoday, next to Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named"T-Rex", crawls the web and provides updates to the Lycosindex from time to time. The FAST crawler provides resultsfor Lycos in addition to its own database.
The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags to heavily,instead it relies on its own ranking algorithm to rank pagesreturned in results. The URL, META title, text headings, andword frequency are just a few of the methods Lycos uses torank pages. Lycos does support pages with Frame content.However, any page that isn't at least 75 words in content isnot indexed.

Excite
Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much moreof a portal than just simply a search engine, Excite used tobe a fairly popular search engine, until companies such asGoogle seemed to have dominated the search engine market. Asof recently, Excite no longer accepts submissions of URL's,and appears to no longer spider. To get into the Excitesearch results, you need to be either listed with Overtureor Inktomi.

Looksmart
Getting a listed with Looksmart could mean getting a goodamount of traffic to your site. Looksmart's results appearin many search engines, including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, andmany others.
Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your siteis generally non-business related, you can submit your siteto Zeal (Looksmart's sister site ), or if you are abusiness, you can pay a fee to have your site listed. Eithermethod will get you listed in Looksmart and its partnersites if you are approved.
Once you have submitted your site, and it is approved forlisting it will take up to about 7 days for your site to belisted on Looksmart and its partner sites.

AOL Search
America Online signed a multiyear pact with Google for Websearch results and accompanying ad-sponsored links, endingrelationships with pay-for-performance service OvertureServices
and Inktomi, its algorithmic search provider ofnearly three years

Take some time to register with these search engines as soonas possible and watch the traffic grow.

Top Search Engines 1

Google
Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past severalyears. They have gone from beta testing, to becoming theInternet's largest index of web pages in a very short time.Their spider, affectionately named "Googlebot", crawls theweb and provides updates to Google's index about once amonth.
Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, byfar, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returnedfrom a result, probably one of the main reasons it hasbecome so popular over the years. Google has several methodswhich determine page rank in returned searches.

Yahoo
Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals onthe Internet today, and the site went live in August of1994. Yahoo! is a 100% human edited directory, and providessecondary search results using Google.
Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around,as far as web directories and search engines go.Unfortunately, however, it is also one of the most difficultto get listed in, unless of course you pay to submit yoursite. Even if you pay it doesn't guarantee you will getlisted.
Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is "reviewed" by aYahoo! editor, and if approved will appear in the next indexupdate.

AltaVista
Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spidernamed 'scooter' accessing their pages. Scooter used to beAltaVista's robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update,a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web. Whicheverspider AltaVista uses, it is one of the largest searchengines on the net today, next to Google.
It will usually take several months for AltaVista to indexyour entire site, although the past few months scooterhasn't been deep crawling too well. Unlike Google, AltaVistawill only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it takes a goodamount of time to index your site depending on how largeyour site is.
AltaVista gets most of its results from its own index,however they do pull the top 5 results of each search fromOverture (formerly Goto).

Inktomi
Inktomi's popularity grew several years ago as they poweredthe secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. Sincethen, Yahoo as switched to using Google as their secondarysearch and backend database, however Inktomi is just aspopular now, as they were several years ago, if not more so.Their spiders are named "Slurp", and different versions ofSlurp crawls the web many different times throughout themonth, as Inktomi powers many sites search results. Thereisn't much more to Inktomi then that. Slurp puts heavyweight on Title and description tags, and will rarely deepcrawl a site. Slurp usually only spider’s pages that aresubmitted to its index.
Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of theseare America Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto,CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more.

Secrets of Winning Traffic through Search Engines

How Search Engines work

Internet search engines are special sites on the Web thatare designed to help people find information stored on othersites. There are differences in the ways various searchengines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:
* They search the Internet -- or select pieces of the Internet -- based on important words.* They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them.* They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.
Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousandpages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousandinquiries each day. Today, a top search engine will indexhundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens ofmillions of queries per day.

Spidering
Before a search engine can tell you where a file or documentis, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds ofmillions of Web pages that exist, a search engine employsspecial software robots, called spiders, to build lists ofthe words found on Web sites.
When a spider is building its lists, the process is calledWeb crawling. In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, asearch engine's spiders have to look at a lot of pages. Howdoes any spider start its travels over the Web? The usualstarting points are lists of heavily used servers and verypopular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site,indexing the words on its pages and following every linkfound within the site. In this way, the spidering systemquickly begins to travel, spreading out across the mostwidely used portions of the Web.

Indexing
Once the spiders have completed the task of findinginformation on Web pages, the search engine must store theinformation in a way that makes it useful. There are two keycomponents involved in making the gathered data accessibleto users:
* The information stored with the data* The method by which the information is indexed
In the simplest case, a search engine could just store theword and the URL where it was found. In reality, this wouldmake for an engine of limited use, since there would be noway of telling whether the word was used in an important ora trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once ormany times or whether the page contained links to otherpages containing the word. In other words, there would be noway of building the ranking list that tries to present themost useful pages at the top of the list of search results.
To make for more useful results, most search engines storemore than just the word and URL. An engine might store thenumber of times that the word appears on a page. The enginemight assign a weight to each entry, with increasing valuesassigned to words as they appear near the top of thedocument, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or inthe title of the page. Each commercial search engine has adifferent formula for assigning weight to the words in itsindex. This is one of the reasons that a search for the sameword on different search engines will produce differentlists, with the pages presented in different orders.
An index has a single purpose: It allows information to befound as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways foran index to be built, but one of the most effective ways isto build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied toattach a numerical value to each word. The formula isdesigned to evenly distribute the entries across apredetermined number of divisions. This numericaldistribution is different from the distribution of wordsacross the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table'seffectiveness.

The search engine software or program is the final part.When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, thesearch engine software searches the index for relevantinformation. The software then provides a report back to thesearcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.Is Your website search engine friendly? If you have anydoubts, it may be time to take a look and make your own “bigbreak”.