How To Use Images, Graphics And Thumbnails To Promote Your Site

Images, graphics and thumbnails play an important role in the overall look and feel of your website. They can greatly improve the usefulness of your site; making it more user-friendly and easier to navigate. More importantly, the visual images on your site can be optimized to improve your search engine rankings.

Despite their importance, many webmasters ignore images or graphics when it comes to optimizing their web pages. Don't make the same mistake.

There are some simple rules to follow when using SEO with your onsite graphics. Here are a few tips:

First, you must know exactly what an 'Alt Image Tag' is in order to optimize for the search engines. You must also realize search engine robots can't see your images, they can only read text - the text in your Alt Image Tags. So you have to construct your Alt Image Tags with this factor in mind and feed these robots with your popular keywords. Search engine robots usually spider popular sites every day or so.

What is an Alt Image Tag?

Every image, graphic or thumbnail on your site will have html code similar to this:

Your Alt Image Tag will be:

alt="Your Keyword Image"

Always include an Alt Image Tag description for all your images, graphics and thumbnails. This includes all headers, background images and even thumbnails of other sites, if you use them. Keep your descriptions of the images short and related to the image itself. It would be a good idea to end each description with the word photo, image or graphic.

Many marketers like to include their main keyword or keyword phrase they are targeting in the Alt Image Tag. They also place this keyword phrase in the text on their page, in the title tag, meta description and many alert marketers also place their keyword phrase in the URL of that page. You should also include your keyword phrase in the last 25 words on the same page.

Feed the spiders but be careful!

DON'T repeat the same keyword or keyword phrase numerous time on your page in the image tags - this may be seen as keyword spamming by the robots.

Using plurals and variations of your keyword is fine, such as: faxing service, fax services, efax services.

Many marketers also use misspelled keywords in the Alt Image Tag as it can only be seen when the image is scrolled over. Spiders can't spell but they will index these misspelled keywords and bring in extra traffic!

Graphics

The ordinary website will have more than just photos or images on a webpage. You will have headers, backgrounds, liners, etc. all of these should also have Alt Image Tags. Although in this age of the broadband Internet, your page loading time is not a major factor as it once was, but you should still reduce all your images so that they will download quickly.

Many professional web designers place unneeded or useless keywords (ones that get no searches) in the graphics on their site. For example, instead of placing 'Welcome to our site' in a headline - place it in a graphic at the top of your page. This will free up your headline for your main keywords.

Placing these useless words in a graphic where the robots can't read them - frees up your Alt Tags for keywords that you're promoting. Place your main keywords in the headline for better SEO. Keep feeding those spiders!

But always keep in mind, you are creating your content or web pages for real live human beings so you should check to see what your site's graphics look like in the different browsers. Try here: www.anybrowser.com

Since we have an ever increasing numbers of different screen or display sizes, always check to see how your graphics look on a different size display. You might be horrified to find your perfectly designed page on a 15" PC is totally distorted on a 17" widescreen laptop.

Needless to say, for site consistency, keep all your background images and logos the same throughout your site. Same goes for your fonts and text size, it will keep your site's visitors more focused and on track.

Thumbnails

Many online sites use thumbnails to raise the professional quality of their sites. It makes for a higher standard of design, not to mention, it will increase the usability of your site. It will also increase your click thru rates.

Thumbnails are screen capture shots of a website. They give the surfer some idea of what a site looks like before they visit that site. In a billion site Internet, this can be very important for the promotion of your site.

Using thumbnails will increase the visibility of your site and make it stand out from the crowd. Many professional sites like AOL, Network Solutions, and ALexa use thumbnails. Any site can use thumbnails, check the resource box at the end of this article for further directions on how to place thumbnails on your own site or sites.

Conclusion

Using images, graphics and thumbnails to promote your site can be easily done if you use the advice given above. Always remember to use Alt Image Tags to position your selected keywords or keywords in the search engines. Consistently do this over a long period of time and you will see your site rise in the rankings. Keep those spiders well fed and happy!

More importantly, using these visual aids will also improve the friendliness and usability of your site. It will help raise the professional look and feel of your site so that other webmasters and sites will want to link to your site; further increasing your rankings and the popularity of your site.

Don't underestimate the power of a simple image - it can do wonders for your site.

by: Titus Hoskins
Copyright (c) 2006 Titus Hoskins

How To Create And Promote A Web Site That Works

A search is carried out on Google - the most used search engine currently on the internet - every 0.003 of a second, searching over 8 billion Web pages. If your Web site does not match the searchers' enquiries your chances of trading successfully and your business 'making it' on the internet are low. The World Wide Web is like one huge shopping mall, every Web site offering products and services; some 'shops' are well lit and easy to access, however, the majority have the lights turned off, their shutters down and the 'closed' sign on the door.

Making your company Web site attractive and popular is more than just putting a picture of the product or a description of the service onto a Web page and publishing it on the Web. There are a host of issues which need to be addressed to ensure success, but before a Web developer is even contracted, the bigger picture of strategic marketing needs to be addressed. It is important to understand that marketing is not sales, strategic marketing provides the structure to help us collate information and through it understand our customers. This is information that we need in order to sell successfully.

Applying this to a company Web site, before any development work is carried out on the Web site we have to be clear on who the customer is and why they are likely to buy. In describing the target customer, such factors as gender, age and socio-economic group are essentials while further information such as technical capability and language level can also be useful.

By carrying out primary market research - and this means not just reading reports or looking at statistics, actually get up from your desk and go and ask your customers - we will be able to find out most of this information offering a greater understanding of the customer profile. Including this information in your design brief puts the Web developer in a much better position to produce a site that the end user will feel affiliated to and comfortable with.

What is the objective of the site? Is it to provide information, to produce direct sales, or just a brochure-ware site showing the company and its capabilities? Is it intended to generate enquiries from new customers or to keep existing customers informed? Objectives will include the detailed information on any existing brand identity and the image the company wants to portray to the world at large. Remember your Web site is now the first port of call for a potential customer. Recent research has shown that viewers will make a decision on the suitability of a company in 20 milliseconds based purely on the image they are seeing on their computer screen. What is your Web site saying about your company? Make sure your Web developer is fully informed.

It is also important to identify the gender of your client base. This has been much ignored to date, possibly to the detriment of many businesses. A recent survey reported that women were 'Dunces of the dashboard': many of those surveyed did not understand the purpose of most of the switches or lights on their own car dashboard (BBC Breakfast 3/3/06); no comment was made in the report as to why this is, although it just might be because most cars are designed by men. Much research and writing exists on how communication differs between genders; since a Web site is by its nature a communication, it should make sense to have a Web site targeted at female buyers designed and developed by a female designer or team. The same obviously applies to a male audience, if this is your target then contract a male designer to build your site. Recent research at the University of Glamorgan supports this; it has shown that gender makes a big difference in the perceptions of the viewer. According to their research over 77% of Web sites showed a predominantly male design, reflecting the higher proportion of male designers in the marketplace. An interesting statistic when according to Judy Hoyt Pettigrew (author of Women Mean Business: The Secret to Selling to Women), as much has 80% of purchases are made by women.

Another consideration is geography and culture. Is the Web site going to be used to target a particular community or sector? Make sure that this is your focus and provide information that is of value to your viewers. Data that helps the decision making process can be the difference between a sale and no sale. In a recent survey from AOP over 80% of business decision makers use the internet and the content of Web sites to help make a decision on a purchase. Over half of the respondents also cited their trust in information supplied on Web sites.

Once we have a Web site that represents the business effectively in terms of image, content and functionality, what else needs to be addressed? Major considerations in the promotion of the site through search engine listings (not paid or sponsored) are the keywords and key-phrases. Over the past eight years it has baffled me that so many sites are missing this meta-data and have no appropriate page titles. These are essential if potential customers are to find your Web site and offerings. Although it is not obvious to the viewer, the purpose of this information is to provide the search engine with the data they need to place the site in the correct category in the database, which in turn helps the search engine respond to search terms entered by users.

To achieve successful ranking in search engines the title and meta-data must reflect the content of the page it belongs to. Keywords and phrases need to be researched thoroughly, what exactly are your customers likely to enter as search terms into search engines. When writing the content of the page remember that whilst conveying information about the products and services you should include your keywords and phrases - those terms which you have identified are used by your potential customer. It is possible to repeat the keywords and phrases a few times but not too often as the search engines treat this as spam!

Use useful and appropriate page titles - the common use of generic page titles such as "home page" and "contact us" is a waste of keyword opportunity. No-one types "contact us" into a search engine, why would they? Carry out a Web search on these two phrases and see how many there are out there (at the time of writing this was 3.1 billion & 6.2 billion respectively).

Once completed the search engine submission process can start. Whilst time consuming review the search engine you have selected and ask if it is relevant to your industry or whether it is likely to be relevant to your target market. Start with your own country search engines and submit to them - ensuring you are following their terms and conditions. Use of free submission services online is not recommended, consider how they make their money! Local regional and national directories should also be used. Many are free for basic listings but there is often a charge for enhanced listing.

In summary the biggest part of the Web site is in the preparation. If you carry out your research into your customers and understand them then you can build a Web site which they will find useful and will purchase from. Remember who the Web site is for - your customers!
by: Obono John Obono

10 Web Promotion Strategies

Web sites don’t usually come in version numbers like desktop software did. Which is probably why the “Beta” label gets so much focussed on – what a great way to announce your site one more time because you dropped it. What are some other ways to make your site more popular and keep the members active?

1. Make a funny game in Flash. People will like it and link to it. Maybe you think “But the game needs to be highly clever and original for people to link to it”, but the truth is, no, it doesn’t. Just check several newsletters or emails from your colleagues and see the games they link to!

2. Create a contest. If you have money, the best way to spend it is probably to create a contest of some sort. Just think of the recent “Win an iPod” hype which got linked from all over the web.

3. Do something crazy on video, and upload the video. While I’m not exactly sure that’ll work (I never tried), I get the feeling most web watchers love funny videos.

4. Get a blog. Blog.

5. Redesign your web site. Possibly this is necessary anyway, but at least it shows people you’re alive and working to improve.

6. Re-announce something old as new, but change a minor detail to get away with it. OK, I’m kidding – but there’s some truth to it; even details which changed may be considered link worthy by some, so why not announce them? Big companies do this all the time using press releases.

7. Provide a real URL for everything. Don’t make a pop-up, don’t add too many parameters, don’t make the address to long, don’t use frames, or a sub-page within a Flash or DHTML, don’t redirect, or forget to include that permalink. Only with a URL can people spread the word. “Email this page" forms are no surrogate.

8. Keep it real, truthful and personal. Whatever you do, don’t lie, because the web has too many experts in all kinds of fields, and their connected time in researching you will find even the smallest bug.

9. OK – drop that Beta.

10. Continue to be original and find new outlets for your ideas. But don’t spam – get into a conversation, and listen as well (that should be half of every conversation).

by Philipp Lenssen

First promotion Strategy

Making a website is very easy but making visitors coming to it is another thing. There are many ways that you can get visitors to your website but here we'll talk about the easiest way: manual traffic exchange companies.

The idea is quite simple, but it is effective, for every site (or 2 or 3 sites depending on the exchange rate) that you visit, you are guaranteed one visitor in return. Sometimes, you can win bonus points, and get even more guaranteed visitors. In order to earn one visitor you must stay on each site a certain length of time (usually there is a times of 10, 20 or 30 seconds. These programs are all free to join (at least on the basic levels).

promote-surf is a new manual traffic exchange that can help you get visitors to your website. It might be bias to said it but promote-surf.com is my newly born baby. So it you want to receive free visitors to your website visit http://www.promote-surf.com and you can sign up for free.

website promoting with it very easy and furthermore we have a very good anti cheat system that will ensure they the visitor is seeing your site and not clicking like mad just to get credits.

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Welcome message!

hi everyone and welcome to website promotion blog. In here we will talk about the ways how webmasters like you and me are getting traffic freely to their website and also strategies about free promotion.

Hope you like this blog and hope to hear from you