1. Do not use splash pages

Splash pages have no purpose other than to be a pretty introduction to your website. They are pages that usually say nothing more than “welcome” or “enter here” but take a long time to load and contain none of your website’s content. When trying to optimize your website’s performance, it is important to stay away from any superfluous text or images that don’t show a visitor your site’s value.

2. Refrain from banner advertisements

Banner Advertisements appear to be nothing more than a waste of website space. Most visitors have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements anyway, and even those that have not only see banner ads as a desperate attempt to make more money at their expense. Since they are rarely appealing to anyone, it is best to avoid them. Good website design has nothing more than the content it is trying to provide. If you are searching for extra ways to make money with your website, strategically placed affiliate links are much less invasive.

3. Have simple and clear navigation

The navigation menus you use are vital as you optimize your website’s performance. They should be simple and easy to understand, so much so that even a child will be able to use it. Complicated Flash menus or dropdown menus detract from your site’s content. And since these features also make website design more difficult, avoiding them will not only keep visitors from leaving your site, but will also save you time. There is never a good reason to make your site difficult to navigate, no matter how attractive you think it looks.

4. Make it clear which page the visitor is on

If your site has several pages, you may want to ensure that they always know which page they are visiting at that moment. By doing so, you give the visitor their own history, so if they need to navigate to or away from that page, the entire process will be seamless. If your visitors are confused, they may leave your site.

5. Website Design and Audio

Audio can be an annoyance to visitors, especially visitors that are going to be staying on your site for a long time. Audio looping can cause frustrations, and if you are trying to optimize your website’s performance, it is important that you do not have excessive amounts of audio. If you insist on adding audio to your site, make sure the visitor has some control over it, either by changing the volume or providing a mute button that is easy to locate and works immediately. Don’t forget, some of your visitors may be at work, or other public places where the audio can be a tremendous distraction.

Discover more information and resources that will create immediate results, visit Larry’s site at www.elitewebtactics.com.

Copyright 2008 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, www.elitewebtactics.com

Those who know me know about my passion for computers and Internet tools, but you might not know that I’m a “behind the scenes” Internet-business junkie.

I help people select, troubleshoot and properly interface Internet tools like hosting accounts, shoppingcarts, autoresponders and SEO. And get businesses back on track when they are taken to the cleaners by disgruntled or ill-informed Webmasters.

One day it hit me like a ton of bricks…“Far too many business owners are leaving themselves vulnerable and unprotected because they are confused over the unknown.”

They simply just don’t know enough to make those important Internet-based business decisions.

Well, until now that is…. Because that’s what my new venture is all about, showing Internet businesses the basics so they can have a protected, smooth-running business, now and as it grows.

I am offering an affiliate payout of 30% for the life of the member’s membership along with a 30-day free trial that can be given as a bonus. Please take a look at http://www.elitewebtactics.com.

The simple definition of a Landing Page is the web page your customers will be connected to when clicking on any link you’ve placed anywhere on the web – in a search engine, ad, etc. This is the place you want your customers to be directed to where they will be “sold” on your product or service. You can have customers directed to your home page. Is this the best way to go? O, is it genius?

As you’ve no doubt noticed, most retailers do send their customers to their homepage. But, there is a way to create a more important experience for your customer, to create greater sales and to make it simpler for your customers to buy into a particular program, product, service, etc. Create a special landing page. Use great landing pages for the following reasons:

1. You must earn conversions!

   While affiliate marketing programs may come in different shapes and sizes, the vast majority pay using a pay-per-click basis. It’s simple. You sign up and submit ads. Then the owner of the program gets your ad to a variety of affiliates and they place your ad on their website. If the traffic they drive to their site click on your ad those visitors are re-directed to your landing page. You pay the affiliate just for that “click”.

   On your end, as the merchant, the way you will earn money from that “click” is to sell them your product, service, etc. That’s called a conversion. If you don’t convert a visitor to a sale then you are actually losing money… In addition, clearly, the more visitors to your site with “clicks” the more you owe the affiliates who advertised. The only way for you to make a profit and be ahead of your expenses is, clearly, to convert your visitors to sales.

   If your visitor is directed to your home page you have less of a chance of converting than if you direct them to a great landing page for something specific. It’s like bringing them into the store and then hoping they’ll buy something. It’s great if your ad is intriguing enough to make people interesting in purchasing, but if they aren’t directed to an equally enticing landing page how will you close the sale?

2. Be specific when using your web pages

   As we’ve discussed, using your homepage as your landing page can be a mistake. This same thought holds true if you are using things like a “contact” page or just a page that shows your product. For one thing, using your home page isn’t specific enough. You usually create these to appeal to different users, to link to other pages, just introduce yourself or company, advertise affiliate programs you’re involved with, etc. The same with other types of pages discussed.

   To maximize profits and be as successful as you’d like you need to be more specific in your landing pages. These are used to appeal to people who are interested in your product already. They’ve come for the sale, you just need to close it.

   Always remember your target customer. Make sure the landing page, therefore, relates to your keywords and your ad content. It is also essential that you make your landing page conducive to taking action, i.e. to purchasing your product or service. Minimally, gather their information so that you can market them in the future.

In general, you probably have an interest in keeping costs low and maximizing profit. You need to, therefore, create enticing landing pages that will lead to increased sales and therefore greater profits. Make sure that your landing page is expressive, in place and ready to go before you embark on the next phase of marketing. Now go forth and bring in your customers and sales!

– Resource Box –

This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged.

Copyright 2006 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved.
Lang Enterprises Inc.
www.elitewebtactics.com

You may have the most interesting site, the best product, the biggest passion for what you do, but until you drive people to your site and get them to buy it’s just a great site, sitting in cyberspace. The enormity of the World Wide Web and the increase in people competing for the same dollar can seem overwhelming. How can you distinguish yourself? Here are 7 Steps to take in order to become a cut above the rest:

1. Use search engines. It is essential to have a top ranking among search engines in order for your site to become well known. You must also use the best keywords possible in order to maximize your efforts and beat the competition. The downside is that using search engines are so low cost, even often free, that they are very popular in and of themselves so you need to rise above by using the best keywords possible. If you attain being at the head of the list anyone will be able to find your site with ease.
2. Affiliate partnerships with other sites. Establish contact with websites that compliment yours. Make contact with the right person at that company. Then exchange links and while you promote their site on yours they will be doing the same on their site.
3. Article submission. If you write your own article and submit to different sites you will be creating an effective way of communicating with potential customers. Once they are interested in your content they will be intrigued and will visit your site.
4. Joint Ventures. Incredibly effective, if you create a partnership with someone who can promote your product or service through their marketing campaigns you will be able to increase your customer base quickly.
5. Become an Affiliate with others. The more websites that put your ad and link on them the more traffic you will receive. It’s a win-win for the affiliate and you.
6. Build a Subscriber base. With the use of autoresponders, e-zines, newletters, etc., getting people to subscribe gives you a valuable asset – a list to which you can market your products or services. These tools will allow you to not only retain your current customers but entice new people to sign-up.
7. Be knowledgeable. You must know your market. It’s essential to make sure you target all your marketing efforts to customers with an interest in your product/service. The moment a potential customer expresses interest in the moment you should reach out and impress his importance to you upon him.

Make sure you have a plan. The importance of marketing to your target audience in a way that’s thought out, takes advantage of every strategy and is appealing can not be stressed enough. If you do that then success is sure to follow.

– Resource Box –

This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged.

Copyright 2006 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc. www.elitewebstrategies.com

Here are five ways that you can use those articles to help grow your business.

1. Build your list. Even if you are just starting out, you can use articles to build your list. After you’ve posted an article on your own website or submitted it to an article directory, people searching for a certain subject can find your articles.

Once you’ve hooked them with great information in your article, you can use a resource box to provide information about you and a link to your website for more information. This link should point them back to a page on your website that has an opt-in box ready to capture their name and email address. If your article is well written and content-rich, they will check out your website and opt into your list.

2. Generate more traffic. You can generate more traffic to your website by granting permission for your articles to be used by other people. For example someone who has a newsletter on a related topic may need more content for their newsletter and include a variety of articles written by others. You’ll now be reaching someone else’s targeted list! (You should always specify that the article remain unchanged and the link to your website be left intact.)

3. Optimize your search engine ranking. Posting articles regularly on your website that are rich in content and keywords can greatly increase your search engine ranking. The search engines see that your website is constantly and consistently active and that you are providing good content.

Submitting articles to article directories helps search engine ranking, as well. The more directories you submit your articles to, the more websites there are out there that are pointing back to your website.

4. Establish yourself as an expert. By constantly providing well-written articles full of pertinent information, you will be seen as a reliable source and an expert on your subject. Then when people have questions about your subject, they will look to you for answers.

5. Cultivate trust. Providing your list with information through articles helps you to stay connected and helps cultivate trust. People feel more comfortable buying from someone they feel they know and can trust, and they will also be more likely to refer their friends and colleagues to you.

To sum it up, writing and posting articles is an effective and inexpensive way to boost your business, boost sales, and boost your credibility. Even if you pay someone else to write your articles for you, the return on your investment is well worth it!

– Resource Box –
This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged. For more tools, tips, and tricks of the trade, go to: www.elitewebstrategies.com – Empowering You to Empower Your Business. Copyright 2007 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc.

Finding the exact right keywords or phrases can bring hoards of traffic right to your door.  But if your keywords are too general or over-used, the possibility of visitors making it to your site decreases dramatically.

You probably think you already know what keywords you should be using.  Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed specific steps, you are probably WRONG.  It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network.  You need to be able to think like a consumer from the outside looking into your business.  Your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding of your business may be significantly different.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can.  You will find that the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

To evaluate the effectiveness of your keywords, take into consideration these three elements:

1. popularity
2. specificity
3. motivation

Of these three elements, popularity is the easiest to evaluate.  The more hits on a keyword, the more popular it is.  So the more popular your keyword is, the more likely that it will be typed into a search engine, which will then bring up your URL.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice.  You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

The third factor to consider is consumer motivation.  Again, this requires you to put yourself in the consumer’s position rather than the seller position to determine what prompts the consumer to type specific keywords or phrases into the search engine. 

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done.  Evaluating keyword performance across a variety of search engines is essential, because trends change, as does popular language.  The most important factor in evaluating the efficiency of a keyword or phrase is to determine which of them not only bring you traffic, but direct customers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and it is!  But it is work that will ultimately pay off in terms of generating traffic and sales for your business.

– Resource Box –
This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged. For more tools, tips, and tricks of the trade, go to: www.elitewebstrategies.com – Empowering You to Empower Your Business. Copyright 2007 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc.

Below are 4 components that affect your search engine ranking.

1. Title Bar – The title bar is the colored bar or tab in your browser that is just above the top of your page. The title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

To change your page’s title bar, you will need to access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. The title tag is located near the top of the page. Type in your desired title between the two title tags: <title>Your Text</title>.

2. Content – The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords – the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words.

3. Meta Tags – Next we come to what are called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find the meta tags on your page, you must again view the code. Follow the same steps as listed above for checking your title tag. The meta tags are located beneath the title tag. A meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. Following the = sign should be a list of keywords pertinent to that particular page.

If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put it in. This may not do a lot for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

4. Link Popularity – Link popularity is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to on your links page. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

– Resource Box –
This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged. For more tools, tips, and tricks of the trade, go to: www.elitewebstrategies.com – Empowering You to Empower Your Business. Copyright 2007 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc.

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, there are steps that you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors over a given period of time, say a month.

However, just because hordes of people have visited your site, this does not necessarily mean that your site is successful. It is equally important to monitor the people that actually performed the action that your site was set up for and figure out the ratio of people who visited to people who took action. This is called your conversion rate.

To find your site conversion rate, take the number of people who performed the desired action on your site and divide that number by the number of total visitors to your site. Then multiply that result by 100. For example, you had 2000 visitors to your site in a given month. 25 of those visitors performed the action desired on your site. Your conversion formula would be (25/2000) X 100. In this case, the conversion rate would be 1.25%.

Another important rate to track is your sales conversion rate. If the desired action on your site is to provide a name and email address, how many of those people actually bought your product? Not everyone who provides their name and email address will actually buy.

After tracking these rates, you may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you are not getting good results. One way to boost your rates is to get increased traffic to your site. This can be done by launching a search engine optimization campaign so that people can find your site more readily.

Another factor to examine is the ease of use of your website. If the goal of your website is for a visitor to fill out a form, is the form easily accessible and understandable? If it’s not clear or if the visitor has to perform multiple steps to accomplish the goal, they may just move on to another site.

Finally, you may want to have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure.

Evaluating your website performance is an ongoing process. Constantly tracking your conversion rates and analyzing your marketing campaigns can make the difference between profit and loss in your business. The biggest marketing mistake you can make is to just put up your website and forget it!

– Resource Box –
This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged. For more tools, tips, and tricks of the trade, go to: www.elitewebstrategies.com – Empowering You to Empower Your Business. Copyright 2007 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc.

It’s important to do your due diligence in researching a free product, just as you would with something you would be paying for. Consider the company’s reputation, customer satisfaction, and make sure you can terminate or uninstall it if it isn’t working for you.

This is not to say that there aren’t some great free resources available out there. So how do you know when free isn’t really free? Answering the following three questions will help you decide if a free product is really going to be free for you.

1. What is my time worth?
We all have three personal resources to draw from: time; money; and energy. If you’re not spending money for an Internet resource or product, chances are you’re going to be spending time and energy.

Say you decide to use a free website template rather than hiring a web designer. Unless you know something about web design and html, you will most likely spend a much larger chunk of time to develop your site than a designer would. The web designer charges $75 an hour and it takes them an hour to design your site, while it may take you 6 hours to do the same job. Your time was worth $12.50 an hour. If you consider your time to be worth more than that, say at least $25 an hour, your “free” website template just cost you $75.

2. How much control do I want over details?
Many free resources have limited or no options available to you. It’s like buying pre-bagged fruits or vegetables. The quality as a whole might be okay, but each individual piece may not be what you would pick out yourself.

For example, if you choose a free web hosting company, you may be limited to one domain name and not much disk space or bandwidth. When you are just starting out, that might fit the bill. But what if you want more than one domain? Chances are you’ll have to pay for each additional site. And what happens when your business grows? How much time, money and energy will you need to spend to upgrade or change hosting accounts?

3. What are my skills and abilities, likes and dislikes?
This is a critical question and it’s important to be honest with yourself. Are you a computer techie, or is copywriting your forte? Can you get lost in the creative process, or would you rather be researching new sales techniques?

If you love to write and the thought of free PLR content inspires you, then it’s definitely a great bargain. But if you spend hours agonizing over rewriting, formatting, and publishing, then you might be better off paying a ghostwriter or a freelancer. If you’re a techie, that free shopping cart software might be a great deal, but if you’re not, you may end up paying the support fees for somebody else to clean up the mess you made trying to set it up.

So when deciding if “free” is really free, be sure to calculate the true cost to you in terms of time, money, and energy, as well as whether you’re going to be stuck doing something that you truly dislike or that is beyond your ability. The bottom line is that you are going to be spending a certain amount of time, a certain amount of money, and a certain amount of energy operating your business. To be successful, you need to find the balance that works best for you.

– Resource Box –
This article may be distributed freely on your website, as long as this entire article, including working links and this resource box are unchanged. For more tools, tips, and tricks of the trade, go to: http://www.elitewebstrategies.com - Empowering You to Empower Your Business. Copyright 2007 Larry Lang All Rights Reserved. Lang Enterprises Inc.