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How_To_Start_An_Internet_Business_ _Site_Layout
| How To Start An Internet Business - Site Layout
This step of how to start an Internet business involves the
layout of your site. When organizing it, two audiences must be
considered. Obviously, visitors to the site are the first
audience. You must also keep in mind the second audience, search
engine robots. Both audiences are extremely important and,
fortunately, both want the same thing.
Lean, Mean, Fighting Layout
Your site needs to be clean and quick if you want to be
successful. Slow, cluttered sites inevitably fail because
visitors and spiders get distracted and leave before taking the
action you want. Let’s take a closer look.
Visitors
The layout of your site should allow visitors to quickly find
information and solutions. To achieve this, every page should be
no more than two clicks from the home page. Have you ever been
on a site where you have to hunt to find a particular page? Poor
layouts are aggravating and hurt conversion rates.
Make things as easy as possible by interlinking between the site
pages. Every page should have links to primary pages and as many
other pages as possible. If you look at Marketing Titan, links
to primary pages are listed across the top and bottom of each
page. Links to specific services are always listed on the left
hand side. You can easily negotiate the pages of the site. It
may look like overkill, but make it as easy as possible for your
clients to move around.
Spiders
Search engines use programs called “spiders” to surf the net and
index sites. When a spider finds a page, it reads the code from
top to bottom and left to right. If the code is clean, the
spider will index the page and follow the links to the other
pages of the site.
If the code is not clean, spiders stop indexing pages. If pages
are not indexed, they do not appear in search engine results.
What stops spiders? Following are the most common problems:
1. Frames – Don’t use them. 2. Dynamic Pages – Your pages need
to be static. If they are dynamic, the spiders often will not
index them because they aren’t sure of the content. 3.
Bottlenecks – Make sure each page of your site links to every
primary page at a minimum. You do not want a spider to get stuck
on a page and miss key pages.
4. Bad URLs – A huge mistake is to put database parameters in
the URL. The URL should contain only the domain name and
keywords for the page. A good URL reads:
http://www.marketingtitan.com/internet_marketing_services. A bad
URL with parameters would read:
http://www.marketingtitan.com/id#us57486&095783
5. Images – Don’t overuse images and don’t put text in images.
Images slow down your site, so make them small and optimized.
Robots do not read text inside of images, thus text needs to go
outside of the images.
Evaluating The Layout
Once the site is designed, TEST IT! Surf the pages and see if
you are able to flow through the site. Add internal links
wherever possible. Finally, test the load times of your site on
a 56k dial-up modem. If the site loads in under 20 seconds, you
are headed in the correct direction.
Your site layout is important. Make sure it caters to the needs
of the visitors, whether human or spider.
About the author:
Halstatt Pires is with Marketing
Titan- an Internet marketing and advertising
company comprised of a search engine optimization specialist
providing meta tag optimization services and Internet marketing
consultant providing internet marketing solutions through
integrated design and programming services.
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