Links are portals to the Internet and, consequently, to your Web page. Your Web site address is a link, and you want your page to gain visibility and popularity, so you need to make that link Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly.
Making your links SEO friendly can be tricky. With so many Web sites out there promoting similar products, you’ll need to be really creative and work hard at maintaining your Web site for it to remain at the top of major search engines. Making links SEO friendly requires tact and balance: not enough tagging will render your site invisible, while too much tagging, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, degrades the relevance of search results and user-experience of search engines. You can be knocked down or get what is known as sand boxed. Search engines are on an active lookout for sites that employ these techniques and, if they find them, will swiftly remove them from their index. The trick is to paint a concise informative picture without overdoing it.
Knowing this, you should be careful not to randomly and carelessly stuff keywords throughout your site. Worse yet are link farms, groups of random Web sites that hyperlink to each other; link farms are considered a form of spamming by search engines and will also get your site sand boxed.
There are safe and prolific alternatives to make SEO friendly links work for you. Link exchange systems, if handled correctly and professionally, can work wonders for the visibility of your Website. Particularly if the links are one way to credible sources. Creating networking opportunities with sites offering similar services to yours, or that have a direct relevance to the content of your Web site, will encourage search engines to promote the visibility of all sites involved.
The Internet is full of sites offering safe, SEO friendly link directories. Listing your Web site on one of these will also help Web surfers get to you faster. The best way is to find a experienced firm to choose your link directory carefully, as there are many, many such sites out there that do not monitor the content of their pages for quality or relevance. Those sites are typically not reliable and should be avoided.
If you need advice on how to make your links SEO friendly, don’t hesitate to ask. We’ve got enough experts here at Creative Works to help you make the right decisions and optimize your Web links to make your Web site visible while keeping it professional and in line with search engines guidelines.
Until next time,
This is the Outsourcing Guru signing off. |
Web 2.0 design is used to describe various common graphic design elements used in today’s modern Web design style. Web 2.0 design isn’t only about what your graphic elements look like – it is a term that encompasses the whole idea behind simple, pleasing and coherent Web site design.
Web 2.0 page designs are elegant, simple and uncluttered. When done correctly and professionally, a good design should attract the visitor’s attention to a few, well thought out elements that represent the reason of being of your Web site. This means that people visiting your site understand right away what you’re all about without having to click their way through a cluttered and complicated gateway. The result is a ‘clean’, ‘airy’ looking site that appeases the eye and serves its purpose: easy communication of your ideal.
Creating a simple Web site doesn’t mean you should restrict the amount of information it contains. Web 2.0 design is all about framing your content in a pleasing and simple layout. Professional designers do this with their eyes closed, but don’t be fooled. There is a lot of work, knowledge and experience involved in creating a successful Web page using Web 2.0 design. Graphic designers at Creative Works are constantly on the lookout for new and enhanced ways of displaying your information in a way that not only reduces clutter but allow you to keep the important data visible. While reducing the amount of unnecessary information is crucial, it is even more important to ensure that everything you want to display is what the visitor looks at. Even more than that, you want to ensure the visitor wants to continue looking for more!
Learning about Web 2.0 design is fascinating, and many people become successful at it with a little time, research and effort. If you’d rather let someone who’s already gained the experience you lack help you with your own Web 2.0 design, visit our galleries and browse our articles. Creative Works has just the designer to work with you to ensure your Web site looks great and both you and your customer are satisfied with your online experience.
Until next time,
This is the Outsourcing Guru signing off. |
Whether to use PHP or ASP is an age old question that has sparked debates in the programming community for quite some time, and really comes down to the older platform war between Linux and Windows. Then comes ASP.net, complicating matters further. This week, we will try to shed some light and hopefully give you a better idea of what works best for you.
Hypertext Pre-Processor, or PHP, was originally designed to run under Linux. It is an open source server scripting language that works with all operating systems and any Web server software. This means that PHP applications are extremely portable, which is a huge advantage. PHP also uses a language that is very similar to C programming languages, making it relatively easy for developers to pick up. Because it is widely used, it is constantly upgraded, enhanced and fixed, making it reliable and familiar. There really isn’t much more to be said about PHP – most people have yet to find its downfalls.
ASP stands for Active Server Pages and was introduced by Microsoft as the language to use for dynamic Web applications running under their Web server. Because Microsoft was busy developing ASP.net, not much was done to develop ASP and it's no surprise that it really doesn’t compare to any of the other languages available today.
ASP.net is just now gaining momentum and popularity. As it evolves, it becomes evident that ASP.net will soon leave other languages behind and grow into something much bigger and better. ASP.net can recognize about 20 different scripting languages. It runs on a completely different structure than other applications. This means that web pages run faster, and that source code is much safer. The downfall of ASP.net is that it's still in its early stages, and quite costly compared to PHP and ASP. Because it operates on a whole different structure, it's also less user-friendly and much more confusing to developers used to C programming languages, or even PHP or ASP scripting.
ASP.net may be a good candidate if you have a lot of money to waste on both the software and the developers who understand it, because it will definitely make your site that much better, that much more superior to most sites around. If, however, you are on a budget, outsource this work to experts, like those at Creative Works. We can save you as much as 50% over having ASP.net work done in house. But if you are looking for a simple and easy to use scripting platform, then my recommendation would be to go with PHP. With all the add-ons, patches and tips you can get from Creative Works, PHP should do the trick.
Until next time,
This is the Outsourcing Guru signing off.
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