How To Start An Internet Business ? Site Layout

The fourth 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 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 good site, links to primary pages are listed across the top and bottom of each page. Links to specific services or products are always listed on each page. It may sound 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 isn't clean, spiders stop indexing pages. If pages aren't indexed, they do not appear in search engine results. What stops spiders? Following are the most common problems:

1. 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 others.

2. Dynamic Pages ? Your pages need to be static or carefully designed. If dynamic, spiders often will not index them because they aren't sure of the content.

3. Frames ? Don't use this antiquated design technique.

4. Poor 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 poor 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 or ALT tags need to be used.

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.

Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com - 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.

____________________

Advertisement: Honest Riches - Click Here!

Advertisement: Lost AdWords - Click Here!

Advertisement: Get $1 Million A Month In Google Pay-Per-Click Ads Free! - Click Here!

Advertisement: Who Loves Money? - Click Here!

Advertisement: SEO Elite, the GrandDaddy of SEO Software - Click Here!

---

Building eCommerce Websites That Work - Part 1

You want to succeed at eCommerce? Welcome to a very big family. Right off, let's be clear - there are lots of ways to do business on... Read More

Why Arent People Buying From Your Ecommerce Website?

Your stock is tempting, your prices right - your ecommerce website is good to go, but somehow the customers just aren't buying. So where are you going... Read More

How e-business and e-Marketing are Changing

Internet now days became a real marketplace and many many companies using Internet as a online Selling and Customer Care or Support Tool for their Products and... Read More

Rules for Achieving Online Success

The Internet brought a great deal of benefits to our life. Access to a lot of free and useful information is, probably, one of the most important... Read More

The Clickbank Crash of 2003: Lessons Learned

I had a rude awakening recently. I checked the days worth of sales from one of my sites and there were none. This had never happened before... Read More

6 Steps to Attracting Black Customers Online

by Jamila White, "The E-Commerce Diva"In the rush to keep up with technology, many African-American business owners are so busy trying to add the latest bells and... Read More

Google Catalogs - Old Gashioned Mail Order Meets High Tech Search

In addition to Google's Froogle shopping service (still in beta), which features a searchable database of online merchants, Google is also beta-testing their Google Catalog service. Google... Read More

5 Tips for Online Shopping

Shopping online has become more and more popular in America as we are all looking to save a little time and money. E-commerce sales are growing at... Read More

Shopping from Your Cell Phone with Froogle Wireless

Many surfers already know about Froogle, Google's shopping portal that is still in beta testing. Google has now expanded their Froogle service so that it is available... Read More

Ecommerce Solution for the Big and Small Business

First off, you need to know what an ecommerce solution is. An ecommerce solution can be defined in many ways. An ecommerce solution is a way to... Read More

Excuse Me, Are You Wasting Traffic?

The largest cost and concern of an internet business is customer acquisition; traffic. Both quantity and quality of traffic directly determines the succes of an internet business.... Read More

Accept Credit Cards Online Without a Merchant Account

There are two major ways to accept credit cards on your website. The first and most expensive is to have your own merchant account. Not only is... Read More

Online Customer Service - The Cornerstone of a Successful Online Business

Online customer service is still one of the most frequently overlooked aspects of running a successful online business. Yet, in the highly competitive world of Internet business,... Read More

Dont Get Ripped Off Getting A Merchant Account

Far too many people get ripped off when setting up a merchant account for their online business. The biggest reason is that they don't understand their options... Read More

Gooooooooooogle It!

....there's much more to Google than you thought:With the wealth of information currently available on the Internet, for many web-users, Google has long been the search-engine of... Read More

Home Sweet Home Page

"Your home page is the world's introduction to you and your company. Make it COUNT!" ? Heidi RichardsThink of your home page as the cover of your... Read More

Retirement Signature Frames ? The Perfect Retirement Gift!

When most people think of a retirement gift, they think of a watch. It's the tried and true gift that companies give employees to say thanks for... Read More

Paypal Primer

To conduct business on the Internet, whether informal, one-time only transactions between two friends, or a full-fledged business selling products or services, payment arrangements have to be... Read More

A Tale of Two Revolutions - Ecommerce: A Historical Perspective

The World As It Then WasThe dynamic economic growth of the late 19th century placed greater and greater demand on horses to deliver manufactured goods between train... Read More

The Top 10 E-Commerce Ways to Follow up with Clients - Part 1

Did you know that 80% of all sales are made after the 5th contact? The biggest mistake we make is not following up with our clients regularly.... Read More

What is SSL (the little padlock)?

SSL ("Secured Socket Layer") is a protocol used to encrypt the communication between the user's browser and the web server. When SSL is active, a "little... Read More

Why Ecommerce is Not Ready for My Daughter or Me

As the mother of a teenage clothing fanatic I'm often at my local mall. It occurred to me that the shopping experience for my daughter is attractive... Read More

Choosing an Ecommerce Shopping Cart

Choosing an online shopping cart is a big decision. Unlike a traditional brick and mortar business, your website is your only chance to impress potential customers. It... Read More

The Census and the E-Commerce Wave

Understanding business and product sales can sometimes put me in a whirlwind. My job tends to get me involved with loads of different opportunities dealing with all... Read More

How Measuring Key Performance Indicators Can Improve E-Commerce Strategy - Part One

The problem with most e-commerce marketing strategy today is that companies don't understand how they use things like web analytics. Most e-commerce directors or web marketers are... Read More

The Plain Man?s Guide to Making Money Online

I'm a plain man who uses plain thinking in devising strategies for making money online.I do not spend obscene mounts of money attending high ticket web conferences... Read More