What every website owner should know

It is of little known fact that I am writing a book. The book is titled What Every Website Owner Should Know —Tips Tricks And Secrets To Success Online. I have recently sent the book off to my editor. I think that this book is unique because it is written for people like small business owners, office managers, or people that are self employed. Essentially anybody that needs or wants a website, but does not have a technical background nor the time to figure it all out themselves. I will release the book soon and I hope that it helps those of you that buy a copy get a jumpstart on your website.

Meanwhile, here are a few points that you should keep in mind if you are considering having a website developed for you...

Organize your thoughts —take your time and write down an outline of your thoughts. Make sure to include:

• Your Objective —what you hope to accomplish


• A Short List Of Websites—that you admire and why you like them


• Your Contact Information


• A List Of E-mail Addresses that you would like your webmaster to setup for you


• A List Of Pages that you would like to include


• A List Of Important Keywords regarding your site


• Passwords And User Names that may be relevant


• If You Already Have A Domain Name, Then Make Sure To Include:
  
  
  
  • The Registrar's Name
  
  
  • Your Login Information


• If You Already Have A Web Hosting Account Be Sure To Include
  
  
  
  • The Web Hosting Company's Name
  
  
  • The Ftp Information Including:
    
    
    
    • The FTP Server Address
    
    
    • Login Information
  
  
  • The Type Of Hosting Account—for example Unix, linux, or Microsoft
  
  
  • The Type Of Databases Available—for example MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, etc…


• Whatever important information regarding your business that you can think of. This can be virtually anything about your business that you deem important. Try to be as thorough as possible, as this will help your webmaster build a strong foundation for your website. The more information that you can includ the better.

Additionally, if you have any photographs or images that you would like to use on the website, organize them as well. If they already on your computer so much the better. If they're not, make sure to give them to your webmaster anyway. If you want to physically keep the photographs and do not own a scanner, you can probably have them scanned inexpensively at your local copy and print store.

If possible include a caption or description for each one. This will also help your webmaster by clarifying how you want to use the picture or what it is about.

If you do not have suitable pictures or images, there are several web sites that provide stock photography at reasonable prices. If you take the time for images you like they will go long way in producing a website that you're happy with.

The service that I like to use is called istockphoto.com. There are literally millions of images to choose from. These images have been contributed by thousands of professional photographers from all over the world. The images are priced by size and resolution. Small images cost about a dollar and ultra large high resolution images suitable to print large murals usually cost about 10 to 15 dollars.

All you have to do is signup and purchase some credits, then you can download your desired images. Chances are, in less you all are planning to do some printing you will only need small to medium sized images at normal resolution.

Hopefully, this is enough to get you started on the right foot. If you stayed till end and subscribe to my blog I will continue to post excerpts from my buck and additional tips tricks and secrets that will help you be successful online.

Good luck, I wish you the best in your endeavors, and I hope that your efforts payoff. If you have any questions feel free to e-mail me and I will do my best to get you an answer. Even better, you can post your question to my community forum and we'll see if we can get answered for you there. All you have to do is simply register and then you will be able to post your questions. If you do register and post your question to you my community forum, I promise I will get to it, email is another story.

"Hey Marc, How Do I Get More Traffic?"

Such a simple question… I wish the answer was that simple. There are many things that you can do to bring visitors to your site. The obvious thing most REALTORS® think of first is business cards and other print-type marketing. While this is a good way to meet people, when was the last time somebody told you about their site and you actually sat down at the computer and visited it? Rarely at best? Ever? I didn’t think so.

Most people find websites by surfing. While there are many different ways people can find you by surfing, usually, they use search engines. Considering that there are millions of Real Estate Websites, “Getting Found” on one without a little know how is about as likely as me becoming a rock star. Chances are your website will appear on page 650,234 (or thereabouts) when someone searches the term “Real Estate”.

So now, the problem becomes: How do I get a good search engine ranking? For that matter how do I get listed at all?? To answer this, you should know about search engines and how they work. First, let’s start with Google. Google actually “powers” most of the thousands of other search engines. In other words most search engines pull results from Google to fill in the gaps in their own database. So, if you get a good ranking with Google, you will show up better on other sites.

It is important to understand how a search engine works. Basically, a search engine is a really big searchable database. Results are returned based on different parameters. The two most important parameters at this point are Keyword Density Ratio and Link Popularity. These are the ones we will look at in this article. There are more, but they are outside of the scope of this humble article…

Let me introduce you to Googlebot your friendly neighborhood search engine spider. A search engine spider is a program that endlessly “crawls” the web indexing web pages as it goes. When it comes to a link it will follow it. It keeps going day and night. If any other website links to yours, chances are Googlebot (and others) will eventually find it. However, to speed up the process you can submit your site and Google (I use Google as an example because it has so much influence.) will schedule a Googlebot to visit your site. This can take a considerable time for it to get to you, due to the enormous volume of sites out there. Once your site is indexed the Googlebot will visit periodically to see if you have posted any changes.

Keyword Density Ratio is the first parameter we will look at. Keyword density is just that. The number of times certain keywords are used throughout your website, or on a specific page. When the spider (Googlebot in this case) indexes your page, it removes all common language (words such as “the” “if” “when” “but” “that” etc…) and saves the remaining text in a database. From there it counts the number of times the words and/or phrases appear on your page. It then counts the number of words in total on that page. For instance, let’s say the phrase “Real Estate” appears 37 times out of a total number of 1000 words. Your Keyword density ratio would be 37/1000. Therefore, when somebody searches for “Real Estate” your page is ranked accordingly. A website with a higher keyword ratio will score higher, a site with a lower keyword density would accordingly, score lower.

So, why not just write “real estate” over and over? Well, in the early stages of the web, that is exactly what they did. Webmasters would type key words over and over in the very smallest font size and the same color as the back ground (If this text were white for example). Even though the user couldn’t see the text, since the spider reads the code behind the page rather then the page itself, the spider could see and index the page. This form of “search engine spamming” is known as “Spider Lines”. Of course, it wasn’t long before the search engines caught on to this and now, if your keyword ratio is too high, then the search engine won’t list you at all. Of course, Google won’t tell anyone what the limit is, so you just have to guess.

Which brings us to Link Popularity, link popularity is the term used to describe how many other sites link to yours. It doesn’t matter how many sites you link to, rather how many sites link to that counts. This is an important distinction. You see you can not really control who links to you and Google looks at this as “Well, a lot of sites link to this one, therefore it must be important.” Moreover, the higher ranked the site linking to you, the more important Google considers the link.

As I said before, you can not control who links to you. This is one of the more difficult methods of SEO (search engine optimization). With this said, there are some things you can do to influence your link popularity. First, you can ask other people in related industries (builders, carpet cleaners, movers etc…) to exchange reciprocal links. This means that you link to their site and they link to yours. It helps both of you out. If you want to know how many other sites are linking to yours there is a handy link popularity tool at http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ this will help you keep track of inbound links. Outside of that you can sign up for some community forums and include a link to your website in your signature. This will ensure that there is a link included every time you post. Then you are free to talk about anything under the sun while quietly advertising your business AND improving your search engine ranking.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about Meta tags. It is my understanding that Google no longer looks at Meta tags and completely disregards the information. For those of you that don’t know what a Meta tag is, it is simply a bit of code in your web page that tells search engines what the site is about, offers a description, and provides the search engine keywords and other stuff the public never sees. From what I understand at this point, Meta Tags have been devalued due to people misusing them and manipulating them for better search engine placement.

Now, for the bad news, you did expect some bad news, right? Google changes the rules as they see fit, which is often. Worse still, they don’t really tell anybody what the rules are, because they don’t want us to know. If we know, they we will all try to tweak our sites for top ranking (Google looks at this as cheating). Therefore, every week Google reassesses its rankings. This reshuffling is known as the “Google Dance”. It used to be a major event that happened approx 10 times a year, but since 2003 they do smaller adjustments more often. This is why your ranking will change from time to time.

So, what can you do? Simple, build a good site, and fill it will good useful, current information. Use a lot of text and write about what you do. Change it around and add stuff often. Exchange links with professionals you recommend and join forums or start a blog (I will be writing about blogs soon!). GOOD LUCK!!!

Choosing a Webmaster

Choosing a webmaster can be a challenging task. Creating a website is a big investment so naturally you want to find the best man/woman for the job. Hopefully this article will shed a little light on your quest.

Here are a few things that you should consider:

1.) Your budget. Know what it is before you begin to negotiate. Don't be afraid to share this information with your webmaster. You can perhaps start a little low and hold some of your budget in reserve when you're negotiating, but it is difficult for the webmaster to make an accurate estimate without a ballpark figure for budget. I don't recommend that you tell exactly how much you're willing to spend, just a round figure so your webmaster will know " the league hewill be playing in".With that said, if you want the moon and the stars, be willing to pay for them. Building a website is a time consuming venture and a good designer will want to be paid a fair price.


2.) Know what you want. Make sure you have a general idea regarding what you are looking for. The more information you can provide your webmaster at the start the easier, faster, better the results will turn out. Outline your ideas, sketch pictures, and provide a list of websites that you like with a notation of the features that you found particularly appealing. This will go long way to helping your webmaster understand your vision.

3.) Provide Content. What do you want your site to say. The more the better; as far as the search engines are concerned text is king. Search engines can’t “read” pictures or images and therefore they do not help your websites ranking.

It should be you that rights the original draft of your content. Regardless of your writing ability, if the original sentiment comes from you it will most likely convey your message. Your webmaster or other individuals can edit it and/or rewrite completely, but even if that’s the case the original sentiment should be yours.

4.) If you have a shoestring budget, then consider a template.
Template Monster is a good place to start. Their templates are priced fair and more importanly, they are retired after 10 downloads. This way you can be assured your site is relatively original. The have hundreds of real estate sites to choose from.

*I have used them with great results. I should tell you I am an affiliate.

5.) Time. The more time you can devote to upkeep and new content the better. You will only get as much out of your site as you are willing to put into it.

6.) Marketing. I have written a couple of articles re: marketing. You can find them scattered around this blog. Marketing your website is a wide ranging topic that I will get into here. However if you subscribe to my blog I will continue to reveal new tips, tricks and secrets about marketing online