How To Run People Off Your Website!

The absolute best way to run people off your website is by having background music with pop up windows.

As a webmaster you should already know how to design your website to give your visitors the best first impression possible.

Even if you have the best product or service on the Internet, you can run people off your website in a heartbeat, by having a lousy layout, accessibility design, or poor user interface.

There are some things that are done in designing websites, that become so irritating to visitors, that it will literally run people off your website.

Two of the most irritating web design offenses, that will without a doubt run people off your website, are noted below.

If your website meets the criteria below, it’s time to take corrective action immediately!

  • Popup Windows

Popup windows have been overused by web designers to the point that most website visitors will automatically close them out, without even reading them.

99.99% of popup windows are used to display hyped up advertisements.

For this reason, most savvy Internet users, already have popup blockers installed on their web browsers.

For me, popup windows are so aggravating, that the ones that do get by my popup blocker, automatically get clicked out.

It’s unfortunate, that the overuse of a potentially beneficial web graphic, can cause people to instinctively click out of popup windows, that could actually have an important message to convey.

The general consensus is that popup windows are probably the most irritating web design aspect of a website.

If you have an important message to pass on to your visitors, don’t put it in a popup window!

  • Looped Background Music

Next to popup windows, the best way to run people off your website, is to play continuous looping background music.

Continuous looping background music on a website, is a sure way to drive your visitor crazy.

Although your favorite background music may be pleasant, playing the same thing over and over again is akin to Chinese water torture to your visitors.

At best, the music will simply become a distraction, and your visitors will turn off their speakers.

At worst, they will leave your website to look for a more pleasant atmosphere.

A music related website can be the exception, however,if you run a website with a large number of web pages; continuous looping background music really will drive your visitors crazy, and cause you to lose business.

Think about it, every time your visitor browses to another page of your site, the same background music starts playing again.

If you really want to run people off your website; install popup windows with background music.

It’ll be a killer!

Here Are Some Web Programming Tricks That Will NOT Run People Off Your Website!

Bookmark and Share

Viral Marketing Techniques – Use Tell A Friend Script

One of the easiest viral marketing techniques you can use to increase the amount of traffic to your website, is the use of “tell a friend” script.

Tell a friend script, is a simple script that can be added to your website’s programming, that will virally spread the word about your website, or blog.

Of all the viral marketing techniques is use today; tell a friend script is one of the most effective, and perhaps the easiest to use.

Once installed in pages where your media is located, you simply forget about it being there.

When people visiting your website enjoy what they encounter, they simply click on the tell a friend button, and pass on the information to their friends or family members.

There are many types of tell a friend scripts available, however the basic concept is the same for all of them.

A visitor inputs their name and email address, then sends the information to one or more recipient’s email addresses.

The principle is the same as sending an attachment to an email.

Because the emails that are received by the friends of the sender, are not regarded as spam, messages from your website will probably be opened and viewed, or played by the recipient.

This viral marketing technique, is a sneaky and extremely effective way to make an end run around email blocking software; and it works like a charm!

Recipients of the tell a friend email message, will usually get a brief description of the web site that sponsors the script, along with the information about your web site.

The more people that use the script, the more people will be aware of the sponsoring company.

Recipients of the mail who like what they see, will visit your site and also the sponsor’s site, resulting in a large number of potential clients.

Getting tell a friend script, for your website or blog is as simple as doing a Google search for; “tell a friend script”.

An example of tell a friend script  is shown below:

<a href=”http://www.freetellafriend.com/tell/”
target=”_blank” onclick=”window.open(‘http://www.freetellafriend.com/tell/?option=manual&title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+’&url=’+encodeURIComponent(document.location.href), ‘freetellafriend’, ‘scrollbars=1,menubar=0,width=617,height=530,resizable=1,toolbar=0,location=0,status=0,screenX=210,screenY=100,left=210,top=100’); return false;” title=”Tell a Friend”><img
border=”0″ alt=”Tell a Friend” src=”http://serv1.freetellafriend.com/button_blue2.gif”
></img
></a>

There are over 6 million results for “tell a friend script” as of this date, so if you don’t like the above sample, I’m sure you can find another to suit your needs.

Of all the free viral marketing techniques available, you can’t go wrong with tell a friend script.

Bookmark and Share

How Search Engines Work – A Primer

We all know how to use search engines, however, how many of you are familiar with how search engines work?

First of all, search engines are nothing more than specialty web sites that are specifically designed to help people retrieve information stored on other websites.

All of the search engines have differences in how they function, however, they all perform the same basic tasks for the public.

  • Internet Search

All search engines scour the Internet for information that is based on important “keywords” found in the request query made by the user.

  • Index Archive

All search engines archive an index of the keywords they find on the Internet, and the locations where the keywords were found.

  • Keyword Retrieval

All of the search engines allow users to access that index archive, to search for keywords, or keyword phrases they are looking for.

Initially, the first search engines only received a couple of thousand inquiries, or searches on a daily basis.
Back then, their indexes only held a few hundred thousand pages.

Now, top  engines such as Google, will index hundreds of millions, to billions of pages in their database.  Google also answers and responds to hundreds of millions of search queries, daily.

In order to locate and index the vast amount of information required to respond to every search engine query, the information must first be found by the search engines.

This is accomplished by specialized software robots, that are referred to as “search engine spiders”, to compile lists of keywords, and keyword phrases found on web sites.

When you hear the term “web crawling”; it refers to the process the search engine spiders use, to build their lists of keywords, and keyword phrases.

As you can imagine, search engine spiders must look at billions of pages as they build their lists of keywords.

Obviously, there has to be some order to the process.

Usually the search engines spiders, begin their searches in the areas most used by servers and the public.  This means that the most popular web sites, and the most often used servers, are first in line for indexing.

As the spiders crawl a popular website, they also index, and follow, every link found on that website.

This is how the spider “wanders”, spreading through the most used areas on the Internet, and then quickly moving out to other portions of the web.

Each of the search engines, must then store the NEW information that the spiders have accumulated from their Web searches, in a format that makes the data useful, and readily accessible, to people making a search query.

In order for the data to be easily accessible to users, two storage components are important.

The type of information stored with the data, and how the information was indexed.

If a search engine only stored the URL and the keyword, there would be no way of determining the relevance of the search result.

The keyword could have been used in a nonrelevant, or trivial manner, very infrequently, or in another page link to that URL.

In other words, there is no way to rank the relevance of the search result.

In order to get more useful search results, Google and the other search engines, store more than just the keyword and the URL.

Each search engine has their own particular formula for assigning “weight” to the keywords in their indexes.

This is why you can get a different search result, from the same search query, using different search engines.

This is also why different Search Engines present web page results lists in a different order.

Because each search engine formula is different, each search result will differ.

You must remember that an index has but one purpose; to find information as quickly as possible.

Of the many ways indexes are built; building a hash table is one of the most effective methods.

The hash table formula applies a numerical value for each keyword, and is designed to distribute entries evenly across a predetermined number.

It differs from the alphabetical distribution of words, which is why a hash table is so effective.

With a hash table, relevant web pages are listed first, when someone searches for a keyword or keyword phrase.

The search engine software looks for relevant information in it’s index, based the number of times the keyword appears on a page.

It also assigns increased weight values to keywords when they appear in the title, as they appear near the top of each document, in links, in sub headings, and in META tags.

The hash table method is what most Search Engine Optimization strategies are based on.

How search engines work as effectively, and efficiently as they do, is mind boggling, when you consider the millions to billions of searches made, and websites published online, daily.

Here are some easy to use SEO tools that will help you with your search engine rankings.

Bookmark and Share