The Web Credibility Project: Guidelines – Stanford University

The Web Credibility Project: Guidelines – Stanford University

How can you boost your web site’s credibility?

We have compiled 10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people.

1. Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.

You can build web site credibility by providing third-party support (citations, references, source material) for information you present, especially if you link to this evidence. Even if people don’t follow these links, you’ve shown confidence in your material.

2. Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.

Showing that your web site is for a legitimate organization will boost the site’s credibility. The easiest way to do this is by listing a physical address. Other features can also help, such as posting a photo of your offices or listing a membership with the chamber of commerce.

3. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.

Do you have experts on your team? Are your contributors or service providers authorities? Be sure to give their credentials. Are you affiliated with a respected organization? Make that clear. Conversely, don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association.

4. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.

The first part of this guideline is to show there are real people behind the site and in the organization. Next, find a way to convey their trustworthiness through images or text. For example, some sites post employee bios that tell about family or hobbies.

5. Make it easy to contact you.

A simple way to boost your site’s credibility is by making your contact information clear: phone number, physical address, and email address.

6. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).

We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more. Of course, not all sites gain credibility by looking like IBM.com. The visual design should match the site’s purpose.

7. Make your site easy to use — and useful.

We’re squeezing two guidelines into one here. Our research shows that sites win credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some site operators forget about users when they cater to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology.

8. Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently).

People assign more credibility to sites that show they have been recently updated or reviewed.

9. Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).

If possible, avoid having ads on your site. If you must have ads, clearly distinguish the sponsored content from your own. Avoid pop-up ads, unless you don’t mind annoying users and losing credibility. As for writing style, try to be clear, direct, and sincere.

10. Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It’s also important to keep your site up and running.

Read the entire article at The Web Credibility Project: Guidelines – Stanford University

Posted in content |

Putting Your Keywords & Content to the Best Use | Caroline Middlebrook

Here is some great ideas about how to get your web site noticed. Using keywords is critical and know where and how to use them will make your site successful.

Putting Your Keywords & Content to the Best Use | Caroline Middlebrook

When starting a niche site, the first step is usually keyword research and then a large majority of the time is spent on content creation and the process seems simple enough – pick profitable keywords to target then write content that targets those keywords but hold on just a moment… there’s more to think about.

Where Are Keywords Used?
Most people don’t really stop to think about where they will use their keywords. They simply identify keywords that they want to rank for and then pimp out their site SEO-wise to try and target that keyword as effectively as possible. But stopping to think about where you use your keywords will reveal the kinds of content you need to create, and where you don’t need content at all.

Your Website Content

This is the most obvious place where you will use your keywords - on your site itself.

This is the most obvious place where you will use your keywords – on your site itself. You’ll create a blog post, article page or something similar that is targeted towards your chosen keyword. You’ll do as much on-page SEO as you can to make your posts & pages rank as well as possible for your chosen keywords. In order for your website to rank for a particular keyword, you need to create content that targets it.

Actually, that last statement is not quite true. Go to Google and type in “twitter tactics”. Depending on where in the world you are, the site http://www.twittertactics.com/ ranks very highly for this keyword and yet it is a completely empty WordPress default blog that was created and then abandoned. The only place where the keyword has been used is in the URL and the title of the site. There isn’t even a post that targets it. However, this keyword is probably not a competitive one so this doesn’t often happen!

Article (Marketing) Content
The next new posts in this project will discuss the backlink strategies that I am using for my niche sites and article marketing is one of them. Now there are two ways in which you can benefit from an article:

The backlink you place in the article or resource box
Traffic that comes from the article itself

To utilise the first strategy, you just need to write pretty much any old article that is related to your site and then insert a link back to your site in the resource box. There is nothing to say that you have to target any particular keywords in the article itself because the important part is the backlink for which you will use appropriate anchor text.

However this is only one way to benefit from articles and is really a bit of a wasted potential if that is all you do. Josh Spaulding in his Article Marketing Domination book advocates writing an article that is going to draw in traffic to the article itself and a portion of those people will click through to your link so this way not only do you benefit from the backlink, but from the traffic itself.

There are two ways in which you can approach the process of writing a highly-trafficked article. One way is to once again abandon all keywords and simply write the most compelling article headline you can think of and hope that its listing in the directory will be enough. However if you are in a competitive niche it can be tricky to really stand out from the crowd amongst hundreds of other articles. The other strategy is to utilise the ranking power of the directory and target low competition phrases in the article itself.

When doing your competition research I am sure that you will have seen on many occasions an article from EZine Articles ranking in the top 10 in the serps. Google loves EA, probably a lot more than your site and if you wrote that same article for your website, your EA article would probably out-rank your site article. By utilising the power of popular directories you can target keywords that the directory can rank for and then drive traffic that way.

Read the entire article at Putting Your Keywords & Content to the Best Use | Caroline Middlebrook

Posted in SEO |

The Changing Consumer Experience – GUY KAWASAKI

OPEN Forum by American Express OPEN | The Changing Consumer Experience

As a small business owner, you need to understand how technology is changing the customer experience. The folks at Razorfish wrote a report called “FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report” to help people understand these change and to explore the coming trends.

Act more like publishers, entertainment companies, or even party planners, than advertisers.

According to Razorfish, “…today’s consumer is more technically adept, open for experimentation and—most importantly—active than ever before.” Its recommendations include:

“Act more like publishers, entertainment companies, or even party planners, than advertisers.”

“Create content that engages and ‘reaches’ consumers across channels, provide valuable services over mere advertising, and master an increasingly complicated and expansive content distribution model.”

“Rethink the way they create relationships (or conversations) with consumers before it’s too late.”

The report also examines the impact of widgets, RSS feeds, “advertising as a service,” Twitter, online video, iPhones, and new design standards. In short, this is something you should read to stay on top of Web technology and digital content. You can get it before your competitor by clicking here.

Read the entire article at OPEN Forum by American Express OPEN | The Changing Consumer Experience

Posted in marketing |

Do Not Search For Domains Names Using Network Solutions

They will grab any name you search for. I’ve had a client go look for names for a new site we were building. They had some ideas and wanted to check them out. 2 days later, they came back and said that the one they wanted was available, but was now taken.

We're Waiting...

That means that we had to pay $36 a year to register instead of $8 at GoDaddy, who we wanted to use. It cost us $28 more just because she used Network Solutions to search for available domain names.

In the past, I used a great small service for registration. They were great until they quit responding to emails and their help desk. I’ll tell that horror story in another post, but they did have a nice, easy to use “whois”, the tool you can use to look up domain name registrations. There’s no captcha. No advertising. There’s just the form.

If you want to look up domain names, use this WHOIS form.

Posted in web site build |

Why The World Isn’t Listening – Small Business Branding

Why The World Isn’t Listening – Small Business Branding Written by Ed Roach

How many of your clients believe they are an apple ripe for the picking? They believe in the old adage, “build it and they will come” – literally.

Based on a comment to the post written by Krishne De entitled, Getting Your Website Found Online, I was inspired to write this post. The point of the comments were that there are a great many businesses who believe that having that website or blog is all you should have to do to get an audience.

I'm Not Listening To You!

The actual post told of businesses who want that magic bullet to success. You know – the – what is the tricks and techniques to instant results? What is it, that would lead any of us to believe that this solution exists? In the many years I’ve been in business, nothing comes easily. It takes work and perseverance.

How in the world is anyone supposed to find you if you do nothing to tell anyone that you are there? Googling is not enough, don’t bet the farm on SEO (but don’t ignore it either). You have to get out there. Do your research. You can’t generate an income without some sales effort. There are some great books on promoting yourself on and offline. Read them and FOLLOW THEM. Having your base marketing in place is a great start, but you have to realize that you must consistently and repeatedly push your brand out into the world. Take every opportunity to develop your brand so that it returns a respectable income for you and your company.

Posted in web site build |

How to explain “URLs” so anybody can understand them – easyDNS Blog

How to explain “URLs” so anybody can understand them – easyDNS Blog

One of our tech support guys just had a conversation with somebody who wanted “to register the URL http://example.com/something.html”, where example.com was already registered, the person couldn’t understand why he couldn’t have that URL with “something.html” after it.

We’ve heard variations of this one a lot. Like somebody who knows “xyz.zz” is taken “but can I register “www.xyz.zz?”, no, you can’t.

The easiest way to explain a URL such as this one: http://www.example.com/something.html

Is to think of it as HOW, then WHERE and finally WHAT:

http://	« how?	The method we are going to use to retrieve or “get to” the document described by the URL. Common ones are “http” (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol), you may also see “ftp://” or “mailto:”
www.example.com	« where?	This is the hostname of the server, somewhere on the internet, which is holding the document we actually want
/something.html	« what?	Finally, after we know what server we are looking for and how we’re going to retrieve the document from it, we now specify exactly which document we want off of the remote server.

Understand those three components and you basically have URLs down cold.

Your web browser (firefox, safari, IE, Opera) is all about “how”, what protocols to use to pull all these documents over the web to your desktop.

The web host is the “what” machine. It sits on a server and serves document after document to remote web browsers who send it requests.

Something has to bridge the browser to the web host/server and that’s the “where”, that’s where DNS and domains come in, and that’s primarily what we do here at easyDNS. We tell web browsers (and other client applications) the “where” aspect of retrieving and transmitting documents (the “whats”) across the internet. We do this via “DNS lookups” …about a quarter billion times a day.

Read the entire article at How to explain “URLs” so anybody can understand them – easyDNS Blog

Posted in web site build |

Use Keywords In Page Titles

You should use keywords in page titles. The title tag is different from a Meta tag. Whatever text one places in the title tag will appear in the title bar of browsers when they view the web page. Some browsers also append whatever you put in the title tag by adding their own name, as for example Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or OPERA.

Search Results Pages, Your Bread and Butter

Each page of your website must be search engine optimized. The title of each page i.e. the keywords you use on that page and the phrases you use in the content may draw traffic to each individual page.

The unique combination of these words and phrases and content will draw customers using different search engine terms and techniques, so be sure you capture all the keywords and phrases you need for each product, service or information page.

The most common mistake made by small business owners when they first build their website is to place their business name or firm name in every title of every page. Most of your prospective customers do not bother to know the name of your firm until after they have looked at your site.

It is probably a waste of valuable keywords and space to put it in the title line of every page on your site. You should consider putting keywords in the title so that your page will do better in the search engine listings.

Posted in SEO |

Using The Wrong Web Hosting Service Will Kill You

Using The Wrong Web Hosting Service Will Kill You | Gwizz IT by John Bear

Picking the right web hosting will be one of the most important decisions you will ever make with your online business. Why? Because the web server you choose will really make or break your online business.

It Could Kill You

Today I am going to discuss two types of servers; Virtual Web Hosting and Virtual Private Servers.

Lately, Virtual Web Hosting has been the only way to go when choosing a web server. One of the reasons that Virtual Web Hosting became so popular was because they supported the necessary files and allowed you to have more freedom than other conventional web hosting accounts. But now you can have more freedom than ever before with Virtual Private Servers. Moreover, Virtual Private Servers should not be confused with Virtual Hosts, because they are completely different types of accounts.

Before we go any further I’d like to explain what the difference is between a Virtual Host and a Virtual Private Server, so that you can really fully understand. In this article I will also go over the advantages and disadvantages of both types of servers, to help you decide which is right for you and your business. Let’s start off with Virtual Hosting.

Virtual Hosting

Virtual Hosting is also known as Shared Web Hosting, where you are sharing the physical server and a single set of software applications with other users. Virtual Hosting has been extremely popular in the past for its fast deployment, strong resources, and most importantly for having a very reasonable price. Another advantage to Virtual Hosting is that you have a powerful, reliable, and professionally managed server without having to have advanced technical skills, making it ideal for an individual, small business, or even a beginner.

Posted in web host |

How to prepare yourself towards budget web hosting plans

This is some good advice from WebHostingGeek. They are 4 simple things to check before you give anyone any money. “Cheap” doesn’t always mean it will cost you the least amount of money.

How to prepare yourself towards budget web hosting plans By: WebHostingGeek

Many people would prefer to opt for a budget web hosting plan. But one must be prepared to handle its own consequences. A budget web hosting plan comes with a small risk which every customer who buys such plans should be made aware of. Many budget web hosting providers have their own secret way of doing business and this is reflected on their over all performance of the company. Hence, it is very important for a customer to find out the various types of facilities and benefits involved with the web hosting package which he intends to purchase. With regard to budget web hosting, you must be aware of certain tactics which budget web hosting providers use. Before you sign up, you must know what your web host is about and how it operates. Following are certain insights that you should be aware of:

1) About those budget web hosting companies that have no experience:
There are many budget web hosts on the website that may not be in the market for too long. In other words, they may have little or no experience at all. It may so happen that you might land up in purchasing a web hosting service that is brand new and inexperienced. I would not prefer this step. In fact, find a web host that has many years experience and they are proud of their service and growth involved as a web hosting company. So, go for budget web hosting providers which are experienced holders.

Posted in web host |

Don’t register your domain name with Network Solutions

Don’t register your domain name with Network Solutions. Use any other registrar. Not only do they charge you 4 times what most other registrars charge, moving your domain name to another registrar is almost impossible.

We had a client who had a name registered at Network Solutions. I showed them the difference in cost and customer support, so they wanted to move to GoDaddy.

La Brea tar Pits, Where You Get Sucked In And Never Get Out

First, they needed to submit a request. Then the request had to be approved. You have to actually call them to have the transfer approved. In this call, they try very hard to get you to stay. This isn’t a technical call or a call to protect you from someone stealing your name, it’s a sales call, a hard ball sales call.

When they finally do approve your request, it’s 5 days later, after multiple emails and a sales call.

Customer service is another issue, but this one is more subjective. They generally are not helpful and it takes twice as long to get things figured out with their support.

Bottom line, no matter what, don’t register your domain name with Network Solutions.

Posted in web site build |