According to the Google Penguin Update – Five Types of Link Issues Harming Some Affected Websites, the spammy link signals were the issues for those websites that have suffered by the algorithmic change. Google also hits websites for aggressive anchor text for keywords in bankinks even before Penguin and right after it, the diversity of anchor text has become even more critical.

The historical data of tons of websites were inspected by the Microsite Masters to perform some investigations whether these sites that have seen their rankings declined after Penguin have been guilty for the unstable percentage of anchor text for the ‘money’ or ‘optimization’ keywords such as any term you tried ranking number 1 for in contrast into the more natural-looking linking anchor text mix.

There were quite fascinating results. Websites that have seen their ranking on search engines fall down had the money keyword for anchor text in 65% or more of inbound links, based on the statement of Microsite Masters:

For those websites that have been penalized, their banklink profile is more of a natural looking. Websites that had the money keyword anchor text under 50% of the time all but guaranteed won’t have an impact on Penguin.

Basically, what Google Penguin tried correcting its rankings by reducing patterns it is considering to be spammy links. Given that potentially also opens doors to negative SEO attacks wherein competitors have the opportunity of harming websites by pointing bad links at competitors with weaker link profile.

There is also a finding that Penguin hits websites that have a small number of incoming links from domains and those sites in similar niche which the Microsite Masters also stated. With Google, the key are link relevance and quality so by attracting quality links from the authoritative domains in similar niche would be a sure-fire sign your website or page is relevant.

Essentially, Google looks for signals that can’t be easily controlled. Obtaining links from relevant websites in similar niche is very difficult to control. The two tools that you can use to view your anchor text diversity and link profile are ahrefs and Open Site Expplorer.

If you are caught by Penguin for having spammy or unnatural links, the best way for you to go is link pruning, said SEO guru Bruce Clay. According to him, one should consider assessing link profile on a monthly basis to find less quality links to remove.

Though it is easy to concentrate on cleaning up your links hoping to recover of Penguin, maybe it is something else dragging down your rankings. Perhaps a site viewed by Google has scraped your web content which is either linking you with some credit or it has failed to take out internal link into your site in the copy text. The link is now from bad community that points back to your site. If you are unsure if your content has been copied on other websites, you should try Copyscape. If you have used it and find that other websites have snatched your content, Google will have the page submitted with a DMCS report which requests removing the content.

For affected websites but have not violated Google rules, it can be that your domain does not have authority or you do not have sufficient quality backlinks.

1. Create a perfect customer and give him a name, ask yourself what are his/her needs, what search term is he/she looking for.

2. How much is your customer worth – e.g. is each of your customers worth $25 or $50 of internet marketing spend.

3. Sign up to Google’s free webmaster tools – these include Google Local Listing, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. The information Google provides through its Google Analytics tools is invaluable for anyone who wants to turn their website into a internet marketing tool.

4. Sign up to a Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Facebook paid listing services.

5. Create a Facebook business page and tell everyone.

6. List your website on any relevant holiday/ accommodation directories – Search Google.com.au for search terms e.g. ‘Self Contained Accommodation South Coast NSW’ and negotiate a top of the page website listing or advert placement e.g. http://www.takeabreak.com.au/southcoast.htm – Call to negotiate.

7. Create a long term website Search Engine Optimisation – Think long term and invest in your website. If you can get a 200 potential customers per month looking at your website how much is this worth, what price do you put on 10 of these customers?

8. Email Marketing – treat every booking as a promoter of your product. Collect an opt-in email addresses and reviews, keep them on a database and email promotions at relevant periods throughout the year.

9. Write about your services or products – Submit articles to leading article directories including EzineArticels.com and link back to your website. E.g. “Things to do in Batemans Bay”

10. Promote your business everywhere and to anyone who listen – Social events and public events present the perfect opportunity to give out business cards – business cards can lead to website traffic

The subject is about the most important thing on the website. It is something that can make spark the interest of users and retain their focus on. Usability is the elements that can improve the functionality and user friendliness of your website. Finally is the balance between the visual hierarchy and visual weights of components.

These elements are the most vital elements when styling a web design and while other visual styles would insist for additional aesthetic layers, in the concept of minimalism, it does not.

Should you Use Minimalism?

The concept of minimalism is the basis of modern website design that starts with the content, brand and nothing else. If you would add only the necessary, you can create a website catering specifically and exclusively to its goal.

It is recommended to use minimalism in website design because there are many benefits that come with it. The first one is that this idea of designing a website usually ends up with less codes and site assets. Minimalist websites will usually have fewer CSS rules, images, HTML elements, JavaScript and others. This only means increased front end performance on the web and improved usability matched with better user experience.

However, this does not mean it has an easier design stage as it takes planning and production, like most other types of website. You should not also mess up minimalism. If you leave out superfluous elements, the design will be free and open. The lesser things to see, the fewer the distractions will be. Make sure though that you give consideration into the typography, balance and white space to come up with an excellent and good looking design.

For web designers that have artistic skill or knowledge in using Photoshop, minimalism can be a perfect way to design a website using your understanding of white space, typography and balance.
One of the main reasons to design a minimalist website is that without excessive design elements, the emphasis or focus will be on the content of the site. With more white space, different sections of your website get breathing room. As said, content is king and though a lot may not agree with this, there are some who would say content is not that important. Each line of code that you are writing is to service the content of the page in some way. The content is equally important on how accessible it is without sufficient consideration of the usability, the content is otherwise difficult to read.

Minimalistic web design does not always mean reducing to the barest essentials. In contrary, most minimalist websites include subtle design elements manifesting themselves in a remarkable and beautiful manner due to lesser distractive elements. If you decide to go minimal on your web design, you should understand the purpose of it and not just the looks. It needs to be well understood to be well executed and it does not necessarily mean your website has to look simple and bland.

These technical guidelines and specifications were developed by through a process that will maximize consensus on the content of technical report ensuring high technical and editorial quality and earning endorsement by the W3C and broader community. When learning about Web technology, you may need to get started with the following introduction and follow links for further details.

• Web design and applications – These involve standards for establishing and rendering web pages such as CSS, HTML, Ajax, SVG and other web applications technology. It includes methods to make pages accessible to users with disabilities and to make them available on mobile devices.

• Web architecture – This focuses on the principles and technologies sustaining the internet such as HTTP and URLs.

• Semantic Web – Aside from the classic web of documents, W3C also helps in creating a technology stack for a web of data support, the type of data found in database. The main goal of this would be to allow computers to perform more useful work and develop systems capable of supporting trusted interaction over the network. Semantic Web is referring to the vision of the W3C on the web of linked data. These technologies allow people to create data stores on the internet, create rules of data handling and build vocabulary. The linked data are being empowered by technologies like OWL, RDF, SKOS, and SPARQL.

• XML Technology – This includes XML Namespaces, XML, XML Schema, XSLT and EXI to name a few.

• Web of Services – This pertains to the message-based designed usually found on the internet and in enterprise software. This is based on technologies like XML, HTML, WSDL, SOAP, SPARQL and many others.

• Web of Devices – W3C focuses on technologies to allow Web access anytime, and anywhere regardless of the device used. Mobile phones and other mobile devices can access the web with this.

• Browsers and Authoring Tools – Both the growth and usefulness of the internet is dependent on its universality. Whatever software is used, the language spoken, the computer owned, whether wireless or wires, sensory or interaction modes, it is possible to publish using any of those. One should also gain access to the internet using any kind of hardware that can be connected to the internet, irrespective of the site and mobile or not. W3C assists this considering and blending through international web standards. These will ensure that all of the crazy brilliance continue creating improving the web accessible and opened to everyone who seeks to use it.

Another vital pointer is to remain within the subject content and avoid divergences. Keep on track with your market audience. Designing your site can be exciting and challenging at the same time.

Although it is true that an appealing website always attracts visitors but once they are on your website the next and most important thing that you should focus on is the content.

Your site should be designed in a way that it can achieve a specific objective. With this, it is ideal and prudent to write first your specific objectives before undertaking any design for your website. This will guide you in creating a web design more suitable to its objective.

Making the first impressions should have an impact. Decide on specific messages that you want to share with the visitors on your site and develop the message in a more concise and appealing manner especially on the first page of your site.

The first page must not be cluttered and should be designed to put intriguing words and phrases which would entice visitors to find further information from your site on the products and services you are offering. Avoid using free hosting sites instead purchase your domain identity when deciding to pursue your business seriously.

Make it a point to design sites instead of mere pages. Target the overall appearance of your site and how it would appear to your visitors. When you start developing a new website, make sure to place creative details are sensible to users and must have consistent attributes which would not go stale for after quite a while. The durability of the website will set it apart from other websites.

Your web design must afford facility in navigating by your viewers and visitors. It should have extreme ease in browsing through the pages and in getting a glimpse of your promotions. The links present in your site must be thoroughly connected and there must be ease as well in getting around the pages while the visitors navigate through your site.

Make sure that important information such as contact details including contact numbers, email address, business name and physical address are placed in each and every page. You should include in your web design the direct links to the products of your business products along with other useful needs.

However, not all companies possess the resources necessary in designing a website. This is where hiring a good website designer becomes a vital consideration to be made. Whether designing your website yourself or hiring professional ones to do the job, it is very important that the outcome is good enough to easily attract customers.

In designing a website, clean layout is very important as it will work in favor of the website. A simple yet clean presentation of text, right usage of images and spacing can bring out the features and specialties in your webpage. Avoid using a lot of images or making the font larger as it is only an indication that your website design is not professional and it can create negative reputation about your business’ professionalism.

Aside from the design elements of the website, the time it will take to load a web page is also a vital aspect in a website design. The use of graphical components such as video, audio, flash, images and others can greatly affect the speed of your website. Therefore using these elements must be kept to minimum. Oftentimes visitors would leave websites that is taking them a lot of time to load.
If in case it is necessary to use heavy graphical elements, the efficiency of your website can be increased if you use multiple frames in one page. This can help in significantly reducing the overheads to wait for the page to load. Multiple frames can be used by adding multiple HTML designs in every frame. So when clicking on a link, only the frame on the page will load.

A good website design is also one that is compatible of multiple browsers. It should work with different browsers otherwise you will lose half of your potential customers. So before you make your website live, its multi-browsers capability should be tested first.

Finally, your website should feature good, concise, easy to read and informative content. It is where your customers will know about your business and your offering. Hence it should be written well using short sentences and simple language. It must be free from spelling or grammatical errors.
When done well, a website design can help you entice more customers and visitors into your website.

So what is website navigation and how does it affect the decision of online users to stay or leave the website they are visiting? Navigation is the inroad you build for online users to get around and find the information they are looking for from your website. It has been known that if the surfers do not get what they want within three clicks of the mouse, chances are they would leave the website to look for another.

A good website design therefore should ensure the online users know where the information is and how they can get there. It is essential for your website to be user-friendly and ease in navigation in order for users to get around the website more easily. There are ten tips to make sure your website has good navigation.

For easier maneuverability and consistency, you should keep the navigation bar on top of your website and repeat on in each of your web page. Make sure the ‘Contact Us’ button is easy for visitors to find. It is important also that your Site Map button is clearly visible. For most internet users, this will serve as the entry point into you site. The links must be described in clear language in order for surfers to know exactly where the click is going to direct them.

Your ‘Home Page’ button has to be present and visible instantly on every webpage. Ideally, it would be nice to have the logo linked into your home page so when users click upon it, they will be redirected into the home page. If a single page is too long, it would be best to introduce ‘page jumps’. These are links that will take internet users to the different parts of the page so they need not to search through the entire page before they find what they are looking for.

A good website design also has search bar on the website, commonly available to all pages. Most internet users would love this as it can help save them the trouble of scrolling up and down searching for information. Consistency plays a vital role in a good website design. The navigation structure of your website should be consistent throughout your webpage. Good navigation means internet users don’t have to go to the home each time they need to visit another page.

An important but often overlooked feature of a good website design is the ‘call to action’ button. This should be clearly defined and prominently display. Internet users must be able to know what will happen when they click on the button.

Finally, a good website design should have eye-soothing colors and fonts. Having a loud website design that screams with colors is a big no-no.

One of the things you should take care of when setting up a website is not just the content quality uploaded on the site but the design elements such as colors of backgrounds and size and type of font to obtain maximum online presence. It is best to avoid vibrant colors like yellow or orange that could make it more difficult for people to read. Aside from that, you also have to avoid using an image as the background of the text as it can affect the readability of the content.

The truth is that most users won’t actually read even 30% of the content posted on your site. Therefore the most important information must be readily and easily accessible to visitors who tend to scan through the pages of your site. When breaking up the content of your page with the most important headers, it will be much easier for online visitors to skim through the paragraphs and arrive at the parts where information they are looking for can be found.

Another vital aspect of an effective website design is browser compliance. This is very important to every web design project. It is highly advised that one should develop and test a portal of standard and popular browsing platforms that are being used by online users today. If a website is not compatible with these browsers, it won’t be accessible to all customers and this can be one reason why you are not driving more traffic into your website.

It is also very important to ensure that your website has user-friendly navigation features. Making the experience of your users while visiting your website pleasurable and hassle-free should be a top priority. This can be achieved by using effectively menus and links to facilitate a smoother flow of your visitors from one page to another.

If you consider all these vital aspects of creating website design, you will be able to attract traffic with high conversion rates. With this, it will be very easy for you to obtain your most desired profit. You should avoid overdoing your website design. The key is to make it simple yet appealing to users.

There are a lot of differences between paid and free web directory submissions. The free type has been used for so many years by automated submitters that can automatically submit a website to thousands of different directories in just minutes. This has made it almost impossible for directory owner to go through the submissions manually and review them in a timelier manner. Most of the websites submitted are of low quality and are trying to simply get a link back to their website for free. Presently, majority of submissions to free directories are never reviewed at all.

There is another problem with the free directory type is that once the submission is done, webmasters are actually hit with spam. Directory owners will most of the time try to acquire a valid email address then go on spamming the person with loads of mail and offers.

On the other hand, paid directories have a team of employees that can review manually each and every website submitted. Mostly, the approval is faster and you will be given a notification if your website has been included. Since website owners pay for the inclusion, the directories are of much higher quality compared to the free ones and can give your website with much more valuable link. Remember that only because you are paying for it there is always guarantee that your website will be approved. Each directory has instituted quality guidelines that should be met before the website is listed.

One of the best benefits of paid web directory is that a lot of the websites will obtain higher page rank. This means they have high trust factor with Google and other search engines. This will give our site with a boost in search engine rankings. The website can get significant direct traffic coming from the paid directory. Most visitors will usually look into these directories searching for specific type of sites. As a result, your website is able to gain more exposure and can bring a number of new customers into your site.

Submitting to web directories is known as a powerful tool when it comes to website promotion. A web directory is a website accepting web listings that are being categorized and sub-categorized. When submitting your site to web directories, the link into your site is then added. As you learned, link popularity is a crucial factor to obtain higher rankings. When your link is being added on a page that has good PR, then it will be a plus into the link popularity of your site.

When the link of your website is placed on pages that have good PR, then it will be a boost to your link popularity since the website will get a piece of the PR of the page. If there are more links into your website, then you will also get higher search engine rankings. However, you should remember that the links should be natural and relevant. The links should be SEO friendly and must be on the page with some PR, surround be relevant text content and there should not be over 30 website links because anything more than that can devaluate a piece of PR that your website is getting from the page.

Web directories offering such links are called SEO friendly web directory and is worth even paying small amount to submit since the link will be found and indexed by Google and the rest of other search engines in a short period of time and will be a huge advantage when it comes to your website link popularity.

Web directory listing usually consists of linked title, description and URL and can display as well the site homepage thumbnail, detailed description, Page Rank, visitor reviews and others, the listing can be free or paid. So how can you find web directories? Using search engines can aid you in finding directories you can use. But others would prefer using categorized list of rated and reviewed web directories where they are reviewed by a lot of webmasters. This saves you a lot of time on searching directories that won’t actually give you the traffic and boost on search engine rankings that you desire.