Building Link Popularity
You did it! You built a website. Now what? The obvious answer, I hope is you need traffic. Unlike a lot of things in life, this time you can’t get enough of a good thing. One of the first steps in your marketing strategy should be building links. Before you begin though, you should understand the difference between reciprocal and non-reciprocal links.
Two websites that simply link to each other is a reciprocal link. Basically both sites send traffic to each other in the basic “scratch each others back” philosophy. Naturally, a non-reciprocal link, or one way link, is just that, a link from a website to another with no return link. Today’s search engines are extremely intelligent and the position of your site in the search results has a great deal to do with who links to your site. With this in mind a good linking strategy would be to have as many inbound non-reciprocal links as possible with a little reciprocal links advantageously sprinkled in. This will tell the search engines that your site contains valuable information because unless your site was a benefit to another site and their readers, why would they link to it? Popularity: 9%
Wednesday ~ March 03, 2007 by OMS Posted in General SEO | No Comments
Reducing Load Time - Image Optimization
If your site is all text then no problem here and load up time will generally be fast. The guilty party of slow loading time is images, either a lot of them or one very large one. Now a site designer has to find just the right balance to attract users with images but not bog down the page to where no one will wait for it to open. Pay close attention to any images you use and use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, reducing file size without effecting appearance but also speeding up load time. Maybe consider a smaller thumbnail version that a user can opt to click for a larger view. There are many free image compressors online that you can download to help reduce your images file size. If you own Photoshop, and save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the quality of the JPEG image. Normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. You can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality but remember that best quality equals large files. Sometimes you just may need to have that quality, just remember that too many on one page can cause major delays in viewing. You can also save your images in GIF format giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely! Popularity: 9%
Saturday ~ March 03, 2007 by OMS Posted in Website Design | No Comments
