I've noticed that most SEO articles focus on what to do after you launch your site. Those that do deal with preparing your site for launch usually discuss on-site SEO like keyword research and meta tags. What tends to be neglected is the advantage that you can gain by getting your site indexed before you launch. With a little planning and a few hours of work it's easy to be indexed by Google, Yahoo, and MSN before your site goes live.
The key to getting your site indexed in the big three is getting links pointing to it from sites that are already indexed. When the search bots crawl those sites they will inevitably find the link to your site and your site will be added to their index. Follow these five steps a month before you launch and you'll be a step ahead of the game.
1. Register your domain name.
You'd be surprised how many people wait until the last minute to do this. The sooner you register your domain, the sooner you can get some quality links pointing to it and get it indexed.
2. Put up a home page.
Make a "coming soon" page with your logo, information about your site, and expected launch date. You can also add a form for people to sign up for email updates about your site. This starts building your email marketing list before you even launch.
3. Start a blog and sign up for Feedburner.
Put up a blog at www.yoursite.com/blog. It doesn't matter if you use WordPress, Blogger, or whatever blog platform you prefer, just make sure you host it on your site. Make a few posts about your site, what people can expect when it launches, and why your site will be unique. After your first post, sign up for a Feedburner account. Under 'Publicize' in your account make sure to sign up for 'Ping Shot'. This will notify blogging directories of your posts which hopefully will result in a few links to your site.
4. Write a few articles and submit to directories.
Regardless of what your site is about, there is certainly a topic relating to your site that you could write an article about. For example, if your site is going to sell fitness equipment, you could write an article about how to build a home-gym. Or if you are going to rate and review new cars, you could write an article about how to shop for a new car. After you've written and proofread your articles, submit them to article directories like Ezine Articles and iSnare. Be sure to include a description of your new site and a link back to it in the resource box. Again, this should result in a few links to your site.
5. Get a link from an indexed site.
Steps 3 and 4 should result in some links from indexed sites which should then ensure your site to be indexed. But it can't hurt to get a few more on your own to be certain. When I launched my last site, I linked to it from my personal blog, which I knew was indexed. If you don't have that option, you can ask someone with a blog or site related to yours to mention it. If you can't find anyone willing to do it for free, you could offer them some free advertising on your site when you launch in exchange for the link.
Getting yourself indexed before you launch gives you a head start on your SEO and will allow your site to have a more immediate impact. Why wait until you launch? Get started a month early and you'll reap the benefits when launch day rolls around.

The webmaster's biggest job is to get their traffic up and keep customers/visitors coming back. Building the site is one thing, but simply building and posting a website does not guarantee traffic. In fact, a website could be beautiful and an example of all the latest technology and still not attract a single visitor if not promoted correctly. Here are 10 tips to guide you to success with your website.



(1) The internet is a new medium.


At least compared to print, it is. A website is a waste if it simply re-hashes something which could easily be put into print. Don't have the site be just an online brochure. Put up features which take advantage of the internet as a medium of communication. Filter information for them. Provide search capability. Provide interactivity with features like forums, quizzes and tools. Web visitors like to interact.



(2) Treat the Customer's Time as Valuable.


When a person visits your website, you have their attention for that point in time. You either need to use it or you will lose it - fast. Most visitors have short attention spans, what you need to design your site homepage so that it grabs their attention and provides what they are looking for right away. Its like walking into a restaurant. If you walk in and just stand there and nobody comes to greet you, you might wonder what is happening. But, if the hostess comes and greets you right away and walks you to a table, then you will be there for awhile and eat. The same analogy goes for websites. Don't overcomplicate your website homepage. Best results will be obtained if you make it very clear where to click to find what they need.



(3) Design the site for customers, not the company.


Your site needs to satisfy the needs of customers, not the company. So, don't post content which is not really useful to the site's customer. And avoid over-flattering marketing hype about the company. It inflates the ego of the company more than it helps your customer.



(4) Involve the Visitor.


Keep the visitor involved and make them feel like a valuable contributor. Actively ask for the feedback and suggestions. Ask for communication from your visitors and answer that communication swiftly. When getting that communication, capture their email address. This will allow you to communicate with them long after they have moved on and forgotten about you.



(5) Keep it Current.


You need to have content on your website which is timely and relevant to the customer's life. Posting month-old news is not interesting. Posting dry product information which never changes is not interesting. Yes, you need to have product information and other information on your site that won't change much, but you can also post more timely content. You can, for example, post content about how your products can be used in certain situations in life. Provide tips and techniques - things which are immediately applicable and solve a problem.

(6) Pay Attention to Form/Design.


Some sites simply over-do it on the eye-candy. Big graphics just for the sake of graphics often impress the site's designer more than the visitor. Do not use graphics that are large and purposeless. Remember, some visitors may still be accessing your website via dial-up. Your site needs to load up quickly for all users. A slow website will cause your users to leave quickly. Also, pay attention to graphic and design size. Many web designers operate on fairly large screen resolutions and sometimes forget that even though a graphic looks great to you, it will appear enormous to somebody on a smaller resolution. On the flip side, don't go too light on graphics. A site which is poorly designed and using the default font and no color is not very aesthetically pleasing. Any web visitor, whether they admit it or not, judges your company by your website unless they have something else to go on. A well-designed site communicates professionalism. A poor design makes the site seem like an afterthought.



(7) Promote.


When a visitor communicates to you via email, it is best to use a web form. not only will this keep your email address from being picked up by spammers, it will also allow you to ask your customers for their email address and then store that address for later use. Employ the "push/pull" marketing strategy. A visitor coming to your website is the pull, but later you want to push content back to them in the form of a newsletter or other promotional material. Start a mailing list and use it. Invite visitors to sign up. Promotion makes or breaks a business, and as long as you respect the ethical considerations of your mailing list, you should use it.



(8) Don't Operate in a Cocoon.


The internet is a medium which is shared by millions. When you set up your website, don't operate as if you are a self-contained island. Get out there and keep in tune with what is happening on other websites related to your own. Participate in forums. Post links to other websites and ask for a link in return. Form partnerships with other sites if it is appropriate. When it comes to communication, people like personal contacts. Hiding behind general email address like "sales" and "info" is OK as long as there is a way to also email you directly. A company site which allows email direct to the management is good. Just remember how much you hate calling a company and getting stuck in their phone system. Sometimes you just want to talk to somebody. Give your visitors that ability.



(9) Have a Plan to Attract Repeat Traffic.


Use newsletters, out-going email, contests, forums, clubs, auctions - anything that will cause people to return to your website. When posting links to other websites, don't just send your visitors somewhere else. They may never return. Provide them an exit page. Give them a pop-up when they try to leave your site. Or at the very least make external links open in a new window.



(10) Track Your Visitors

Pay attention to your site's statistics and react accordingly. What are people reading? How are they finding you? Do they just come and leave right from your homepage? How long as they are on your website? Do they return? This data is immensely valuable in fine-tuning your website based on customer needs and wants. Remember, the biggest mistake of any webmaster is designing the site for what THEY want. A successful website is designed for the target audience, not to impress the site's owner.

Web site design is a critical element in niche marketing.


If you want to build your reputation as a Professional in your niche, you need to project a professional image from the moment your visitors reach your web site.


Like it or not, first impressions count and no more so than on the Internet. Your web site is the only way that visitors can judge you and your product. Give them the wrong impression, make it hard for them to find the information they're after and chances are they will click away into cyberspace and never come back.


To avoid this happening to you, here are ten web design tips to help ensure that your niche web site projects a professional image :


1 - Use the KISS approach - Keep your web design simple and straight forward with clean lines and a suitable colour scheme. Avoid distractions like Flash presentations, animated gifs and audio which loads as the page opens.


2 - Visibility - Design for a screen resolution of 800x600 pixels and a maximum page width of 760 pixels so that your web site visitors don't have to scroll from side to side to read your content.


3 - Graphics - Keep your graphics down to one or two smallish ones and optimise them to load quickly (You can optimise your graphics at www.netmechanic.com who offer a free facility to do this). Always add "alt" tags to each image, with a concise description, so that people who surf with graphics turned off and the sight impaired, who use text readers, know exactly what the image is.


4 - Load time - Aim to have your pages load in 8-10 seconds on a 56K modem. You can do this by keeping your page size down to about 10k or less.


5 - Use CSS - CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS enables you to define the look of your web site with various style elements like font type, size and colour, backgrounds, Hyperlinks and a lot more. By linking your HTML pages to a Cascading Style Sheet you can reduce the amount of code on your web pages and speed up load times.

6 - Navigation - Make sure your main navigation links appear in the same place on every page so that your visitors don't have to hunt around for them. Your visitors should also be able to see at a glance exactly where they are on your web site, so include "You are here" links at the top and bottom of each page showing the path from your Home page, for example :


"You are here >> Home > Widgets > Redwidgets"


In this case Home and Widgets would be linked back to the relevant pages.


7 - Site Map - Include a Site Map on your web site listing the title of each page with a short description and a link back to the relevant page. Not only will this enable your site visitors to find their way around, it will also help to encourage search engines to spider your entire site.


8 - Readability - Avoid dark backgrounds and fancy font styles, if you have a lot of stuff to read on your web pages it is better to stick to a white background with black print as that is less fatiguing to read. Arial, Verdana and Times Roman are the most common fonts to use and the easiest to read. Oh and one other thing - not everyone has 20/20 vision, make your font sizes big enough for those people to read comfortably.


9 - Test - Test your design in as many browsers as possible. Although Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, don't ignore alternatives like FireFox, Mozilla, Opera, K-Meleon, Netscape, Safari, etc. they may only constitute 15%-20% of browsers, but that's still millions of potential customers you might otherwise miss out on.


10 - Relevance - Don't cover more than one major topic per page, this will help you get your message over more easily. Make sure that everything you are going to include on your web site is relevant to the niche market you are targeting. For example if your site is about golf, don't include links to a dog training site (unless it's about training dogs to find lost golf balls:-).

There are many adsense tips floating around the internet. Here are some adsense tips that can drastically increase your CTR (click-through-rate) and your profits. These are simple changes that only take a few minutes to implement but can make drastic changes to your bottom line.


Lots of people say to make your ads blend in. However, some people are having a lot of success by making their links stand out. The most effective style seems to be having your links Amazon.com blue, while your other links are a less-noticeable color.

Another tactic that is working very well is placing images directly above your ads. This simple technique has been known to increase CTR by 400%. To keep the images fresh, some people randomize related images on their site using PHP code.

Google has cited the 336x280 large rectangle as the most effective ad size. Pay close attention when Google gives advice on how to increase your profits, they have a wealth of statistics and research that back up their findings. However, nothing can replace your own testing. Every site is different.


Place ads where your visitors will likely be focused. Study your web page. Where do your eyes seem to focus? How do your eyes scan over the page. Adsense ads often do well when placed near navigation and other hot spots.


Check out this heat map by Google -


http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html


- Weave your adsense into your content, aligned to the right or left.

- Place link units in the top left-hand corner. This part of the website has shown to be clicked on more than any other part of the page. This is the most valuable piece of real estate on your web page.

Take advantage of the "alternate URL" feature to avoid Public Service Ads that seep money away from your website.

- One of the best things you can do is add additional pages to your site. A web site with thousands of pages and tons of content often does very well in the search engines. You can get free content from article directories. You could also use public domain content, which is a favorite tactic of John Reese. Or, you could use content in the creative commons. This is getting easier than ever now that Yahoo and others have created a search engine specifically for content in the creative commons.

Succeeding with adsense is largely determined by the amount of traffic to your site. However, there are many adsense tricks that you can employ to get the most revenue possible out of your site. Often times, this means doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling your earnings. The key is to find out what works for your web site. Testing and tracking is the key to increased revenue!

There are millions of web sites trying to get listed in the top 20 spots of the major search engines. That amounts to an awful lot of competition and even after spending hours and hours on Search Engine Optimization techniques you may still not be able to achieve a high ranking for your competitive keywords!

However, if it proves too difficult for you to get high rankings directly, there are still ways that you can get to the top.......indirectly!

So, just how do you do this?

Firstly, look up the top 20 web sites on the major search engines under the keywords and phrases people would find your web site. If you could either advertise on those sites, or get a link from those sites to yours then that would be nearly as good as having a top listing yourself.

The most expensive way to do this would be to buy ad space on those web sites. However, if you don't want to spend any money to do this, you could use the ten strategies below.

These strategies may not of course apply to every web site but I'm sure there'll be at least two or three that you can make use of straight away....

1. Participate on their discussion boards. You could post questions, answer other peoples questions, and join in on conversations. Just include your signature file and link to your website at the end of your messages.

2. Ask the web site owner if they would like a free ebook to giveaway to their visitors. You could have them link to your web site or include your ad in the free ebook.

3. Submit content to their web site. You could write articles for their web site and include your resource box and link at the end of the article. If they publish it, you'll indirectly be at the top of the search engines.

4. Write an excellent article review of their web site, roducts or services. Then publish the review on your web site. E-mail the web site owner and tell him or her about it. They may link to your web site so their visitors read it.

5. Ask the owner of the web site if they would want to trade advertising. If you don't get as much traffic as they do, you could throw in some extra incentives.

6. Propose a cross promotion deal with the web site. You both could promote each others products or services together in one package deal. This means a mention and link back to your web site.

7. Give the web site a testimonial for their product or service. Include a little text link for your web site with the testimonial. You never know; it could end up on their ad copy.

8. Post your advertisement on their free classified ad section on their web site. You want to be sure you have an attractive headline so they will read your ad.

9. Sign their guest book. You could leave a short compliment about their web site on their guest book. Just include your signature file and link at the end of your message.

10. Tweak your own website so that your pages are search engine friendly. There are steps that you can take that don't take long to implement but can dramatically improve the traffic you get from the likes of Google and Yahoo! Look at our free course detailed below for the simplest way to do this.

A website should firstly be searched out by visitors before talking about attracting or retaining those visitors. Nowadays, a ¡§well designed website¡¨ does not only relate to a web site¡¦s visual attractiveness but more importantly, how friendly it is with search engines.



Below are 10 SEO friendly website designing tips where web designers should pay attention to during the early stage of their web designing process.



1. Avoid creating menu on the left-hand side of a website . If unavoidable, an alternative way is to put some text with rich keywords at the top or above the left-hand menu so that this text will be the first thing to be read by search engines.



2. Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines . To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.



3. Every page should contain the ¡§title¡¨ and ¡§description¡¨ tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines.



4. Try not to use Flash when possible . Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and make people run away. If you really have a reason to use flash, try to make it smaller (e.g. as a flash header) and leave other area of your website for keyword-rich content.



5. Think twice on how to use graphics . Make them relevant to your content and use an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to read as they cannot read graphics and also for your visitors so that they can have something to read when waiting for the graphics to load.



6. Do not only use images to link out . You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though.



7. Avoid using frames . Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.

8. Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.



9. Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster . It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.



10. Use standard HTML . Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than is needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that cannot be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or even the whole website. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html so that you may manually avoid or even delete those unnecessary scripting codes.

Dropshadows add contrast to objects, and add depth to an image. They can increase visibility, and improve readablility. However, if used inappropriately drop shadows will look cheesy.

This text has no dropshadow. It has little contrast from the background, and appears flat.

1 Creating Dropshadows using Layers

This shadow is soft, yet it ads a lot of contrast to the text, due to it's large surface area. This shadow can be created in any version of Adobe Photoshop.

To create this drop shadow:

A) In the Layers window, hold down Ctrl, and click on the layer you want the shadow applied to. In this case, it's the text object phong. This will load the layer transparency.

B) Create a new layer , and drag it under the layer you want the dropshadow on. Double click on the new layer, and name it Small Shadow.

Press D on the keyboard, to ensure the selected foreground color is black. Fill the selection Alt+Backspace, and then deselect Ctrl+D.

C) Now, Gaussian Blur the Small Shadow layer 3-6 pixels, to create a nice ambient shadow around the edges.

Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur...
3-6 pixels

D) Drag the Small Shadow layer onto the new layer icon , to create a duplicate of it. Double click on the new layer (Small Shadow copy) and rename it Large Shadow.

Gaussian Blur the Large Shadow layer by about 20 pixels.

Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur... 20 pixels

E) Next, select the Move Tool (V), and drag or nudge the shadow down and to the right.

Finally, change the opacity of the Large Shadow layer to 80%.

Once you have the desired effect, feel free to merge the two shadow layers (Ctrl+E).


Tips: The sharpness of the shadow affects the illusion of how far away the light source is. By bluring the shadow more, you can create the illusion of a light which is farther away. A crisp shadow would indicate that the light source is near by.

Also, by moving the shadow farther away from the object which is casting it, the angle at which the light source is located can be altered.





2 Creating Dropshadows using Layer Effects

The following drop shadow only works in Photoshop 5.

In the Layers window, right click on the layer you want dropshadowed, and select Effects...

Mode: Normal
Opacity: 75%
Angle: 120
Distance: 12
Blur: 8
Intensity: 0

Mode determines the blending method that the drop shadow will be applied with. By clicking on the black box beside the Mode dropdown, you can change the color of the dropshadow.

Opacity changes how opaque the shadow will be.

Angle points to the origin of the light, which is opposite of the way the shadow will be cast. By selecting Global Angle, it will use the universal angle for all dropshadows in the image.

Distance affects the number of pixels the dropshadow will be offset from the original position of the layer.

Blur determines the number of pixels over which the shadow will be diffused.

Intensity changes the contrast threshold of the shadow. Play around with the numbers too observe it's effect.

I have started this blog to help my friends with some photoshop tutorials. I will start with the easy ones and then I will post the hard ones to.
If you have questions about this tutorials please write to me.