Google Places is a free tool provided by Google for your business that can pay abundant dividends by amplifying the traffic flow to your website, increasing your website visibility in Google searches, and growing your company’s sales.  Google recently claimed that one out of five searches on Google are related to a geographic location.  Google Places allows you to create a listing for your business within Google Maps, which also frequently shows in regular search results, where a user can find the products and/or services you offer with map based directions and other information about your business.

The Basics

Whether you’ve already created or claimed your Google Places listing or if you’ve yet to do so, the first step in having your listing rank well is to make sure you’ve fully completed your business profile.   Answer all of the fields Google provides completely and with as much information as possible.  Upload pictures of your products and services, your team, or business.  If available, upload videos about your business or products.  Video topics can include sales, company history, or product demonstrations.  Add an offer or two for your business, which is a essentially a free online coupon.  The more quality, relevant content you add to your Google Places profile, the better overall your listing will rank.

If you haven’t already created or claimed your Google Places listing for your business, you can learn how to so here.

Google Places in Search Results:  A Competitive Edge for Your Business

The Google Places listing for your business will also sometimes appear in keyword search results in Google.  Google has recently placed a stronger emphasis on Google Places listings, often showing Google Places info above organic search results for a certain keyword search.  For example, a company’s actual website could be ranked #20 organically appearing on the second page results for a given keyword search, but show up on the first page search results, or even #1, with its Google Places listing.  The Google Places search placement result isn’t for the company’s website itself, but instead for its Google Places listing.

In the example below, we’ll use Quality Shed’s Glendale, CA location and the keyword phrase search “Glendale, CA sheds”.  The company’s actual website pages are listed on the second page results, however its Google Places listing is coming up #1 overall!  When you click on Quality Shed’s Google Places listing heading, it takes you directly to their website, not the listing itself.  By getting your Google Places listing to rank high in Google, you can give yourself a significant search advantage over your competitors while creating an important new entrance point to your website potentially attracting new customers you wouldn’t have otherwise.

Other Business Directories Affect Your Google Places Listing

Google will search other business directory sites that may include a listing for your business along with any reviews for your business.  Google currently scrapes reviews about your business from these other sites and will populate your Google Places listing with those reviews.  In the above example, although Quality Sheds has four reviews in its Google Places listing, it also has a review from someone who reviewed the company through “Insiderpages.com”.  Google pulled a review from InsiderPages about the Quality Sheds and automatically added it to their Google Places listing.  The review pulled from insiderpages.com was a positive review for the company, however  it’s essential to check your Google Places listing regularly to ensure any possible negative reviews that could be floating around in cyberspace about your business don’t inadvertently get pulled in by Google to your listing. When reviews are added about your business in any directory, it’s beneficial for you to personally respond to both good and bad reviews about your business.

It’s a good idea to make sure your business is listed on as many reputable directory and review sites as possible.  However, because there are a multitude of directories on the web, many of which would hold little value to your business, you’ll want to focus on local directories and directories that center on your type of business.  Local online phone directories and trade organization websites that provide business listings are a good start.  Make sure you accurately list your business name and add as much info as you can about your business to each.   It’s important to have your business name consistently shown in all directories so that search engines can identify that a listing belongs to your business and not another.  If you find your business in a directory  with auto-populated information that isn’t accurately spelled or contains other information that’s incorrect, make sure you claim the listing or contact the directory’s administrator to correct it.

Sitemaps and Geo Sitemaps

It’s a must to have a sitemap.xml file, usually placed in the root directory of your site, for search engines like Google to find and read each time it indexes your site.  This site map file provides the complete page structure of your site to search engines.  If you have a traditional HTML based site, you’ll want to manually generate and upload your sitemap.xml file to your site periodically or at least when you make significant changes to your site.  A good resource for generating a sitemap of your site is xml-sitemaps.com .

With WordPress based websites (and with some other CMS sites) you can install a free plugin that constantly and automatically keeps your sitemap.xml up to date with the changes and updates you make to your website.  You can download the WordPress sitemap generator plugin her

Your sitemap file will help your overall site ranking, but alone may not influence how well your business ranks in Google Places.  However, another type of sitemap, the Geo Sitemap,  can be a factor considered by Google for your Google Places ranking.  The Geo Sitemap is a KML file which is used by Google to show locations on both Google Earth and Google Maps.  To generate a Geo Sitemap, you’ll need to create two files, a KML file, and an XML file, and upload both to your sites root directory.  You’ll then need to submit the Geo Sitemap to Google with your Google Webmaster Tools account.  To generate both the necessary KML and XML files, you can use the Geo Sitemap generator tool at SiteMapDoc.com .   Follow the directions and upload the files to your site.  Remember to change the generated code to use your website’s correct URL and make sure you save both files with the appropriate file extension, .kml and .xml.  Finally make sure you add your new Geo Sitemap file to your Google Webmaster Tools account.  You’ll need to submit your .xml file to Google Webmaster (which points to your .kml file).  If you don’t already have a Google Webmaster account you can sign up for one through your Google Account or by clicking here.

Conclusion

Google Places is a dynamic service that Google is constantly tweaking to improve the way it serves its search engine users and revenue model.  It’s critical to stay on top of Google Places current trends;  what is an effective strategy today, may not be tomorrow.  Once you’ve mastered the topics described in this article, you’ll also want to educate yourself on more advanced methods to improve your Google Places ranking.   Best of luck with optimizing your Google Places listing and growing your business.

Author’s Note:  I’d like to extend a special thank you to Quality Sheds of Glendale for allowing me to use their company as an example in this article.

Author’s Note:  I’d like to extend a special thank you to Quality Sheds of Glendale for allowing me to use their company as an example in this article.

Viewing natural search results without the bias of your own personal search habits is crucially important when determining how high your website ranks for a particular keyword or keyword phrase.  Performing a keyword search for a keyword related to your website will commonly bring up your website much higher in the search results than an ordinary web searcher or a new potential client searching for the products or services you offer that has never before visited your website.  This after all, is the type of individual and web traffic you’re trying to direct to your site and capture.

By default, Google will personalize your search results, even if you’re not logged into your Google account.  You’ll need to “unpersonalize” your search results to get an accurate picture of how your website is really ranking for the rest of the world.  To do effective SEO, this is an absolute.  So how do you turn it off?

There are a number of methods to do so, but one of the easiest is using the “&pws=0” parameter.  First, you’ll need to turn off instant search results in Google.  To do this, perform any Google search through your Google search bar in your browser or by navigating to Google.com.  Next click on the “Instant in on” link next to the main Google search bar button.

When doing a Google search for a certain keyword or keyword phrase, you’ll see a search URL appear in your web browser’s address bar.

After you do a search for “disable personalized search” in Google, the following search URL will appear in your browser address bar:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=disable+personalized+search&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS350US375&ie=UTF-8

If you add the parameter “&pws=0” to the end of the search URL it will return unpersonalized search results, in effect disabling personalized search results in Google:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=disable+personalized+search&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS350US375&ie=UTF-8&pws=0

By clicking on the two links above, you should get two different results.  The first taking into account your search history, habits, present geographical location, and other personalized factors.  The second link, with the &pws=0 parameter added to the end of the search URL, will provide you more natural mostly unpersonalized results.  Geography can still play a role in search results bias even using the &pws=0 parameter, but all other primary factors will be disabled.  It’s also important to note that sometimes your personalized search results will closely match natural, unpersonalized search results, however this usually isn’t the case if you’ve already visited other websites related to your keyword search.

Unfortunately, the &pws=0 parameter will not permanently stay appended to all your future search queries, so you’ll need to add it again to the end of each new query you perform.  There is a way to use the Grease Monkey Firefox plugin to set your browser to always add the &pws=0 parameter to the end of your search queries and this a more advance topic you can learn about by vising the Grease Monkey website or doing a search for “Greasemonkey &pws=0“.

Disabling Google personalized search results is a critical component to performing accurate SEO for your website.  Appending the &pws=0 parameter to the end of your search URLs will give you a quick and easy way to depersonalize your search results providing you the ability to view the natural, unbiased search results for the keywords for which you’re trying to rank highly.

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When a colleague recently asked me about best practices for linking between pages on his WordPress site, I decided to do some research to see if there was a better way to accomplish this than the built in WordPress standard HTML URL linking tool.  Adding internal links throughout your website is enhances user experience, marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).  For example, you may mention a number of your company’s featured products and services on your home page for which you’ve created a separate sales or detail page for each one elsewhere within your website.  It’s good practice to hyperlink each p/s on your home page to each of their corresponding individual pages, because it gives your site visitors an additional opportunity to delve deeper into your website instead of solely relying on them to use your main site navigation.  Internal linking is also recognized and valued by search engine crawlers and will contribute to a more [cref website-maintenance positive ranking for your site].

The first method you could use to link to another page or post within your WordPress website is to use the included link tool in the text editor that appears when adding or editing a page or post.  However, this method is best suited for external hyperlinking to other sites than your own, because if you decide to change a page or post name or move it to another location within your website, all the links referenced to it will break.  Every time you rename or move a page or post you’ll have to find all the hyperlinks in your website that point to it and update them.  As your website scales and grows you can easily image how difficult this would become to manage.  Nevertheless, it’s useful to know how to use the link tool for external linking.

WordPress Link Tool

To use the link tool, first select the text you want to hyperlink by highlighting it with your cursor.  The link tool (“chainlink” icon button) will then illuminate in the text editor toolbar.  Clicking on the link button will open a new window with options to link your selected text.

WordPress Insert Hyperlink

Copy your link URL into the corresponding field and you’re ready to go.  You may also choose to configure any of the other options for example, to enhance accessibility and keep visitors from closing your website in their browser when following your external links to another website (setting the Target propery to “Open in New Window (_blank)”.

Internal Linking Best Practices

A better, more dynamic method to internally link, or cross-reference your pages and posts would be to reference them by a unique ID number or Slug name.  This way if you a move a page the link doesn’t change.  It doesn’t matter where the page is physically located in your website, our only concern is the static unique identifier of the page.

Fortunately there is an easy way to accomplish this through the use of the Cross-references WordPress plugin.  To understand how to effectively use the Cross-references plugin, you’ll need to know a little bit about how WordPress names your pages.

Each page and post in WordPress is assigned an ID number and if you were to use WordPress out of the box you’ll see it names all your pages and posts by a unique number that shows up in its URL.  Remember page names and page titles are different; names are the unique name of your page in the URL, Titles are the heading you choose at the top your page or post.

Many WordPress users change the default number based naming convention in their admin settings in favor of text based permalinks, a more website visitor and search engine friendly convention.  WordPress websites and blogs are database driven, that is all of your content is stored in a database and retrieved when a site visitor navigates to a certain page. Permalinks aka a permanent link, is a URL that points to a specific page or post after the content data is pulled from the database and is human readable.

When adding a new page or post, text based permalinks are then automatically created by WordPress to mirror your page or post title. The permalink for this article is: http://www.itegritygroup.com/seo-web-development-blog/index.php/2009/03/wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages/ . If we didn’t use permalinks, the URL for this page would look something like http://www.itegritygroup.com/seo-web-development-blog/index.php/page?id=294/ . Not very user friendly.

If you don’t want to name your page the same as your page title, you can edit the page name portion of your permalink in the area just below your page title. Your page name is also referred to as a Slug.

WordPress Permalink

Page Naming (Permalinks)

It’s a good idea when possible to keep your page names to between one and four words separated by dashes.  You can use more than four words, however search engines will weight each individual word less as you add more words.  You’ll also want to strip out any words in your page name that aren’t relevant to someone searching on the internet to find your content.  The default permalink for this post is my website URL + the location of my WordPress site +  my page title (Slug): http://www.itegritygroup.com/seo-web-development-blog/index.php/2009/03/adding-links-between-pages-on-your-wordpress-website.  There are way too many words in the page name and some that are completely irrelevant to someone who is trying to locate content about linking pages in WordPress, like “to” and “your”.  I chose to name my page …wordpress-hyperlinking-post-pages because these are the keywords I’ve determined individuals are mostly likely to use when searching for my content.  This unique identifier for my page wordpress-hyperlinking-post-pages is my page’s Slug.

Using the Cross-references Plugin

Once you’ve installed the Cross-references WordPress plugin (*ITegrity built websites already have the Cross-references plugin installed & configured) you’ll find the link to it’s configuration page under the Settings link in your website’s admin area.

Cross-references Settings (your menu may appear differently)

Click on the Cross-references link to open the configuration page.  For most websites, you should be able to leave most of the options as is, however there are a few you may want change.

By default the “Post Identification by” is set to ID.  If you are using permalinks it’s better to change the value to “Slug (name)”.  Using the Slug instead of ID will save you time when you cross-link pages and posts and is a more intuitive than using an ID number.

“Related Post List” determines whether the plugin will insert a related posts list at the bottom of each page and post.  This means the Cross-references plugin will list all the pages and posts you’ve linked to internally from a particular page or post.  It’s a matter of personal preference as to how you set this, but I prefer to not show the related posts and pages.  The other settings on the Cross-references options page usually don’t need to be changed unless you want to use the plugins more advanced features.

Now that you’ve got the Cross-references plugin configured properly, how do you actually add the links to your pages and post?  Cross-references uses simple syntax for you to add your links:

[cref “slug-name”]
Example: [cref wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages]
Result when published: [cref wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages]

In the above example we used the syntax [cref followed by the Slug name of the page or post we want to link to, ending with ]. In this case the link will appear as “Adding Hyperlinks to Your WordPress Website” because that is the page title of the Slug, “wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages”.

What if you want to create a link to a page or post, but you want the text link to be something other than the title? In the example below, we slightly change the syntax to accomplish this:

[cref “slug-name” “text you want to be linked”]
Example: [cref wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages How to Cross-link Pages in WordPress]
Result when published: [cref wordpress-hyperlinking-posts-pages How to Cross-link Pages in WordPress]

All we did differently was add a space after the Slug name and then add the text for which we want to be linked, in this case, How to Cross-link Pages in WordPress. The example below shows you how the Cross-references plugin syntax is used in this article in an previous paragraph:

Cross-references Plugin Syntax

Changing Page Titles and Slugs and Updating Your Links

Once you start adding links to your website and blog in this manner, you may begin to wonder what happens if you decide to change one of your page titles. No problem. All of your links’ text are automatically updated whenever any of your page or post titles change. But what happens if I decide to change the Slug name of a page or post? Will it break all my links because the links are now using an old Slug name? Yes, however the Cross-references plugin provides a tool to update all of your links with one simple procedure. Remember the advanced settings at the bottom of Cross-references options page in your admin? Near the bottom is an area called Tools. The first option is

Cross-references Slug Rename Tool

Using traditional static hyperlinks to cross link pages and posts quickly becomes a nuisance as your site scales. Adding and managing internal links within your WordPress website is made into a much easier process when using the Cross-references plugin.

Another difference is posts can have categories and tags associated with each entry.

Categories are the general subject or topic that a post is classified within. They are useful for organizing your blog content and allowing your visitors to browse certain categories to view posts of similar subject matter. It’s good practice to keep the number of main categories under ten as to not overwhelm your site visitors with too many choices. You can also add subcategories to your main categories if needed.

Tags are similar to the Meta tags of a website page. They also give you more fine grain control over how you classify your posts. When someone searches using specific keywords, they will locate your post by not only it’s title, but the tags you’ve added to describe your post’s content. Drawing upon an analogy to scientific classification in biology, Categories can be thought of as “Class” (i.e mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, arthropods) whereas Tags are like “Species” (i.e fox, deer, bear, desert kit fox, western mule deer, alaskan polar bear).

To get started adding a new post, log in to the Admin area of WordPress and click on “Posts” in the left navigation. In the expanded “Posts” area in the navigation, click on “Add New”.

Wordpress Add a Post

Now you’re ready to begin writing your new post for your website. The first step is to enter a post title. Once you’ve finished adding a title, click in the text editor area below the text formatting toolbar where you’ll be writing the body of your post. A new URL for your post will be dynamically created for you by WordPress, based on what you entered for your post’s title, and will appear next to “Permalink” below title text box.

Clicking on the “Edit” button will allow you to change the default URL WordPress created. If you have a long post title, you’ll want to change the default URL to shorter name, optimally one to four words separated by dashes. When deciding on your post URL name, be mindful of the keywords potential visitors will enter in search engines to find your post. For example, if your post is titled, “Add a Post to your WordPress Website”, by default WordPress will give your post a URL similar to http://www.your-website.com/index.php/2009/01/add-a-post-to-your-wordpress-website. First you’ll want to strip out the frivolous words that aren’t relevant to a keyword search for your article. In our example we’ll drop “a”, “to”, and “your”. We’re left with “add post wordpress website”. All things being equal, this could be an acceptable URL. But I have a bit of extra personal knowledge on the subject of my post and I’ve also done some keyword research to see what my potential audience is searching for. I know the majority of my target readers are WordPress users who aren’t adding the word “website” to their searches for WordPress articles. I also know that every search for WordPress content has the keyword “wordpress” in the search. Therefore, I’m going to place the keyword “wordpress” as the first word in my URL, because the first word is weighted more heavily by most search engines, followed by “add” and post”. The URL I’ve chosen for my post titled “Add a Post to your WordPress Website” is http://www … wordpress-add-post.

After you’re finished with your post title and URL permalink, you can begin to add content to the page in the text editor area below the formatting toolbar. You may either use the standard “Visual” text editor tools to write and format your text, images, and media or the “HTML” editor if you feel more comfortable using HTML code (learn how to [cref insert-image-wordpress-post add an image to your page]).

Most WordPress installations are set to automatically save a draft of your work when writing a post, but it is a good idea to manually save your work every so often, especially if you’ve been working on it for an extended period. You’ll find the “Save Draft” button in the publish pane on the right side of the page. This is also important if you want to stop work and pick up again later.

WordPress Save Draft

Once you’re finished creating your page, its time to add your post category(s) and tag(s). On the right side of the page in the “Tags” pane, enter the tag names you think best describe your post. You can either use your knowledge of the post topic you’re writing about or perform keyword research to determine the best tags to associate with your post. If you’ve already entered tags for other posts, you can click on the “Choose from the most popular tags” link to bring up a list of your most popular previously used tags.

WordPress Categories & Tags

Adding a category(s) to your post is very similar to adding a tag. You can either create a new category or add an existing one. You may choose to classify your post under one or more categories. If you want to manage your categories, open the category editor by clicking on “Posts” in the left navigation and then “Categories”.

At this point you are just about ready to publish your post to your WordPress blog. In the “Publish” pane above the “Tags” pane, you’ll notice a few options.

Status: This shows whether the post is currently published to your blog, still a draft, or pending review.

Visibility: By clicking on the “edit” link, you’ll see a few options appear. Normally you’ll want to keep the visibility setting on “Public” so all visitors to your website and blog have permission to view your post. However, you occasionally may want to password protect a post. By choosing this option, WordPress will prompt you to create a unique password for your post. The post link will be visible in your blog area, but when a visitor tries to view the page, they will be required to enter your password. This can be a useful feature to quickly protect a post, but for a more comprehensive website wide solution, WordPress plugins exist that present a better option, such as Role Management for WordPress. The final option is “Private”. Making a post private will hide it from appearing in your blog unless you are logged in. A user will also not be able to access it by search or by directly entering the post URL in their browser unless logged in.

Publish: The “Publish” setting directly below “Visibility”, controls when your post will be published to your blog. If you leave this unchanged and click on the publish button, your post will be published immediately which is normally what you’ll choose. There may be instances where you don’t want to publish your post right away, but at some time in the future. By changing the date and time, you can schedule WordPress to automatically publish your post to your blog whenever you want.

WordPress Publish Pane

Before you publish your post it’s a good idea to see how it will actually appear within your website and blog after it’s published. Click on the “Preview” button in the “Publish” pane to see a preview of your post. After you’ve made any necessary adjustments to your post and you’re ready to make it live in your blog, click on the “Publish” button. If your post or any of your images and test formatting aren’t appearing properly, you can always edit the post as many times as needed and re-publish.

CSS is usually contained in a separate file from an HTML web page. This is why CSS files are frequently referred to as “external style sheets”. When an HTML page or other type of web page loads like .aspx, .php, or .cgi, the page calls the external CSS file and reads all of the presentation properties defined in the file. The CSS file tells the HTML page how to style the website’s content and in the case of tableless web design, where to place it. With CSS, a web designer can set rules for the presentation of individual web pages or an entire site.

Traditionally, web pages were built using HTML with tables to layout the page structure and content. These cell based tables are very similar in form to a table found in Microsoft Excel and Word. An advantage of using tables is when used properly, it closely mimics the standard page layout in print media such as newspapers or magazine articles. However, as web technology has advanced and become more dynamic, a new era of design with greater possibilities has emerged. A new approach to designing and laying out web pages was created to break the constraints of structured table layouts. This approach is called CSS tableless design.

It’s important to understand that traditional table based design and CSS are not mutually exclusive; CSS is frequently used by web developers using table based design to control the properties of tables and other items on their web pages. On the other hand, tableless design wouldn’t be possible without CSS. However, instead of using tables, a tableless designer uses what are known as “DIV”s, which is short for “division”. The name DIV is also derived from the HTML <div> tag that forms the DIV in the HTML code. A DIV is a box, or more accurately described as a container, where web content is housed. Similar to table based design where content is contained within the cells of the table, with DIVs the content is housed inside DIV containers.

A DIV’s properties are defined within the CSS file. CSS tells the DIV where to appear on a web page, its width and height dimensions, and its appearance i.e. if it should have a background color or image, a border, or whether it should even be visible. There are a wide variety of other CSS properties that can be applied to DIVs. Instead of being constrained by the rigid grid structure of tables, DIVs can be made any size and placed anywhere on a webpage including layered on top of each other. This is what makes CSS tableless DIV design so powerful. The layout and design possibilities are essentially endless.

Even though the use of tables for website page structure is deprecated, tables still play an important role in CSS tableless design. Tables should be used for structuring and presenting tabular data. An example of best practices for using a table in your design that many novice CSS tableless designers overlook is when building a web form, for example a company information request form. Sure, it may be obvious that using tables is best used to present data from a database or the results of a form submission, but when laying out the form itself, tables will save you a lot of time. Therefore, it is important for CSS tableless designers to understand how to use tables and when they are a better and more efficient solution than using strictly CSS tableless design.

It’s been a hot button issue for some web designers as to which method is better, table based layouts or CSS tableless layouts.

Let’s take a look at 9 reasons why CSS tableless design performs better than traditional table based web design and why it has become the preferred method of modern web design:

1. CSS tableless design allows web designers the possibility to make more complex layouts and designs when producing a website. With table based layouts, web designers are confined to creating layouts that can be rigid, inflexible, and based on grids. CSS tableless based layouts, on the other hand, allow the designer to be as creative as their imagination allows them to be.

2. If your intention is to improve search engine rankings for your website, then a CSS tableless design will help your cause. CSS tableless designs result in smaller web page file sizes, a reduction in the ratio of code to content, and the elimination of the extraneous “junk” HTML markup that many table based web editors use. This makes it easier for search engine spiders to crawl through your website and results in a more favorable ranking in search engines.

3. By using CSS style sheets it is extremely easy to maintain visual consistency throughout your website. When using table based layouts, it is easy to lose this consistency because each web page’s style, layout, and design are frequently hard-coded individually into every page. If you need to make a change to your website across all pages, you’ll have to change the code on each individual page. With CSS, all pages can use the same CSS document for their layout and styles. If you change a property in the CSS file, the changes will be instantaneously reflected across all pages of your website.

4. Updating a CSS tableless website is easier and less time consuming than compared to table based designs. For example, if you want to change font sizes and colors within your website, your external CSS file can be simply opened and the necessary changes made without making the change on each and every page of your website. To change the look of your website for special or seasonal promotions, the entire website “look and feel” can be completely altered simply by changing properties in the CSS file without touching the HTML code of the web page.

5. Redesigning a website using CSS tableless design is faster and less expensive than redesigning a website using table based design. This is because CSS tableless designs have separate files for content and visual data including web page structure whereas table based designs mix layout information with content in the same file. By separating the visual data and layout from the content, a web designer is able to quickly and easily make changes across the entire website.

6. Table web page designs rely heavily on the use of spacer .gifs, a transparent image used to control blank space within a table based web page. Having to create a series of custom sized transparent images to organize your web page layout creates messy code and a rigid page structure that can’t be easily changed. CSS tableless design eliminates this problem by using DIVs instead of tables which can be easily resized, positioned anywhere on a page, or even dynamically manipulated through the use of scripting languages.

7. A common advantage of using CSS tableless web design is a reduction in web page file size which equates to your web pages loading faster. When compared to a CSS tableless layout, a table based web page frequently takes twice as long to load. Also, the amount of bandwidth you will save using a CSS tableless based approach, especially as your website grows in size, can be vast resulting in a faster overall loading website while saving you money.

8. Using CSS tableless web design makes your website more accessible by making content consumption and site navigation easier for users. You’ll also do a much better job of accommodating those with visual impairments and other disabilities. Screen readers, Braille devices, and special browsers for the impaired have fewer problems with tableless designs because they can control the CSS file making font sizes larger, or even modify the web page structure to make it easier to read.

9. CSS enables the web designer to attach multiple style sheets for different media types. If a potential customer visits your site with her Blackberry or mobile phone, a different CSS style sheet is called which dictates a completely different layout and styling for your entire website formatting it for optimal viewing on the small screen of the device.
CSS tableless design is a great method for developing modern websites and offers many valuable advantages over traditional table based design. Using CSS tableless design will provide your website visitors better usability and accessibility, faster page load times with greater, more elegant design possibilities. For the web developer and website owner, CSS tableless websites are easier and less expensive to redesign, update and maintain. When given a choice, CSS tableless design will be the best option for most present day website designs.

Privacy policies usually contain details about what types of personal information are collected, how the personal information may be used, the persons or parties to whom the information may be disclosed and the security steps taken to protect the personal information.
Why is it importance for me to have a privacy policy for my website?

1. A privacy policy enables you to provide full disclosure to the users visiting your website with regard to the collection and use of their information as outlined in your privacy policy.

2. Having a clear and simple privacy policy can make your site appear more trustworthy to your visitors, which can lead to a higher conversion rate and more sales!

3. A well crafted privacy policy convinces visitors that their personal information is safe with you reassuring them that they can trust you.

4. If you are using Google Adwords, a privacy policy can help improve your Quality Score, especially if you are collecting visitor names, email addresses and phone numbers via an opt-in subscriber box. And for Google AdSense publishers, Google now requires you to display a privacy policy on all websites that display AdSense ads or search boxes.

How do I generate a private policy for my website?

A simple and easy way to quickly generate a privacy policy is to use an online website privacy policy generator. An online website privacy policy generator asks you questions about your website and how you collect and use any information you may or may not gather about your site visitors. It will walk you through all the steps involved in creating a privacy policy and when finished, produce a formatted, customized HTML file containing your website’s privacy policy. A popular, no-strings attached and free online website privacy policy generator can be found on DMA’s website: http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/PPG/
If you use the WordPress blogging platform and self host you can install a privacy policy plugin from http://www.synclastic.com/plugins/privacy-policy/ that will automatically generate a privacy policy for your website and provide you options to customize it.

Whether you choose to use an online website privacy policy generator or write one from scratch yourself, follow the 7 steps mentioned below as a guideline to generate your own privacy policy:
1. Make use of simple language so that the privacy policy is easy to understand, read, and easy to find on your website. Always create a link to the privacy policy page on your site.

2. Review and update your privacy policy from time to time to keep pace with changing rules, regulations and security standards.

3. Give a brief description about your company, and any special information that your website has. If your website does have special conditions for collecting information from certain types of visitors, you should state them clearly in your privacy policy.

4. Provide details about the information collected from users visiting your website. Visitors have a right to know what information you are collecting. For example, are you collecting personal details by asking them to complete an information request form or service application? You should also disclose whether your servers log visitor information such as hostnames and IP addresses.

5. Present the method(s) you use to collect information and whether the information you collect is automated. This type of information will provide your visitors a more complete idea of how you collect information.

6. It’s important for your visitors to understand how their information is stored by your company. They need to know where their information goes after it is collected and receive assurance that their personal information will be handled in a safe and secure environment.

7. If your company makes use of cookies or other tracking systems, your visitors must have a full explanation of which tracking systems are being used and the purpose of these systems.
Your online privacy policy should provide answers to all the questions pertaining to information you collect from your website visitors. They should be assured that there are appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures implemented to safeguard and help prevent unauthorized access, maintain data security, and correctly use the information you collect online.

Having a clearly worded and thorough privacy policy will help improve your company image and make your website appear more trustworthy to your visitors, which can lead to better rankings on search engines and increased sales.

*Special note for California web site owners:

Effective July 2004, the California Online Privacy Protection Act requires operators of a commercial Web site or online service that collect Personally Identifiable Information from California residents through the Internet to conspicuously post a privacy policy on their Web site that complies with prescribed disclosures. The privacy policy must:

(1) identify the categories of Personally Identifiable Information that the operator collects through the Web site or online service and the categories of third-party persons or entities with whom the operator may share Personally Identifiable Information;

(2) describe how a consumer can review and make changes to his or her personally identifiable information, if the operator allows such review and changes;

(3) describe how consumers can learn of changes in the operator’s privacy policy; and

(4) identify the effective date of the privacy policy.

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
skozyk[at]itegritygroup.com
www.itegritygroup.com

Its intuitive user interface provides you easy access to all data, allowing you to quickly obtain the key information you need for your website. Google Analytics keeps track of how all visitors found your website including exact keyword searches from different search engines and which other websites linking to you referred visitors to you. Google Analytics allows you to track the effectiveness of your marketing programs, email marketing, pay per click networks, unpaid organic search, and much more.

Google Analytics is also integrated with Google AdWords. Google Adwords will display an ad for your business on Google search results pages and their advertising network on a pay per click basis; that is, you only pay Google an advertising fee if people click your ads directing them to your website.

Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords optimizes your online marketing campaigns by tracking your sites landing page quality and conversion goals. By using Google Analytics, you can determine which ads are performing well, and which are not, providing the information to minimize or select appropriate keywords for Adwords campaigns.

The following are 10 essential features of Google Analytics:

1. Google Analytics allows you to compare data about the performance of your site at two different time periods. It also allows you to chart the data immediately to get a better view of your site. It shows you the performance of your site based on area, city or country metrics.
2. Providing referring sites and search results metrics are the basic features of any analytics program, but with Google Analytics you can get statistics not only on the number of visitors a link partner is sending, but the quality of the traffic.
3. Once you have your business goals, for example sales & marketing, setup in Google Analytics you are able to determine and thus control vast amounts of data with regard to what’s working and what’s not in your marketing strategy.
4. Google Analytics allows complete Adwords integration. This means it provides data on each group, campaign, and keyword. Specifically, you can look at each of these areas and see the number of displays, clicks, your cost, conversion, etc.
5. It enables you to customize the rich features provided in your Google Analytics dashboard. You can move the most often used reports to the dashboard for fast access by just clicking the “Add to Dashboard” link.
6. The Google Analytics dashboard feature allows you to schedule and automatically send recurring email updates to yourself or other recipients within your business using multiple formats.
7. Google Analytics shows you the popularity and effectiveness of each link on every page of your site. These powerful and graphical reports display the effectiveness of your site design in a visual model.
8. Google Analytics‘s naviGAtion summary report shows where your users go from the homepage, or how most of them get to your contact page. If people aren’t following your desired naviGAtion, it means you probably need to correct some things on your page to compel users to click on the areas you desire.
9. Google Analytics tells you what search keywords people are using to find your site. If certain keywords are proving hot, you might want to consider catering Google Adwords keyword buys, content, and offers to them. It tells you how your customers find you.
10. The search engine traffic metric illustrates which search engines are sending the most traffic to your website and how well it’s converting into sales. This will help you optimize your marketing spend and SEO efforts.

In addition to the 10 reasons mentioned above, Google Analytics also has a “Report Finder” to help you search for your archived reports, helps you view your website’s bounce rate over time, shows connection speed data which helps you determine how to prioritize and optimize your site’s design and load time, and much more. To start using Google Analytics navigate to http://www.google.com/analytics/ . You can either register using your existing Google account, for example if you already have a Gmail account, or sign up for a new one. Google Analytics is a feature rich, free application that every website owner should consider integrating into their site.

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
SEO Web Development & Custom Web Site Design Company

http://www.itegritygroup.com

Steve Kozyk is the CEO/ Founder of ITegrity, an SEO Web Development & Custom Web Site Design Company based in San Diego California. ITegrity focuses on many types of web development & design including health care web site development, corporate web development, small business web development, church web design, and Realtor web site design.

Simply having a website is not enough. If you expect consumers to find your web site… and consistently return to your website, you must provide them with new and useful content to keep them engaged. You can accomplish this by providing useful tips and information about topics related to your business on your website. Write articles or manage a blog that focuses on topics you know a lot about that also relate to your business.

In today’s world it is the norm that a prospective customer visits your website before contacting you. In many cases they will already have a good idea about your company, products, services and how it will serve their needs before you directly speak to them. It’s imperative that you provide them with useful content that will help guide them to doing business with you. Ensure your website content is up-to-date and relevant by regularly maintaining your website.

The most important benefits of website maintenance are that it:

• Ensures your website is up to date
• Keeps your customers updated with the latest information about your company
• Makes search engine spiders happy and increases your chances for higher search engine rankings
• Enhances your marketing and promotional actions
• Provides information about who’s linking to your site
• Improves your company’s brand image and aids in expansion
• Helps to solve and monitor possible operational problems and avoids potential catastrophes with clients

Seven useful tips for maintaining and keeping your website updated:
1. The main goal for maintaining your website is to keep your visitors coming back and attracting new consumers. If your site is not updated regularly, visitors will not bother to return. They need the latest and new information or resources to return back and find you. Hence, it is essential that you have fresh new content added regularly to your website.

2. Keeping track of your visitors’ activity on your website is essential. Website traffic analysis and statistics will help you plan more systematically for future business offerings and online activities. Try and use these statistics to your advantage and improve the features and pages where consumers visit the most.

3. Create a forum which allows your visitors to interact with each other and meet new people. This is a great way to increase the popularity of your website.

4. Create an e-newsletter which should contain articles, tips and tricks. This allows you to tell your visitors what’s new on your website, inform them about special deals, and any promotional, educational or newsworthy events.

5. Incoming links are very important for ranking higher in the search engine marketing game; therefore, try to build strong incoming links. Keep track of all these incoming links and check back on these links regularly to make sure they still have your link on their webpage especially if you have agreed to participate in a reciprocal link exchange program where you are linking back to their website. The Internet is constantly evolving; if you have outgoing links on your website to other sites and they no longer work, search engines will penalize you for broken links.

6. Provide a form where all web users have the opportunity to provide feedback and suggestions for your site. Accept any feedback you have received seriously and reply as soon as possible. Feedback given to you by your visitors will help you provide more targeted content and provide you with better ideas for improving your website.

7. In addition to your website content, the design of your website is very important. The most critical thing to keep in mind is to keep it simple, easy to use but appealing. Research other popular sites and high ranking competitor web sites for content and design ideas.

It’s never a good idea to build your website and believe it’s a finished product once you’ve decided to go live on the internet. Just having a website is not enough as the Internet is constantly evolving with new ideas and technology. So should your web site evolve to capture new traffic and provide a compelling reason for consumers to return to and patronize your business. Whether you take the time to regularly update and maintain your website yourself or seek the services of a professional web development company to do it for you, remember it’s a vital part of being successful on the Internet. Best of luck!

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
skozyk[at]itegritygroup.com
www.itegritygroup.com

When used correctly, your business website can be a very effective tool in marketing your business on the World Wide Web and converting visits to your website into sales for your business.

Going past just survival, if you want your business to thrive and establish itself as a market leader, be forward thinking and make your business stand out by building a presence on the Internet. Having a brick and mortar presence in your market is just not enough in today’s world. Each year a greater percentage of the population uses the Internet to make purchases and shop. They are also increasingly using the Internet to research and locate businesses. More people today are even discarding traditional hard copy phone books in favor of using online phone books to look up businesses. Is your business listed in the most popular online phone books like yellowpages.com and superpages.com?

Below is list of 9 critical reasons to have your business website on the internet.

1. Gain an Edge Over your Competitors.

The Internet is a necessity of modern business life. Businesses that have a website are already at a huge advantage over their competitors. They not only have a wider customer base but they are also considered more professional.

2. Cost Effective Marketing.

A business website has the potential of reaching millions of customers throughout the globe without spending or investing huge amounts of money. The number of potential customers contacted via your website and the costs involved puts the return on investment of a website on higher scale when compared to other marketing techniques, such as traditional advertising and on the road sales representatives.

3. Provides Complete Business Information.

A business website can easily provide complete business information including your business policies, terms and conditions, phone and fax numbers, business address, directions, maps and special offerings. People can get all the pertinent details about your business just by visiting your company website.

4. Eliminate Time Constraints.

A prospect can visit your website at their leisure without time pressure. This is one of the biggest advantages that web advertising has over other media. It allows unlimited time for a potential customer to explore your company and its products.

5. Continuous 24/7/365 Days Advertising.

A website can be viewed any time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. To have a business website means 365 days continuous advertisement of your products and services. It helps to keep your existing and potential customers updated with latest information about your business.

6. Creates A Global Presence.

A website has no geographical boundaries which enables people from all over the world to look at your products. This gives your business a global presence and an ability to drive more sales and make more money.

7. Best Media to Showcase your Products.

A business website enables you to post photographs of all your products and services along with technical details such as pricing, quantity discounts, color, size availability, delivery, shipping, scope, etc. This will give your website visitors a general idea and a sense of your business and range of products and services you’re offerings.

8. Ability to Attract New Suppliers.

Your website will not only be visited by potential customers, but also by motivated suppliers who are looking for more customers who might approach you to sell their products at lower prices which gives your business the opportunity to expand. Adding new suppliers can help you to offer your customers a wider variety of products at lower prices.

9. Create a Professional Image of Your Business.

A website helps you to create a professional image of your business giving an impression that the company is credible and trustworthy. A professionally designed website can not only attract visitors (prospects) but can help convert them into buyers or paying customers.

Any one of these factors alone would help your business to expand and increase sales, but by having a website for your business you are acquiring the benefits of all for an exponentially lower cost than you could by traditional means. Creating an online presence for your business on the Internet can be easily achieved by a professionally designed business website. Many reputable web developers can be found online by doing a little research, for example using a Google web search for “web developers”. Best of luck with your new website and online business!

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
skozyk[at]itegritygroup.com
www.itegritygroup.com
Web Site For Your Business- 9 Critical Reasons to Build a Web Site

There are numerous tools available on the Internet to help online surfers with web searching. One of the most valuable and useful tools is the Alexa Toolbar. Alexa was founded in April 1996 and was designed to provide an interactive web navigation system. Did you know that Alexa is owned by Amazon.com? It is also possible to make your own personalized Alexa toolbar with your Amazon.com affiliate code.

The valuable information about a webpage, and of course a complete website, provided by Alexa is truly amazing. So, how do you add an Alexa toolbar to your browser? It’s very simple. First, go to Alexa.com, then click Download Alexa Toolbar at the top right hand corner of the page. Next click on the install option provided on the following page. After you’ve finished installing, the toolbar will appear across the top of your browser.

There are two main features offered by Alexa toolbar:

Traffic Ranking: One of the most helpful features provided by the Alexa toolbar is traffic ranking of any website. Alexa toolbar tracks how people use the Internet and turns this information into ranking statistics for each site on the Internet. By now, most web marketers know that the Alexa.com ranking of their site is important. It gives an independent measure of your monthly unique visitors. Ranking 1 has the most traffic and so on. For example on the basis of most visited site in the world, Yahoo is currently ranked one by Alexa. This information helps you determine how well your advertising campaigns are going, how your rivals are doing and how to keep your website one step ahead of them. The Alexa information is also used by other search engines so you benefit from an increase in you search engine results page (SERPS) rankings as your site progresses up the rankings.

Related Links: Another vital feature of Alexa toolbar is it provides links to additional websites that are similar to the one that is being viewed. When you start searching the term on your favorite search engine, it gives a list of urls’ closely matching your search term in the search engine result page. This feature allows you to view a list of similar website without much of an effort – great for competition analysis. Also, you will be able to see a new set of related links on the toolbar that may be same or different from the earlier ones, which allows you to save time you would have otherwise spent for searching.

There are additional features that come with Alexa toolbar like a popup blocker, search engine entry box, a link to Amazon & Alexa website, and additional information about the current Alexa ranking of the website that you are visiting.

In conclusion, the Alexa toolbar is a valuable tool for determining a website’s placement or position in the Internet world. It is interesting to note that Google also uses Alexa’s information for ranking and indexing websites. Whether you just want to use the Alexa Toolbar’s features for general web browsing or for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) analysis, I recommend going to http://www.alexa.com and installing the Alexa Toolbar in your favorite web browser.

Steve Kozyk
CEO/Founder ITegrity
skozyk[at]itegritygroup.com
www.itegritygroup.com

Alexa Toolbar- How to Add it to Your Browser and Why You Want to Do It