Traffic, traffic, traffic. Any article you care to read about having a successful web site will always stress the importance of traffic. It is absolutely essential if you want to succeed in any internet based business. You can have the best designed web site, a great product to promote or sell, but without traffic, you have nothing. Whether you already have a web site and not getting enough traffic, or thinking about starting up one, traffic has to be at or near the top of your list of priorities.

To help you generate more traffic for your web site, here are some surefire ways to increase your traffic.

1) Invest in ppc (pay per click) advertising with the major search engines.
Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture provide great advertising schemes that are very popular and assure you targeted traffic. While this is a surefire way to generate traffic, the downside is the expense which can be quite considerable if you are in a very competitive niche. While some shy away from spending money to increase traffic, this is a guaranteed way to bring potential customers to your web site.

2) Exchange, trade or buy links.
When you exchange links with other sites, both of you benefit from those exchanges as the traffic one site generates can flow on to the other. This is especially beneficial to you if the other site has a higher page ranking. The search engines crawl high PR sites regularly and will follow the links to your site and hopefully rank your site higher as well. The more links you trade with other sites the more traffic you can expect. Just remember early on in your traffic generation program, to keep the links within the same or similar niche.

3) Use Viral Marketing.
Viral marketing allows you to advertise your company or product with minimal or without any cost at all. This method involves attaching your link to a variety of media such as a funny video, entertaining games, interesting articles or a gossip. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium and pass it on to others. Your link will be seen and investigated.

4) Search Engine Optimization.
Ensure that you use proper keywords/keyword phrases that relate to your site’s content when you design your web site. Search engines look for certain keywords that they show in their results page. Having the right keywords/keyword phrases is a high requirement in ranking well in search engine results and thereby getting lots of traffic.

5) Write and submit Articles
Submit your original articles to article distribution sites. You can write these yourself or have others do it for you. Make sure that you attach a description as well as a link to your web site in the resource box at the conclusion of your article. As well as directing readers to your site, you will also get backlinks to your web site which will increase your web site’s ranking.

6) Join forums and contribute to discussions.
Show your expertise and credibility by making constructive comments. People will begin to trust you and your site will benefit from the traffic of those wanting to visit it to get more information about you or your product. These are just a few methods you can use to generate traffic to your web site. Obviously there is a limit to how much detail can be explored and each of the above topics merits an article in its own right.

Today, most businesses want a website. Some already have one. Others want one. They don’t want to hire IT staff and probably can’t afford any. And in most cases, an in-house IT staff, especially for your typical small business, just isn’t necessary. But, that doesn’t mean that you have to go without or will be forced to use some cookie cutter website or a personal FrontPage experiment gone awry. You can hire a web developer/designer to create a professional website for you, set it up, then hand it over to you for you to do what you want with it. But, how should you go about finding someone to do this? What should you look for? There are literally thousands of companies/individuals out there offering to do your website. How do you pick from this large group?

What Do You Want?

The first step is to decide exactly what you want on your website. This is very important as it will determine what the requirements are and, in turn, what skill set your web developer needs to fulfill your needs. Here are some questions to ask of yourself:

* What kinds of information do you want to have on your site? Approximately how large do you envision the site (# of pages)?
* Will your site require regular updates? Do you want to do these updates yourself?
* Will you be engaging in e-commerce on this website?
* Will you need a database?
* How fast do you need the job done?
* What is your budget?

Start Your Search

Doing a web search for someone that has the skills you will need for your website will still give you a humongous list of possible choices. Referrals are often the best method of weeding people out. IF someone recommends a developer, it is because they are happy with the service they were provided. So, if someone recommends a developer to you, you should check that developer out and see if they have the skills you will need from them.

Often, the developers you are pondering are not located in your town. In today’s day and age, this is not usually a problem. Yes, there are instances where a face-to-face meeting is really beneficial, and if you are the kind of really considers this meeting important, you should limit your search to developers within driving distance of your location. Otherwise, the internet and phone system provide all the communication you will need, regardless of distance.

The first thing to do when considering a developer is to check out their website.

* IS the site well-designed and attractive?
* Is it easy to navigate?
* Are there any broken links?
* Is the information complete (introduction to staff, company location, contact methods, etc.)?
* Does the site load quickly?
* IS there a portfolio? (Very important. A developer without a portfolio to display is a total question mark. You simply don’t know if the people are good or are snacking on Doritos trying to figure things out as they go).
* What skills does the developer have? Do they do design only, or can they do dynamic web development and database design? Also, ensure that they do not advertise themselves as a web designer but focus mainly on print media. Internet design and print design are different ballparks with different requirements. Also, keep in mind that good use of Dreamweaver or FrontPage does not in itself make a web designer. Check their portfolio and ensure the developer really knows his stuff. A person well-versed in internet development should know not only about creating the site, but also maintaining it, marketing it, and promoting it. Ideally, a web developer has successfully done all of the above on his own sites.
* Does the site offer customer testimonials? Read them. And, you might even contact those clients independently to ask them questions of the service you were provided.

Small Freelancers vs. Big Firms

You need to decide if you want to work with a large design firm or a small freelance company (or even single developer). There is more security for the client when working with a larger firm. The skills they offer vary widely because their staff is so large, and they often have a very large portfolio. The caveat, though, is that large companies often charge more money. The overhead costs for such companies is larger, so they will charge more. Additionally, larger companies often come with more beauracracy. With so many developers, often communication is just not what it should be, leading to inconsistencies in the project due to miscommunication. Also, sometimes you will find that these companies pay a little too much attention to process rather than simply getting the job done.

Freelance developers offer better value for the money, and because they are a single person, the communication flow between them and the client is usually much better (one-on-one). If there is a staff, usually the size is small, meaning communication will still be more tight-knit. This will lead to more consistent coding and coordination. Also, you know who is responsible for your project and there is more accountability. In larger firms, nobody is responsible in some cases. (or so they say). The downside of freelancing is that their skill set is their skill set, and if you need something that they don’t know how to do, they must research it. Also, freelancers are limited by their size. If they already have a high workload, then their throughout is limited and it may force you to wait. So, depending on the size of your project, a large firm might guarantee the job gets done quickly.

Rates and Guidelines

Check out the rates of the developer. Often, you will not find the rates directly posted on their website. This is usually because they like to do things by estimate, so simply contact them, give them a few specs, and go back and forth until you get a ballpark figure. When getting an estimate, make sure it is detailed and exact. Ask any questions that you have. If you think the price is too high, ask them about it. Don’t be afraid to counter-offer. They can always refuse.

Check out the developer’s contract. Make sure the client is protected. Pay attention to guarantees of response time. You want to make sure your developer is available for you. Also, look for their policy on project changes. Obviously, you cannot alter the specs of your project once an estimate is agreed upon without expecting additional fees. Ask them about this. Also, inspect the contract for warranty of work. Who will they handle bugs in the work they have done?

Talk With Them

Any developer you consider should have a method of being reached by phone. Call them and gauge their personality. Make sure they are good people who you can talk with and bounce ideas off of. See if they treat you right or act like they barely have time for you. Good communication is very important to a successful project, and if you can’t properly communicate to your developer, you should not hire him/her.

Evaluate

Evaluate your potential developers using the advice above and you will be more likely to have successfully completed project with minimal frustration.

Getting your blog ranked high on Google is a fantastic way to attract potential clients. Here’s how it’s done.

1. Select Your Keywords and Keyword Phrases

Choose the keywords and keyword phrases you want your blog post to rank high for on the Google search engine results page. For example, I want my blog post to rank high for the term, “blog ranked high on Google.” Currently there are approximately 286,000 pages using this term so I’ll have to do everything in my power to compete with these web pages to get my blog post on the first page of the Google results page for that term.

My keyword phrase also includes other keyword phrases like, “ranked high on Google” with about 310,000 competing pages and “high on Google” with over 71 million competing pages. Getting to the first page for these terms would be a bonus.

2. Use Your Keywords in Your Blog Title

Google pays very close attention to the words and phrases you use in your blog title. Notice how I used the term, “blog ranked high on Google” in the title of this article. It’s important to use your keyword phrase in your blog title if you want to rank high for that phrase on the Google results page.

Another reason you want to use your keyword phrase in your blog title is to give your reader an immediate understanding as to what your blog post is about. If your blog is listed at the top of the search engine results page for your keyword phrase but no one reads it, it’s of no value. Use a title that will cause people to click through to your blog post.

The New York Times creates two different titles for their articles. They use a catchy, creative or humorous title for their newspaper, and a keyword specific title for the articles and blogs they post to the Internet. They do this because people looking for jokes about the eating habits of nuns generally go to a search engine and type, “jokes about the eating habits of nuns,” not “Nuns, Buns and Puns.”

3. Use Your Keywords in Your Blog Text

Notice how the keyword phrase, “blog ranked high on Google,” is used throughout this blog post. Google pays attention to the text on a blog in order to understand what the blog post is about. Once Google comprehends the content of the blog post, it will categorize the blog based on that information. By using your keyword phrase in your text, both Google and your readers can quickly understand what your blog post is about, allowing Google to accurately categorize your blog making it easy for your clients to find.

In the past, search engine consultants encouraged writers to use their keyword phrase in the first 25 words of their text and again in the last sentence. Today, the search engines don’t seem to pay as much attention to word placement, but reader’s do.

If your article is about your keyword phrase, it’s a good idea to use it in the first and last sentence because it helps your reader quickly know what your blog post is about. It’s also a good idea to use your keyword phrase in the first sentence because that is the text that is most likely to show in the description text on the search results page.

4. Link To Your Blog With Keyword Rich Anchor Text

Get as many one-way links leading back to your blog post as possible from as many quality blogs and websites as you can. Do your best to insure that the text people click on to get back to your site includes your keywords and keyword phrases. This is known in Internet marketing circles as anchor text.

In this example I want the anchor text leading back to my blog post to have the keyword phrase, “blog ranked high on Google,” as the clickable text. The clickable text is the means by which all of those other web sites and blogs tell Google what your blog post is about.

Google provides far more weight to the theme of your blog post based on the quality and size of the sites linking back to your blog than the text on your blog. For example, if you do a Google search for the term, “click here,” you will be taken to the Adobe Reader download web page. It’s interesting to note the term “click here” doesn’t appear anywhere on that page. The reason the Adobe Reader download page comes up first for this term is because there are millions of other sites that use the anchor text, “click here,” to direct people to the Adobe Reader download page.

There are two wonderful ways to get keyword rich anchor text directing people back to your blog post. The first is to write and submit an article about your blog post to other web site and blog owners who will upload your article to their site. In return those web site and blog owners will provide you with a keyword rich anchor text link from your article back to your blog. They get great content for their web site and you get a valuable one-way link back to your blog post.

The second way is to encourage other blog owners to write about your blog post. In doing so, they are very likely to use your blog title as the anchor text leading readers back to your post. This is another reason why it’s so important to use your keyword phrase in your blog title.

5. Ask Your Readers To Digg Your Blog Post

Ask your readers to tell the rest of the world about your blog post by submitting it to one of the social bookmarking sites. They include DIGG, Stumble, Blink and many others. If the title of your blog post includes your keyword phrase, it is likely that this is how your readers will describe your blog post to the social bookmarking sites. This helps Google decide where to rank your site on the search results page.

6. Blog On A Community Site

Recognized Expert, Active Rain, and Christian Blog are all examples of niche community blog sites. Recognized Expert is a site for marketing experts, Active Rain is for real estate professionals and the Christian blog is for, you guessed it, Christians. These niche sites have tons of traffic along with the undivided attention of Google and the other search engines.

If you’re a marketing expert for example, blogging on a site like Recognized Expert will push your blog post to the top of the search results page in a matter of hours. That’s a huge reason to blog on a community site. If you wrote the same content on your own blog, it may take months to be seen by Google, and you may never get close to the first page for your keyword phrase.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and the other search engines explore busy community sites for new content every few minutes. On the other hand, they visit newer and smaller sites every few months. If you’re serious about generating business from blogging, consider blogging on a topic specific community site.

Apply these six steps to every blog post you write, and you will quickly create a huge following of clients and potential clients. This is how the pro bloggers get their blogs ranked high on Google.

If you are a regular internet user, you would by now have heard of Google AdSense. Website owners on the other hand, would at some point of time or the other, have even tasted Google AdSense profits.

 AdSense is a very comfortable tool from Google which works in tandem with Google Ad Words to place relevant ads on your web pages. The best bet is to learn how to get money out of your US bank account while in a foreign country. A few years back, it was more difficult to get more money when you weren’t in the country.

Google AdSense profit generation explained

Google Adsense profits works on a very simple principle. Business needs advertisement and if your business is web based, your advertisements must appear on Google. Therefore, business creates advertisements and pay Google to place them alongside the search results as also websites having a partnership with Google on AdSense. Most of the advertisements adopt the pay-per-click format.

How to generate Google AdSense profits

Opening an Adsense account is your first step towards profit. Once your account is activated, you can follow the links provided by Google to complete the procedure. There are a few questions to be answered and you will need to tell Google how the ads are to be positioned on your page. When you complete the formalities, Google will provide you an HTML code to be pasted on your web site. You now start getting the advertisements and whenever someone clicks on the ads, you get your share of the booty. So simple. Get going and make the best out of Google AdSense profits – your profits.

You just go to the nearest ATM, pop your card in, and out comes the money that you need. You’ve been to ATMs in the US, so you know how they work, so operating an ATM in another country is going to be a piece of cake. What happens if you accidentally miscalculate, and that great deal on a reproduction of a Ming dynasty vase turns out to cost almost as much as a real one would? Once your account is activated, you can follow the links provided by Google to complete the procedure. There are a few questions to be answered and you will need to tell Google how the ads are to be positioned on your page.

When you complete the formalities, Google will provide you an HTML code to be pasted on your web site. For you now start getting the advertisements and whenever someone clicks on the ads, you get your share of the booty. So simple. Get going and make the best out of Google AdSense profits – your profits. You probably are going to need more money now; what happens if you don’t know how to get it? The best bet is to learn how to get money out of your US bank account while in a foreign country. A few years back, it was more difficult to get more money when you weren’t in the country. If you needed money, you would have to wait for someone to wire the money for you, and it would waste a whole day of vacation waiting in an office for your money to arrive.

Does anyone remember search engines before Google? Some of us may, but chances are that we’ve long since been Google converts. In fact, 60% of the search traffic in the United States goes through Google. Google arrived on the scene in 1998 with its funny name that plays on the word Googol (a number written as 1 plus 100 zeros). But Google is much more than a search engine. Google in its current state is an overwhelmingly effective internet marketing tool.

Google, the Marketing Machine

Although Yahoo and MSN are still widely-used search engines, all internet marketers know that Google is the only one worth worrying about. That’s because the vast majority of Google’s traffic is searches. This is a key point for marketers. Most people using Google are searching for something, often products or services, so marketers need to make sure that their products and services are showing up in Google searches. Google is the middleman between consumers and business and, as everyone knows, the middleman can end up being very rich and very powerful.

Using its Adsense program, Google now offers Cost Per Action (CPA). This means that internet marketers reap larger returns in exchange for displaying Google’s links. All professional marketers know that promoting affiliate products gets you 10 times the revenue of putting Adsense on your own site. But when marketers use CPA within Adsense, Adsense suddenly makes more sense to online marketers.

Google has also recently acquired DoubleClick. DoubleClick also includes Performics, a huge online affiliate marketing program. As a result Google can take any user from search to checkout.

Ecommerce and internet marketing are growing at an unbelievable rate. If a company were able to control a majority of those transactions, it would have unmatched power. Because so many consumers inherently trust Google and its search results, marketers who have managed to get top listings for their keywords will have money to throw away. In the same way, marketers who know how to most effectively use Adsense and Adwords realize that Google is a prime source of online income.

But Does Google Play Fair?

Google claims that its PageRank system is an online democracy of a sort. Votes in this case come in the form of links to your site. The more websites link to you, the more popular you are and the higher your page will be ranked in Google’s Search Engine Page Results.

Most SEO experts agree that Google has been fair so far. After all, their ranking method allows even the smallest pages to be highly-ranked if they are popular enough. Google even cracked down recently on sites that offer paid-links, which leveled the playing field for those webmasters or marketers without the financial means to pay for traffic.

But everyone agrees that there is some danger in the fact that Google controls every step of the marketing process: search listings, Adwords, and Adsense. Although there is some concern about a monopoly, Google would probably never risk its popularity by doing something so obviously unethical.

How Will Google Grow?

Google just keeps growing, and there’s no reason to doubt that it will eventually control all aspects of online marketing. As the internet continues to evolve, and as online media continues to permeate so many aspects of everyday life, it only makes sense that Google will use every possible outlet for marketing to the increasing numbers of internet users.

Getting Yourself on Google

Internet marketing is an enormous undertaking and can be overwhelming to say the least. While many internet marketers have chosen to navigate the worlds of Google, Adsense, and Adwords by themselves, many others have chosen to utilize the services of SEO experts and internet marketing consultants who have many combined years of experience in the business. As Google continues to exert its power in the online world, a savvy marketer must know how to use it to its greatest potential.

A website must be simple in navigation and structure, pleasant, functional, have a good page rank, but most of all, it should be fast. A fast website is the key to increase the user experience and this brings you returning and happy visitors to your website. By following the following simple tricks we can optimize your website for speed with almost no cost at all. 

Optimize the images in your website 

It is well known fact that loading time of any website directly affects the user’s response to a website; viewers hate to wait for long to get the website to be fully loaded.

Images play a vital role on the loading of a website so it’s very important to take optimal size of the image in order to load the webpage faster. Photoshop and similar image editing software include a feature called “Save for the web”. Always use this feature since it will reduce the image size and load time substantially.

Image formats

In order to optimize the images it is very important to choose the right format. There are different formats based on the type and size of the image, which can be used effectively by following these rules:

JPEG: Stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. This format was created for photographs and fine art-work. You should use JPEG images whenever you are displaying a photo or a true-color image. Use a 50% compression rate for optimal results with these images.

GIF: Stands for Graphics Interchange Format. The GIF is most favorable format for internet, mainly because of its small size. GIF is also used for animated images. JPEG images support millions of colors while GIF ones will integrate a maximum of 256 colors. You should use this format for flat-color images like logos, buttons or text images.

PNG: Stands for Portable Network Graphics. This format was specifically made to replace GIF images on the internet. The main advantage of PNG images over GIF ones is that they support 24-bit colors and alpha transparency. That said not all the browsers recognize some of its features. You should use the PNG format for simple images that require more than 256 colors.

Use the height and width tags

When you use images or tables on your pages you should always include the height and width tags. If the browser does not see those tags it will need to figure the size of the image, then load the image and then load the rest of the page. Here is an example of code containing those tags:

<img src=”http://www.himshilp.com/images/himshilp_logo.gif” width=”197″ height=”71″ border=”0″ alt=”" />

When the height and width tags are included the browser will automatically know the size of the image. As a consequence it will be able to hold a place for the image and load the rest of the page contemporaneously. Apart from the improvement on the load time of the page this method is also more user friendly since the visitor can start reading the text or other information while the image is being downloaded.

Don’t scale images in HTML

Don’t use a bigger image than you need just because you can set the width and height in HTML. If you need
<img width=”100″ height=”100″ src=”banner.jpg” alt=”banner” />
then your image (banner.jpg) should be 100x100px rather than a scaled down 500x500px image.

Reduce cookie size

HTTP cookies are used for a variety of reasons such as authentication and personalization. Information about cookies is exchanged in the HTTP headers between web servers and browsers. It’s important to

Keep the size of cookies as low as possible to minimize the impact on the user’s response time. Eliminate unnecessary cookies Be mindful of setting cookies at the appropriate domain level so other sub-domains are not affected Set an Expires date appropriately. An earlier Expires date or none removes the cookie sooner, improving the user response time.

Flush the Buffer early

When users request a page, it can take anywhere from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to stitch together the HTML page. During this time, the browser is idle as it waits for the data to arrive. In PHP you have the function flush(). It allows you to send your partially ready HTML response to the browser so that the browser can start fetching components while your backend is busy with the rest of the HTML page. The benefit is mainly seen on busy backends or light frontends.

A good place to consider flushing is right after the HEAD because the HTML for the head is usually easier to produce and it allows you to include any CSS and JavaScript files for the browser to start fetching in parallel while the backend is still processing.

Remove duplicate java scripts

Duplicate scripts hurt performance by creating unnecessary HTTP requests and wasted JavaScript execution.

In addition to generating wasteful HTTP requests, time is wasted evaluating the script multiple times.

One way to avoid accidentally including the same script twice is to implement a script management module in your templating system. The typical way to include a script is to use the SCRIPT tag in your HTML page.

      <script src=”menu_1.0.18.js”></script>

An alternative in PHP would be to create a function called insertScript.

      <?php insertScript(“menu.js”) ?>

In addition to preventing the same script from being inserted multiple times, this function could handle other issues with scripts, such as dependency checking and adding version numbers to script filenames to support far future Expires headers

Put Stylesheets at the Top

Moving stylesheets to the document HEAD makes pages appear to be loading faster. This is because putting stylesheets in the HEAD allows the page to render progressively.

This is especially important for pages with a lot of content and for users on slower Internet connections. The importance of giving users visual feedback, such as progress indicators, has been well researched and documented. In our case the HTML page is the progress indicator! When the browser loads the page progressively the header, the navigation bar, the logo at the top, etc. all serve as visual feedback for the user who is waiting for the page. This improves the overall user experience.

The problem with putting stylesheets near the bottom of the document is that it prohibits progressive rendering in many browsers, including Internet Explorer. These browsers block rendering to avoid having to redraw elements of the page if their styles change. The user is stuck viewing a blank white page.

Put Scripts at the Bottom

The problem caused by scripts is that they block parallel downloads. If you serve your images from multiple hostnames, you can get more than two downloads to occur in parallel. While a script is downloading, however, the browser won’t start any other downloads, even on different hostnames.

In some situations it’s not easy to move scripts to the bottom. If, for example, the script uses [removed] to insert part of the page’s content, it can’t be moved lower in the page. There might also be scoping issues. In many cases, there are ways to workaround these situations.

Flush the Buffer Early

When users request a page, it can take anywhere from 200 to 500ms for the backend server to stitch together the HTML page. During this time, the browser is idle as it waits for the data to arrive. In PHP you have the function flush(). It allows you to send your partially ready HTML response to the browser so that the browser can start fetching components while your backend is busy with the rest of the HTML page. The benefit is mainly seen on busy backends or light frontends.

A good place to consider flushing is right after the HEAD because the HTML for the head is usually easier to produce and it allows you to include any CSS and JavaScript files for the browser to start fetching in parallel while the backend is still processing.

Example:

      … <!– css, js –>  

   </head>

    <?php flush(); ?>

     <body>

… <!– content –>

Make favicon.ico small and cacheable

The favicon.ico is an image that stays in the root of your server. It’s a necessary evil the browser will always request it, even if you don’t care about it, so make sure that this  file is always present in the server. This image also interferes with the download sequence, so if you are using a favicon in your website make sure that it’s small, preferably under 1K.

Optimizing CSS

Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) make websites much more structured because they allow the browsers to cache style-related information from the .css file directly, eliminating the need to read that information every time a single page is loaded. Even if Style Sheets are naturally more efficient than HTML tables you can still optimize the CSS code to make your website cleaner and faster. Remove whitespaces as and when possible. Avoid repetition of the code wherever possible to make your style-sheets lighter. Use Shorthand Properties, Take Advantage of Your Inheritance, Use Grouping, Cut the Comments, Apply Styles Wisely.

Use a slash to display a directory

When a server opens a link in the form of “http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles” it will need to figure what kind of file or webpage is contained on that address, wasting time on the process. If instead of using that link you include a slash (”/”) at the end like “http://www.himshilp.com/seo-articles/” the web server will already know that the link points to a directory, reducing the time to load the page.

Reduce the HTTP Requests

When a user is opening your website every object on the page (e.g. images or scripts) will require a visit to the server. Those HTTP requests will delay the response time of your site, and if you are loading number of objects this delay can add up to several seconds.

By reducing the number of objects on your website, we can reduce the delay from HTTP requests. Delete unnecessary images, headers, styling features and the like. If possible you can also combine 2 or more adjacent images into a single one.

Secondly make sure that your requests for external files or scripts are combined in a single location.

Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header

We should refer the following as a rule:

For static components: implement “Never expire” policy by setting far future Expires header. For dynamic components: use an appropriate Cache-Control header to help the browser with conditional requests .

Web page designs are getting richer and richer, which means more scripts, stylesheets, images, and Flash in the page. A first-time visitor to your page may have to make several HTTP requests, but by using the Expires header you make those components cacheable. This avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers are most often used with images, but they should be used on all components including scripts, stylesheets, and Flash components.

Avoid too many banner ads

Don’t waste your valuable website real estate on flashing banner ads, as they are most of the time ignored by the visitors, and they make your webpage heavy to be loaded. Provide more valuable content instead. Then mix in some relevant affiliate links within your website’s body content, this helps your website visitors feel that they want to buy instead of feeling like they are being pushed into buying.

Avoid background music

If you really want your visitors to remain long on your web site, reading your content, the very least you should do is ensure that they aren’t put off by annoying background music looping on your website. Not only this type of music will bother the visitor but delay your webpage’s loading time. If you really feel you must use background music at least make sure visitors have some control over it – give them the option of volume or muting controls at the very least.

Minify Javascript and CSS

Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size thereby improving load times. When code is minified all comments are removed, as well as unneeded white space characters (space, newline, and tab). In the case of JavaScript, this improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced. Two popular tools for minifying JavaScript code are JSMin and YUI Compressor. The YUI compressor can also minify CSS.

Obfuscation is an alternative optimization that can be applied to source code. It’s more complex than minification and thus more likely to generate bugs as a result of the obfuscation step itself.

Avoid redirects

Redirects slow down the user experience. Inserting a redirect between the user and the HTML document delays everything in the page since nothing in the page can be rendered and no components can start being downloaded until the HTML document has arrived.

Webserver Log Analysis:

The logs that your webserver keep are an open book to teach where and when errors occur. The most important part in the logs are the 404 and 500 errors that represent a missing page. It means that a visitor or a web crawler requested that page and it’s missing. This again does not have so much of an effect when it comes to speed but it’s a good idea to try and repair the bottlenecks at least for the sake of user experience. Almost any web hosting provider offer a log analizer such as awstats

Surely there can be many other methods also like avoid using flash as much as possible because, usually, flash loads harder due to their sizes. Remove the HTML comments from your pages, because comments can slow your website down. Big or small, comments have something to say when it comes to page size. Actually you should remove everything from your website which you don’t really require. Avoid nested tables, it effects browser’s reading time. Avoid full page tables for fast rendering. The browser won’t show anything until it’s read the whole thing that way. For a faster loading webpage, either use multiple tables (not nested) or put some content above the main table to make your content in the first table show up faster. In this way you can provide something to read to your visitors while the rest of your page loads.

I think by reading this article you must have got a nice idea of restructuring your website in a way so that it takes less time to get displayed and in turn it will also increase the traffic to your website, which is truly essential in today’s age.

You may have created a fantastic website with all the bells and whistles but if it is difficult to get to the content of the site, then it’s a bit like making the journey to the supermarket only to find it is closed. A bit of a waste of time really. What follows is a few ideas on how you can improve some of the functions of your site to make it easier to access and use.

Put yourself in the place of the visitor. If you find yourself waiting for the site to load then you will probably not bother at all. For most internet users, anything longer than 15 seconds and they will have left the site. Make sure that your site loads quickly if you want to keep visitors.
 Then, in order to retain their attention, deliver the very best of what you have on your website as soon as possible.

It will undoubtedly cause you to have to make compromises, but for your website to be truly “user-friendly” you are going to have to consider those who use a dial-up connection to the internet. Although there are more and more every year who are switching to broadband, there are still a large number who are using dial-up. The biggest deal when using dial-up is the time it takes a site to load and as we mentioned earlier, if you want to keep your visitors then your site needs to load fast!So what are some of the compromises that you will need to make to increase the speed of loading for dial-up users. Generally speaking the text on a website will load up quickly even with a dial-up connection. Whereas the biggest obstacle to fast loading is having large images on your pages. It can be a fine line between having enough images to attract people and having too many so that it slows down the overall time that the site takes to load.Every image that you have on your website needs to be optimized to ensure that it loads in the shortest possible time. Editing by means of image editing software removes any unnecessary information that is on the images. This will effectively reduce the file size without affecting the appearance.

One such software package is Photoshop. When you save an image as a JPEG file you can choose the “quality” of the image. Usually a setting between 8 and 10 is good enough to save it in a small file size as well as keeping the quality high. If you don’t have Photoshop, you will find image compression software free to download from the internet.There are other options available to reduce image size. These include PNG format and GIF format. GIF format, while giving you the smallest file possible will often corrupt the look of the image, so you will need to keep this in mind when choosing which one to go for. Having given consideration to how quickly your website will load for both broadband and also dial-up users, you should then think about the fact that once there, are they going to find the typography of your content appropriate? For example, if you have large blocks of text, space out the lines using CSS. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. The size of the font is important to take into consideration too. It may look neat and tidy to have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font, but if you have to really strain your eyes to read the text, then it is defeating the object of having the information in the first place. You can still make it look tidy and professional but at the same time easy to read.

Once you have refined the look of your text and pages, you will want to be sure to make it easy for visitors to your website to find the content that they are looking for.Yours may be a website with thousands of articles. You need to provide workable means for visitors to find one single article from that pile without a lot of hassle. It could be as simple as an index of articles that you have, or as sophistated as an SQL-drven database search engine, but be assured that providing a feature like this will equip your visitors with the means to use your site with ease. One last thing to be careful about is making sure that all the links on your website are active before you make the site live. Just one broken link can tarnish that professional image that you are trying to create.

Creating a website that loads quickly is important for you and your business. If you have a website that loads too slowly, potential visitors and even customers will simply give up and click away. Internet users have a variety of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and some still use a dial-up connection, which is frustrating in the first place. The last thing they want to do is visit a website that takes too long to load. Your website could even load slowly for those who are using a DSL or cable connection.

If you find that your website seems to be getting hits on your home page and nothing else, your load time could be the problem.

Giving your website a fast load time is vital to you, your website and your business. There are even studies that show that users will click away from your website if it does not load in ten seconds, for more detail goes to: www.instant-video-streamer.com.   and sometimes less than that. To make your website load faster, you need to know the size and download speed of all of the pages on your website.

Graphics can take too long to load if not used properly. If you can take away some graphics, you will begin to increase your load time. If you take a look at the graphics you have on your web pages, you might realize that you have way too many that are not necessary. Only leave the ones that you absolutely have to.

Make your necessary graphics smaller by using your graphics editor, such as Adobe Photoshop. Making them smaller creates a faster load time. Every little change helps.

You might be surprised to find that there are html codes in your web pages that are not necessary for your website at all. for more help visit to:www.great-links-toyour-website.com.Always try to use CSS when designing your website. This will create a faster loading time. Try using HTML Tidy – an html cleaning tool that can help clean out any unnecessary html coding that is hidden in your web pages.

Even your web hosting company can play a part in how fast your website loads. If you have completed all of the changes to make your website load faster and you find that it still loads too slowly, it could be your web hosting company. Before going to your web hosting company to find out what the problem is, test your website (all of the pages) on different computers with different Internet connections. If it is still too slow, it could certainly be at the fault of your web host. sty could be having a small problem, email them about your concern and give them about a week. If nothing changes in that time period, it may be time to switch web hosts.

Keep your website load times running fast and you will find that more and more people will visit your website and stay longer, which can mean a substantial increase in sales!

Creating a website that loads quickly is important for you and your business. If you have a website that loads too slowly, potential visitors and even customers will simply give up and click away. Internet users have a variety of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and some still use a dial-up connection, which is frustrating in the first place. The last thing they want to do is visit a website that takes too long to load. Your website could even load slowly for those who are using a DSL or cable connection.

If you find that your website seems to be getting hits on your home page and nothing else, your load time could be the problem.

Giving your website a fast load time is vital to you, your website and your business. There are even studies that show that users will click away from your website if it does not load in ten seconds, for visit to:-www.impacts-audio.com and sometimes less than that.

To make your website load faster, you need to know the size and download speed of all of the pages on your website.

Here Are Some More Things You Can Do To Increase Your Load Time -

How are Your Graphics?

Graphics can take too long to load if not used properly. If you can take away some graphics, you will begin to increase your load time. If you take a look at the graphics you have on your web pages, you might realize that you have way too many that are not necessary. Only leave the ones that you absolutely have to.

Big to Small Graphics:

Make your necessary graphics smaller by using your graphics editor, such as Adobe Photoshop. more visit to:-www.handy-color-schemer.com Making them smaller creates a faster load time. Every little change helps.

Check out Your HTML:

You might be surprised to find that there are html codes in your web pages that are not necessary for your website at all. Always try to use CSS when designing your website. This will create a faster loading time. Try using HTML Tidy – an html cleaning tool that can help clean out any unnecessary html coding that is hidden in your web pages.

How Fast is Your Web Host?

Even your web hosting company can play a part in how fast your website loads. If you have completed all of the changes to make your website load faster and you find that it still loads too slowly, it could be your web hosting company. Before going to your web hosting company to find out what the problem is, test your website (all of the pages) on different computers with different Internet connections. If it is still too slow, it could certainly be at the fault of your web host. As your web host could be having a small problem, email them about your concern and give them about a week. If nothing changes in that time period, it may be time to switch web hosts.

Keep your website load times running fast and you will find that more and more people will visit your website and stay longer, which can mean a substantial increase in sales!

So You’ve decided to have an online website for your business. Before doing you will need to follow the following 5 steps in before hosting your website online.

1. Design your Website

You will firstly need to design the website for this I would recommend hiring a Web Designer. Before contacting a web designers you should always check the portfolio and there skills. If you just want to advertise your business then you need to look for a web designer who knows how to use graphical programs such as Adobe dreamweaver, flash, fireworks and Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign as well as knowledge of HTML, DHTML, CSS and Javascript. However if you want to sell items online or have some technical calculations etc then you should get a web designer with knowledge of online Databases, PHP, MYSQL, perl, .net , HTML, Javascript and CSS

2. Search for a Domain Name

The Domain name is an important part of your website as this; is this web address of your actual website. You need to look for your business name in a domain name but don’t sign up to the domain name until you find a suitable hosting company in stage 3

3. Sign Up to a web hosting and domain company

You will now have to sign up to a hosting company which will also register your domain name. Look around and find the cheapest you can find and make sure you check the disk space can fit against your very own website as if your website is over 50 Megabytes (MB) and the hosting company has a hosting package that offers you 25MB disk space then you won’t be able to put your website within this hosting package as the disk space is to small. You should also check to see if they can give you a free domain name with this service as well as see whether you get a discount if you pay a year in advance.

4. Upload your website

Now that you have the hosting package you will need to upload the web pages to your website using a file transfer program this you can download for free or web hosting company may offer this to you. They will give you username and passwords wither by email or by post which you need to enter before you transfer the files online and it may take about 24 hours before your website is active so you may have to wait for a little while before you can upload your website to the internet.

5. Advertise Your website

The final step in having a website is advertising your website. This is a very important stage in creating a website as without it you will literally be invisible on the web. You will need to submit your website to search engines and make sure you have appropiate meta tag keywords on your website and within your content as this will attract the search engine to your website. You can exchange your web links with other web sites this is called web exchange and you can buy advertising space with on
selected websites.

As you can see you have a lot to think about when putting your website together however if you follow the steps that I have included in this article you should find that having a website is beneficial to you and your business.