10 Ways To Make Your Website Fail.
If you get nothing else out of this site, read this. These are 10 sure fire ways to make your site unsuccessful. As the internet is growing more and more cluttered with scams, and quick money schemes, it is hard to know what works and what doesn't. These 10 things don't, they are nothing but trouble.
1. Click Exchange Programs- For the time and money spent there is very little return. To make these work at a capacity that is useful you will waste a lot of time. A very ineffective way to spend your advertising dollars. You can dig a hole with a spoon but a shovel is faster.
2. Free For All pages- If you don't know what they are stay away. FFA's are a hollow way to increase links and hits. FFA use dangerous traffic driving methods that are essentially SPAM. Most search engines consider them spam.
3. Website Awards- Very few are the respected type that are useful. This is basically a webmasters scheme to get there link on your site. It has nothing to do with awards 9 times out of 10. If you get contacted about receiving an award for your site, it is most likely bogus.
4. Frames- Do not use frames. Search engines can't index frames pages. When you submit to search engines they will not know how to use a site containing frames. To fix this problem after your frameset tags add
<NOFRAMES>
<BODY>
Place your optimized content between the <NOFRAMES> tag. This will allow search engines to reference your site.
5. Messing With Search Engines- There are countless ways to "fool" a search engine. The problem is that most search engines have evolved or will evolve to catch these things. One of there main jobs is to catch this sort of thing. I guarantee you will not like being banned from a major search engine.Some of the things included in this category are; using invisible text (white text on white background); using very small text to jam the keywords in a small area, repeating keywords over and over, and listing your site in the wrong category. The bottom line is you don't need this kind of thing if you have a well designed site, plenty of content and old fashioned techniques employed to optimize your site.
6. Images- Don't get me wrong, images are good to a point. There are several reasons why overloading your site is bad. The first is search engines don't have eyes. Graphics are not helping you get a better ranking or get listed. The second is the more graphics you have to load (size wise), the slower your site will load.Here is a link to a tool that will reduce the size of images on your site, Image Cruncher. Different types have different compression characteristics. Visitors don't like slow loading sites. Search engines don't like slow loading sites and most will penalize these sites. Graphics don't sell anything, words do.
7. Affiliate and Associate Program Mistakes- Many people have wasted a lot of money using these tools because they didn't take the initiative to begin with. Sure it's easy to join up with one of these cookie cutter sites, but why not have your own site? I mean your own domain, your own design and ideas. I am not saying using these tools is a bad thing I am saying using someone else's content, domain and product exclusively is severely limiting your potential. Why not use it to supplement a larger idea?
8. Lowering Prices During Slow Times- This will go against everything that feels right. Most of the time lowering your products prices will not help sales. Lowering prices on the internet often lowers perceived value. Instead, try adding value to your product or services and content to your site. If your product is worth the price, it will sell. If it is not selling the next option is to take a long hard look at why. 99% of the time it isn't the price..
9. Debugging Your Page Before It Hits The Internet- How many times have you been to a site where the pages or graphics don't load, or there are misspelled words. Always debug your page and fix your mistakes. Flaws in code, misspelled words,pages and graphics that aren't consistent from one page to another are all major problems. The secret is credibility, you may have a doctorate in 5 different things but you misspell a word and your credibility goes down the toilet.This is the great thing about the internet as well as the bad thing. No one knows you, they just know your site.Who wants to spend 50 dollars on a site when half the images don't load. This can be time consuming but is well worth the effort. Visit your page often make sure that everything works correctly.We all make mistakes, laziness should not be one of them.
10. Catering Your Site To Every Potential Visitor- Not every visitor will have the latest version of Internet Explorer or Netscape. Many might not even use those browsers. Make sure your site is capable of running on any number of browsers. For that matter make sure your site has a consistent appearance throughout many different screen resolutions and color combinations. Some visitors come with an 18 inch flat screen some with a 15 inch VGA. These are two different monitors that will have varying results on many web pages.85% of people either have a screen size of 800x600 or 1024x768. Just about 50% have 1024x768. Try changing your colors and resolution and view your page. Stick with 256 safe colors.
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