Web Site Menu

What not to do when you’re making a menu for your website. I snipped this from an article giving tips to web developers, by Carolyn Snyder.

“People use various terms to describe these menus — rollover, fly-out, pop-up, hierarchical, or cascading. These are menus that pop up automatically when the user positions the cursor over a particular item onscreen. Whatever you call them, these things can be so difficult to use that they border on evil.

I don’t care that prominent software vendors have been using cascading menus for years — obviously they have forgotten that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And that’s exactly what users do — they try to take the diagonal route to their desired menu option rather than across and down. And as soon as they move off the menu, they lose it (or even worse, get an unrelated one). Depending on where the user leaves the cursor after clicking, another menu might pop up, possibly covering part of the page the user wanted.

I recently tested a site that used rollover menus. Of the 17 users who took part, four complained of difficulty using the menus, and one was so stymied that I had to help him. Even users who understood this interaction model sometimes had difficulty selecting the menu options they wanted.”

I couldn’t agree more. Plain text menus are so much better, for two reasons really. The author of that article talks about the useability issue, but there’s another reason to not use these types of menus. They’re not search engine friendly. A plain text menu is much more search engine friendly. Use text, and have the text be related to the keywords important for the page it links to. Don’t just put “home”, have the text say something about your site.

retire young retire rich

I just finished reading Retire Young, Retire Rich, a book in the Rich Dad series by Robert Kiyosaki. I have a lot of great ideas. Here’s one.

business forum online small

I’m going to bite the bullet and upgrate Business Forum to vBulletin 3.0 before the release candidate. It’s been too long, and I’m sick of waiting. I closed down Business Forum on the old host, and I’m going to upgrade it and recreate it over again. I’ve had too much down time with my old host, nearly lost the entire database once. The past few days we’ve had hours and hours of down time. I’m just going to host it myself and not bother with having a sponsor for now.

It hasn’t been as easy to design in vBulletin 3.0 as it has in vBulletin 2.x. I expect that to even out after the release candidate. Jelsoft makes a great product, and they provide great support, I’m always singing their praises, but damn they’re slow. They’ve asked the community of users to refrain from developing addons to vBulletin 3.0 until the final release candidiate is out. It seems like years that the final release has been right around the corner.

For the sake of Business Forum, though, it’s time to make the move. I probably would have waited longer were it not for the unreliability of the host. Upgrading will do wonders for the SEO, though, we’ll just have to deal with an ugly looking site for a few months.

Books for Web Hosts

I just read a couple of books I can recommend. Just read a couple of books I can recommend.

Strategies for Web Hosting and Managed Services
Web Hosting

Tons of good tips in both books, and they’re useful for someone who’s been in the business for a while as much as for newbies.

Anchor Text vs. PageRank

I’m thinking that focusing on buildling PageRank isn’t the best strategy for getting good traffic out of the search engines. I’m not saying that PageRank isn’t important, just that seeking PageRank for the sake of PageRank isn’t going to get you a lot of traffic. OTOH, seeking anchor text will bring in the traffic.
I’ve seen search engine results where sites with lower PageRank get better results than sites with very nice PageRank. At the basic logic, you can see that if PageRank alone was what it took to get good search ranking you’d only have one site at the top for all keywords. Also, when you put anchor text at the top of your SEO priority, you’re building PageRank incidentally.

What’s worth more to you then? A link from a PageRank 6/10 site with no anchor text, or a link from a PageRank 4/10 site with the anchor text you specify? That’s also a tough call because with the link from a 6/10 site you can get the raw PR and then use it to spread around in your own site and use your own internal links with your anchor text to increase your rankings. OTOH, the anchor text from the 4/10 site will give you the greater boost to your home page for your primary keyword.

Conclusion…. seeking links from lower PR sites is very worthwhile if you can specify your anchor text.

Comments?

PageRank

What a difference a letter makes. I’ve been doing some experimenting with website marketing, and thought I’d share some results. My objective with this experiement was to find out how adding a bunch of back-links to an existing website would effect its search engine placements.
I took my Coin Books website, which is circa 1999 in style, design, and content, and got some links from other websites. I had the sites linking to me use the anchor text “coin books” as that’s the title of my website and the keyword I’d like to have people search for when they find my site.
If you go to Google to search for “coin books” now, you’ll see my site listed second now! It hadn’t even shown up in the top hundred before adding a substantial amount of back links. Incidentally, the PageRank of the site rose from a three to a five during this experiment.
That’s great news, right? Well, maybe, but not as great as it could be. You see, according to the Overture term suggestion tool, people are more likely to search for “coin book” than they are to search for “coin books”. What’s the difference? It’s the same thing, right? Well, not according to Google. Now, go to Google and search for “coin book”. Now where’s my site? I don’t know. I searched through twenty pages of the results, and didn’t find it.
My next experiment with this is how to get it to show up on the first page of search results for both “coin books” and “coin book”.

How to Submit a Site to Yahoo

Getting listed on Yahoo should be without doubt the most important mission on any Internet marketers mind.

Yahoo is the biggest of all the search engines, well actually that’s not true, you see Yahoo is not technically a search ENGINE it is a human compiled directory of websites and does not have a spider bot going to sites and indexing them. But for the sake of this article when I say search engines I am referring to all ’search sites’. Anyway as I was saying Yahoo is the biggest of all the search engines, did you know that recent estimates show that Yahoo is currently capturing an amazing 40% of all search engine traffic online? Do you know what this means? That means that almost 1 out of every 2 people that do searches on the Internet use Yahoo, everyone on the Internet has done searches some time or another.

Nothing in the world should be clearer to anyone with a website whose just after reading the above figures - you need your site listed in Yahoo ASAP.

RECAP
If your site is not listed in the YAHOO INDEX, (note - being listed under webpages does not mean you are listed in Yahoo, it in fact means you are listed with Google because Yahoo gets webpage results from google) you are losing lots of potential customers to competitors that are listed in Yahoo. And with the amount of visitors Yahoo can send you even with an average listing this could amount to hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars worth of lost profit.

Now you know how important it is, lets get on to the good stuff, how to submit to Yahoo.

Well first you have to determine the scope of your site. Is your site commercial or noncommercial? Commercial sites that want to be listed by Yahoo now must use “Business Express” when submitting. This used to cost $199, however the price has risen to $299 a year.

What is Business Express? Good question and one that many people ask, well it’s basically the same as free submit except that with business express your site is guaranteed to be reviewed within a weeks time. However please be aware that it does not guarantee that your site will be accepted and added to the Yahoo index. If your site is rejected Yahoo will allow you to appeal for free within a certain time scale (usually 30 days) of being informed of your rejection. Also Yahoo staff usually include in your rejection the reason you have been rejected, you should examine these reasons fix any problems and resubmit after a week or so.

If your site is a noncommercial site, you will still be able to submit for free, but a review could take as long as 8 weeks or might never happen at all.

Before you submit make sure your site is 100% ready, under construction pages need not apply to Yahoo because they are not going to get in. Your site should be aesthetically pleasing to the reviewer, be quick loading and of course should has lots of content.

OK lets get started. How does Yahoo return results? Well search results on Yahoo are determined by words that appear within these four areas:

1) category
2) title
3) description
4) URL
These sites are then sorted by relevance using an automated algorithm.

First up category selection, many people don’t realize this but when someone searches for a term(s) on Yahoo its algorithm searches through the category name also, for example visit www.yahoo.com and you will see the results for a search done on ‘Internet marketing articles’. You will see under each listing that these words are highlighted if they are in the name of the category, the top listing has the most occurrences of these words between its title, description, URL and words in the category its in.

You should remember this when submitting to your category, when trying to establish what category you are going to submit to you should do a search for one or two of your keywords and see what categories come up. But which of these categories do you submit to?

Since most referrals to sites from Yahoo come from the search results and not from people visiting certain categories, it is wise and best (in most occasions (I’ll tell you why in a bit)) to submit to a very specific category with lots of keywords in the category name. To see this strategy in practice revisit the results page for ‘Internet marketing articles’ on Yahoo.com notice that the top ranked site is in a category with lots of keywords, these are: Internet, Business, Advertising and Web, these combined with various keywords in the title, description and URL combine to give this site a pretty good chance at ranking well on a few good keywords and phrases. Therefore category names are just like having more titles and descriptions. Note - if you are a regional operation try to pick a category with the name of your state or province in it. This will help you get targeted visitors from Yahoo.

Remember I said in most occasions a little higher up the page, well here’s why it’s not the best policy in all occasions. Imagine if your business name or official website name began with an A or any other alphabetically high character and someone goes into a general high - level category and there you are listed in the top few, you could receive lots of traffic from your category listing like this.

Basically what I’m saying here is that if the title you are submitting (i.e.. Your official business or website name) is alphabetically very high. Then you’d want to compromise between a lower level very specific keyword rich category and an upper level more general category in the hope that you’d receive more visitors because you would be listed high on the page due to your alphabetically high title.

Personally I’d try to get into the most general category possible on all occasions and rely on the keywords in my title, URL, and description to get a good ranking in search results.

As for the title Yahoo insists that you use your official business or website name when applying to them, if you submit some keyword rich title they wont even look twice at your application. You should take this into account when choosing a domain name/official website name.

I did - AKA Marketing - ‘A’ is useful in getting listed high in general categories as discussed earlier, because AKA is an abbreviation I can ‘get away’ with having AKA all caps which again helps with the category strategy. Also it includes a good keyword - Marketing and they cant accuse me of applying to them with a keyword rich title, can they?.

Yahoo favors short titles, this stems from the fact that the shorter the title is the less likely they will be to edit it. Which means less work for them. However if you follow the above guidelines and indeed Yahoo’s own onsite guidelines chances are you wont get edited down.

The description part I think is the tricky part. The Web site description posted with your URL is a big factor in how your site will rank once it’s listed in the directory.

You have to submit a description which has your main keywords in it, and make it sound very appealing to potential visitors at the same time, however you can’t have anything that resembles hype and bragging, for example - number 1 site on the net for ….. The best on the web for .. . . …

Again Yahoo will either edit it to something which doesn’t benefit you at all or just move on to the next application (most likely). If they do edit it you can bet your keywords won’t appear in the final listing, for these reasons it is important to get it right first time.

The description should be concise and based on facts, most importantly it should include your most important keywords whenever possible. Do not exaggerate what is located on your site. Remember your site gets reviewed by a real person and in the end, your site will not get listed, simple as that

The length of the description should be about 10 - 15 words. Note however on the Yahoo submittal form, they say 25 is the maximum, never go near this number, they are sure to edit it, a mess with your keywords. Refer to Yahoo’s own words “Please be brief”.

SIDENOTE
Sometimes people email me asking this question ”does my title and description that I submit to Yahoo have to be the same as the meta description tag and title tag on my site”. Simple answer, NO!

We have already discussed most of the issues regarding domain name choice and Yahoo above, however there are others, most notable the whole 63 character thing, this allows for very long keyword rich domain names,if you decide to pursue this strategy, don’t go mad and use up nearly all 63 characters because Yahoo reviewers wont like it, however do use long domain names to your advantage. Get ones with your main keyphrase in it, and have these words separated by hyphens ( - ) because Yahoo’s algorithm like hyphens it may give you a rankings boost. Also remember to try for alphabetically high domains, which are plausible and make sense. If you can that is.

Some experts question the merit of keyword rich domains as a way of gaining an advantage over other sites in Yahoo, however I have seen this strategy in action and it does give advantage, most of the time it’s only a slight advantage but we’re talking about Yahoo here, a small advantage can mean a lot more visitors. To see why I believe in keyword rich domains, go to Yahoo.com and enter in ”linking strategies”. WHAT SITE COMES UP! . That was a very good example wasn’t it
Other tips for Yahoo is to have an about us page on you main page - Yahoo likes to know who it’s dealing with. On this page describe what you do honestly and also post the physical address of your business/building your website is run from.

IMPORTANT
Don’t under any circumstances spam Yahoo, it they notice your submitting your site more than every 2 or 3 months they will just forget about you and more on.

Article by David Callan

New Weblog Open

I am creating this weblog to store my random ramblings. Mostly, I’ll be writing about my experiences with startup small businesses, but maybe once in a while on other topics as well.