Useful Tools for Web Design Evaluation

Basically, an effective web design is described as the one in which users are able to find information in an instance and in a logical way. Therefore, as a web designer, you must be able to know how to evaluate your own designs to see if it delivers quality outputs and effectiveness to users. Take note that there are an array of methods which can help you in evaluating the over-all performance and looks of your website.

Below are some tools that can help you know if your web design will work.

PERFORMANCE TOOLS:
    *      YSlow – this tool is created to examine all the components of your web page, including components dynamically created by using JavaScript. It also measures the performance of the web pages while offering you a few suggestions for improvements.
    *      WebPageTest – a helpful utility that analyzes the page load times while giving you a quick rundown of how well your site is performing based on a number of various criteria.

ANALYTICS TOOLS:
    *      Piwik – this analytics software gives interesting yet detailed reports on your website visitors, your popular pages, the search engines keywords they used, the language they speak, and all the needed information.

VALIDATION AND COMPATIBILITY TOOLS:
    *      HTML Validator - this validator checks the mark-up validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, and MathML, thus making cross-browser design that much easier. You can also check if your source code is standardized. This tool will work perfectly for all users even though they use different browsers.
    *      CSS Validator – a free validation software created by the W3C that is committed to help Web designers and Web developers check the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This tool is said to be an invaluable ally. It does not only incorrect uses of CSS, but it will also tell you when your CSS poses some risks in terms of usability.

USER FEEDBACK TOOLS:
    *      Five Second Test – is a simple usability test that measures the effectiveness of your user interfaces. It works by flashing up a screen shot of the particular web page for 5 second. After the page is viewed a form appears which has five spaces for the user to simply list the things they remember.
    *      Usabilla – this tool allows you to create your own feedback surveys. You can edit the tests in order to get useful data on how visitors find their layouts.

Use these tools listed above early in your development to ensure you're on the right track, or use it to see how well your existing site stacks up.

Why You Should Use a Link Building Service

Of all the SEO techniques and web promotion strategies, it is the Link Building which carries a huge vitality. In fact it caters all the necessary factors in order for your site to achieve high page rank in major search engines. As you know, your site's back links are what search engines look at when ranking your site, therefore it is better to take the best step when it comes to link building technique.

Building links steadily is what makes link building a time consuming but the most effective process in SEO. Bear in mind that a well planned and comprehensively conducted link building strategies can provide you and your site with more visitors everyday – which results to high brand credibility. And since you want a rapid and successful results, the strategy of building links offers you a good news! Buy using link building services from dedicated companies, you can not only generate a massive amount of visitors, you will also increase the amount of your traffic. With traffic to the site, you will be able to put your products in the front of the customer who is ready to buy.

Moreover, link building services allows you to have your company get linked to a large number of other sites. Which literally means – more popularity. Having these factors being said, you can thus conclude that the whole purpose of link building is to get your link onto the web pages. By having a service that solely concentrates on this, you can see an increase in traffic and page ranking over time. This increased traffic can be increased profit for some website owners.

Link Building is categorized into two types of quality links - reciprocal and non-reciprocal. Although both plays a prominent role in search engine optimization, they have a few dissimilar characteristics and effects. In reciprocal link building, you will be aided to multiply and at the same time increase your sales figures. This is a time-consuming process, but at the end of the process, you will find that your site has received a prominent ranking. This also helps in online partnership. Any site which uses reciprocal linking can be assured of online partnership. While with a non-reciprocal link building, you do not need to exchange links. It also gains authority status, meaning - as you receive more back links, you attract more visitors.

With these benefits written above, it is then important to maximize the use of link building services. The great thing about such services is the amount of time it can save the website owner – and that is YOU. Remember that not all of us have the time to contact a variety of other website owners to see if they will link to your web page. Instead it is more beneficial to hire someone to do this.

SEO is much more than Meta Tags

A myth about SEO or Search Engine Optimization reduces all to just Meta Tags. In most cases, people often thought that Meta Tags are the only tool for search engine optimization, but ironically, this is one of their least useful uses. Perhaps we can never deny that meta tags are an important factor to take note in Search Engine Optimization, but still, there are many more important elements to be considered. SEO is a sort of puzzle in which creativity and technicality embrace each other.

For everyone's information, Meta tags are considered to be one of the most basic factors of Search Engine Optimization. Learning it's elements is a requirement and a must for every SEO practitioner. Meta tags have been around long years ago. They have been a big part in search engine history. They were valued as a factor in rankings before – until people started abusing their use in getting on top of the SERPs. After that, Google opted meta tags out of the ranking factors. But that doesn’t mean that they are not important anymore - meta tags still play quite a big role in your site’s SEO. In fact, the use of Meta Tags in web pages are often required by search engines as a source of information to help them decide how to list and rank your website. Meta Tags are not always required, but as a rule of thumb, it makes more sense to take advantage of them than to leave them out.

Basically, meta tags are the words that are hidden in your code. As described by Mr. Danny Sullivan, it is “a ‘legal’ way of hiding words in your web pages for search engines”. The search engines still read them for it to have a simple, summarized idea of what your site is about and what exactly your keywords are.

The importance of Meta tags lies beyond the fact that the search engines read them in order to compare if these keywords and the description are related with the visible content. Are your keywords present in your page? Is your meta description related with your content? There is certain weight in your meta tags that the search engines see, that being the reason, wouldn’t you want to do everything in order to bring your page a little bit higher in the SERPs? That’s exactly the reason why meta tags is important.

However, SEO is much more than meta tags. Using such tool is never enough to attain your desired goal – to rank high in Google and other search engines. According to Mark Edwards, the most important SEO tip was to ensure any website content was relevant, interesting, regularly updated and substantial. “And make sure other sites are acknowledging you (if they use your content),” Mr. Edwards said.

Even if meta tags do not hold much vitality when it comes to page ranking, their importance is still present as the search engine robots validate their relativity to your content and site niche.

Best Ways to Acquire High PageRank

A successful search engine optimization campaign can never be achieved by just doing a simple link building strategy. Bear in mind that employing the most effective link building techniques is a must. Moreover, link building is not only the process of getting links to a website from other sites; in one way or another, it can also increase a websites page rank with the search engines. Page Rank is the value that the search engines give to a web page. It is usually on a scale of 1 to 10.


Building link popularity helps to gain higher page rank for a website. The higher the page rank, the higher the site will appear on the search engines with competitive keywords. Usually, the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN use link popularity in order for them to rank a website. The search engines seem to think that the more incoming links a site has, the more important or valuable it must be. So how do we get a good quality of inbound links for our website? Here are few of the best ways:


First in line is to write a compelling content. Press releases, blogs, articles, and reviews are guaranteed to provide you with quality backlinks. In writing an article, try to put in as many keywords as possible, but it should not be very obvious to the reader. Create as many blogs as you can and post them on websites with high page rank. Blogs are very effective as many people are sharing their thoughts on blogs and you have a good chance of getting noticed. After coming up with a strong content, it's time for you to do blog commenting. This is the process of posting feedback or comments in blog posts in order to get referral traffic and increase search engine rankings of sites. This technique can be acquired by searching related area of interest blogs & forum topics.


Another commonly used technique in having high PR is through directory submissions. Directory submission sites allow you to get a massive amount of inbound links for free! The nice thing about it is that the directory listing will always be there for as long as the directory does not violate any protocol. It is a fact that most net visitors forget websites and pages; thus is your website is enlisted with a directory, people can always find you when they want to.


Social Media and Bookmarking also plays an important role in achieving high PageRank. Since social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter owns millions of users, it is undeniable that posting links on different profiles are an effective way to acquire backlinks. Take note to find the best bookmarking websites based on PageRank, Alexa Rank, dofollow and submit website using beneficial keyword anchored phrases.


I’m sure by implementing the above methods, your website can get a high page rank.

Get More Exposure for your Blogs through Social Media

Creating a blog is easy. But the hardest part of it is building a large audience that will visit your posts. Well it is quite true that the biggest problem which most bloggers are facing these days is on how to get people notice their posts. Even though you have written the best and creative blogs, that will be nothing if no one has likely to read them. So how can you get your blog noticed?


Announcing your blogs through social media sites is indeed a good start to make your blog promotions effective. Since social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter carries millions of users from different parts of the world, it is undeniable that these sites are great for getting thousands of visitors to your blog in an instance. Every bloggers should realize the importance of networking with other bloggers. Remember that bloggers are human. They help people that they like, and they like people that help them.


Social media has its own audience with unique preferences. Some of these audiences has the ability to link to you, vote for you, re-publish your posts to other networking sites, and promotes the things that you're currently promoting. Ergo, you should never under-estimate the power of social networking when it comes to promoting your blogs. In fact, all successful bloggers have built a strong network along the way.


One can use Twitter and Facebook in many different ways that will benefit their blog promotion. Having accounts and posts on both networking sites might help you in the best way possible. When you post on Twitter, it can automatically re-post to your personal Facebook news feed. While if you post something on your FB's fan page, it will also post to Twitter - as well as to your personal Facebook news feed.


And the best thing that social media do is that they allow you to link your blog posts to their sites. For Facebook, navigate to the “NetworkedBlogs” application, click it, and add your blog information as requested. There’s a verification process that Facebook will walk you through to make sure you’re the author of the blog.


For Twitter, go to “Twitterfeed”, a useful and free website application that feeds your blog to Twitter. Register for an account, verify your personal details and then log in. Once done, click the “Create New Feed button” to add your blog. It might take a couple hours to start working. LinkedIn is another social networking website that allows you to link your posts. If you have a WordPress blog, simply go to “Applications” and click “WordPress.” If you have a TypePad blog, go to “Applications” then “Blog Link”. LinkedIn will walk you through the process step-by-step.


Generating a large audience for your blog posts is never an easy task. And perhaps social media is only one of those effective ways that could give a more successful results to your blog promotion.