Utilizing Proper Ad Placement to Monetize a Website

Not to be confused with first page placement, which is the process of getting your website to rank on the first page of a search engine, first page ad placement utilizes key areas of your web page to gain clicks on your advertisements. Advertisments on websites may look distasteful to some, but it is a great way to offset the costs of hosting and managing a website. Another way to use advertisement space would be to create your own ads and place them on your site. This can move your traffic to certain areas of your website, where you may be selling a product or offering a service. Here are some tips to place ads properly on your site.

While many bloggers and SEO consultants recommend that you place ads in your sidebar, advertisements placed below the post title and above an article have a much higher success rate in receiving clickthroughs. Placing a text ad here makes it blend into your site, while an image ad will most likely irritate the reader.

Mentioned above, sidebar ads do not get a high clickthrough rate. Placing an ad at the top of the sidebar does. By blending it in to look like it’s part of the navigation, it will receive a large amount of clicks from visitors.

Another place commonly used is below your post. If you place ads below your articles, make sure it is directly below the articles. Using text links, so they look like a list of related links, will create a large amount of clicks.

Many websites offer products and SEO services and using advertisements on their own pages can give a substantial boost. Creating backlinks throughout posts or placing image ads in the sidebar “funnels” visitors into certain areas of the website.

By blending in your advertisements with the rest of your site, you can guarantee a high rate of clicks on your ads. Make sure the ads are related to your website, else nobody will be willing to click on them. By using these advertisement tips, your website can effectively pay for its PPC advertising and even its hosting costs.

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How Optimizing Your Blog Post Titles Can Increase Your Traffic

Many websites will tell you to fill your blog post titles with keywords to make them more search engine friendly. While this will increase your rank on search engines, it won’t do much to entice visitors from social media sites or other referring sites. Basically, your post titles need to be optimized in accordance to how you do your internet marketing. Let’s go over your two major audiences and discuss how to optimize your blog posts.

Search engines, like Google or Yahoo!, are a major source of traffic for websites. While proper website SEO can and will create traffic for you site, post titles and proper keywords are the main way to increase your search ranking. Search engines use complex algorithms that determine the page rank of your website based off of several optimization factors. In order to rank high on Google, you must focus on using keywords in your titles, rather than catchy and creative titles. This is strictly to be recognized by the algorithm as relevant information to the search.

The other major source of website traffic would be from social media sites, such as Twitter and Stumbleupon. Marketing to these internet users is entirely different than ranking in search engines. You need to keep your titles short and sweet, while also making them interesting and appealing. These are strictly human visitors, not bots, so you must market accordingly. Include keywords that would interest visitors, instead of focusing on keywords that they would likely search for. Creating a catchy title that tempts them to visit your website is the key here.

There is a great tool for blogs built with WordPress called the Platinum SEO Plugin. This plugin lets you define an additional title for every page, so you are able to create a title for both audiences. This is an easy and effective way to optimize your titles, and allows for an easier time marketing your website.

Internet marketing and website SEO can be difficult tasks to undertake, but there are SEO professionals with the knowledge and talent to do it for you. Depending on your blog or website’s purpose, you may want to reach your visitors as fast and effectively as possible, without having to trial-and-error your way to getting traffic.

Mobile Website Design Principles: Part 2 – Cross-Platform Browsing

With web browsing on mobile devices on the rise, many web developers are creating mobile versions of their sites. Creating a mobile website can be difficult, especially since there are many platforms available on phones. By taking the following information into consideration, creating a mobile website shouldn’t be such a difficult task.

Let’s start with your markup language. A few different types are available for those building a mobile website. WML, or Wireless Markup Language, has been around since the early days of mobile web devices. It is an XML markup language. While it is available on every phone with web capabilities, it has been superseded by XHTML. XHTML is available in the standard XHTML rendered by desktop browsers, and XHTML-MP, the MP standing for Mobile Profile. The only difference between the two is that XHTML-MP has a few less elements and tighter restrictions to make it easier for a mobile device to render the website.

The next thing to keep in mind is the many screen resolutions available in the mobile world. The most common ones are 128 x 160 pixels, 176 x 220 pixels, 240 x 320 pixels and 320 x 480 pixels. By keeping these dimensions in mind, you will be able to optimize some of your content. However, it’s best to keep your site as minimal as possible, especially since there’s no mouse on a mobile phone and they are only able to move up and down a page. While there are a few exceptions in the market, such as the iPhone and the Nokia Internet Tablet, but these phones should be able to browse your regular page easily.

The goal for any web site should be to know your customers in order to deliver to them the best available content. This goal is even more important with mobile sites since you need to target the use of your site. Regular web users are most likely sitting at a desk facing a large monitor that has a high resolution. Visitors who are browsing your mobile site, however, view it through a tiny screen that’s usually less than 1/4 of your desktop’s resolution.

The final step in mobile website design is to test your design. While desktop browsers can be forgiving with code, mobile browsers don’t have the processing power available to automatically fix errors. This can possibly render your website completely useless. Luckily, there are some tools to help in this process. This W3C validator is designed specifically for mobile websites. The next step is to test the site on a mobile platform. While there are emulators available to see your website’s general layout as it would be on a mobile device, these tools won’t be 100% accurate. They can help in the design process, though. The only sure-fire way to test your site is to view it on a mobile phone. Try to test it on phones with different resolutions to ensure that it’s working correctly.

Mobile website design, while similar to standard design, can be difficult if you don’t have the proper tools available. There are many services available that can do it for you, thankfully. Even if you’ve designed your website without the help of others, mobile website design may be difficult.