10 Benefits of Hiring a Professional Web Design Company

Who needs a web design company? Doing it yourself seems like a piece of cake. Download some software or use your web hosting company’s built in website making software. Spend a few hours and then *poof*, your website is done. Maybe not.

The biggest problem in digital marketing today is that small business owners do not understand how important their website can be to their business. The look and functionality of your website can make or break you. While doing it yourself will certainly save you money upfront, within 1 year you will have lost more revenue and goodwill than it would have cost to hire a professional web design company…twice over. Today’s websites are nothing like those from 5 years ago. They serve as both a 24-hour marketing vehicle for your business and a tool to make your life easier. So what’s the big deal with having your site done professionally? Here are 10 reasons why going with a professional beats doing it yourself.

1. A Positive First Impression

The second somebody visits your website, they form an opinion of your business. This opinion is based entirely on the look of your site. Imagine that. Even if you provide the best service in the world or your products cure cancer, your website is the one doing the talking. What do you want it to say? When you go the extra mile to hire a professional web design company, they’ll notice the difference and your first impression will be significantly more positive.

2. Compatibility With the Latest Mobile Technologies

If you are not a freelancer or working for a web design company, you probably have little knowledge of new and upcoming technology standards for mobile websites. This can cost you big. For example, we know mobile is growing every month, but what solutions might you use to make your website mobile compatible? If you weren’t aware of responsive web design, you might instead pay a monthly fee to have a company create and maintain a mobile version of your website. A professional web design company would educate you on responsive design and build your site using the technology, saving you hundreds of dollars. Additionally, as newer mobile devices come out, is your self-made website able to adapt? Nobody knows, but with a professional your site will likely be far more future proof as new ways to browse the web emerge.

3. Beautiful High-DPI Retina Optimized Images

Wondering why your website’s images look fuzzy on your new iPhone or high-def tablet? It’s because these new high-resolution devices support high-dpi images – images with twice as much detail than before. You’ve heard the term “retina” used in Apple marketing and retina-compatible images are what we are talking about here when we say high-dpi. For the average Joe, even with a “retina-compatible” theme high-dpi images require a bit of trial and error. If you aren’t using WordPress, the process is even harder without ready-made plugins to start off with. But when a professional web design company is involved, you can rest assured your images will look razor-sharp on all of the latest mobile devices – iPads, iPhones, the Nexus 7 and more.

4. A Reliable Website

You designed your site yourself. It went live a month ago. But all of a sudden you get an error message when you try to change anything. These types of issues happen all the time, even with reliable systems like WordPress, when the site isn’t developed by a professional. If you’re on your own, what do you do? You might spend hours on Google trying to find a solution, eventually giving up and contacting a web design company in hopes of a fix. After spending hundreds for an emergency service call, you’re left with a working site – but one that could go down again at any moment. Is it work the risk?

5. Better Designs

When you use your web hosting company’s built-in website maker, you are using a pre-made template. Templates have two big flaws: They tend to be basic designs and everybody can use the same one you did. The result is a boring website. Who needs Ambien when they can just visit your website? That’s no good. We want customers to get excited when they visit your site, and when you hire a web design company with skills, expect an original, clean design built with your goals in mind. There is just no comparison. And if you don’t think design matters – in some cases it’s all that matters. Look at renowned companies like Apple, Dyson, and BMW. Each made the design of their products, not the performance, the focal point. The results of those efforts speak for themselves: They command a premium price, incredible word of mouth, and a very powerful branding. It’s no different on the local level.

6. A Faster Website

Most websites do not perform optimally as is. A web design company with experience is going to know the various plugins and 3rd party tools to integrate into your website to provide speed and security. Make no mistake, these are significant upgrades. The tools are a necessity for most WordPress sites and even more important for sites outside of WordPress where security may not be as strong. A popular testing tool for your website is GT-Metrix, which will rate the quality of your website’s coding. How your site is coded has a significant impact on performance. A score above 85 on both test is considered good and a score above 95 is considered a flawless site. The other advantage a reputable web design company can offer is recommendations on hosting. The hosting service you choose also plays a part in site performance. A great tool for testing site loading speed is Pingdom. Here’s what a test result looks like:

7. More Likely to Show on Google

When you design a website on your own, SEO is probably the last of your concerns. But without SEO, your website in most cases will never appear on the first pages of Google, if at all. Which means, of course that nobody will find you through search. With SEO, a web design company will code your site in a way that communicate the specifics of your pages to Google, Bing, and other search engines. The result is that when someone searches for a product or service you offer, you are far more likely to show up in the search results. Traffic from search engines costs nothing so this is a highly desirable feature. Be wary of any web designer that asks for hundreds of dollars extra to optimize your site for search engines.

8. It Will Save You Time

Web Design is about more than laying out a nice design. These days web sites support incredible functionality that can save you time and increase your revenue – automatically. Say you own a salon or car repair shop. Online appointment booking provides both a convenience to your customers and saves you from having to book the appointment by phone. Follow-up thank you emails can be sent automatically and add a friendly touch to your service. There are literally thousands of possibilities to automate parts of your business using your website. You’ll improve customers service, increase repeat business, and most importantly save time.

9. It Will Make You Money

In addition to automated technology to save you time and improve service, other capabilities allow you to increase revenue with minimal effort. Remember that online appointment booking we were just talking about? What if we allowed clients to check boxes for additional add-on services right in the online appointment booking process? We’ve just created a way to increase revenue without any effort on your part (other than providing the service itself). And that car repair shop? Offer add-on features like an oil change, wiper replacement, car wash, etc. The possibilities are endless. This is how your website can truly work for you.

10. It’s More Affordable Than You Think…

Don’t look at your website as a cost. It’s an investment that can make you a lot of money when done right. But the investment probably isn’t as costly as you think. These days, CMS systems and plugins have brought the cost of hiring a professional web design company way down, but the ROI has been ever increasing as these sites provide more amazing capabilities.

Final Words on Hiring a Web Design Company

I recommend you look at web design the same way you might look at other tasks best done by a professional. Doing your taxes. Installing a garage door. Paving your driveway. All of these things could technically be done by anyone, but most folks hire a professional, and for good reason: professionals have the proper tools, training, and experience to do the job correctly, on-time, and at a fair price. Nobody is saying you can’t do your own taxes. But using an accountant, just like using a professional web design company, is an investment: you are spending money upfront to make/save money in the long run.

Looking to build a Website for your company? - Call +91-40-65891579 / +91-9030416219

Wesite - http://www.3kits.com/

Google + - https://plus.google.com/+3kitsWebdesign/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/3kits

Twitter - https://twitter.com/3kitss
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/3k-it-services-pvt-ltd

Blog - http://blog.3kits.com/

website developers in Hyderabad, Web designing Hyderabad, Web design Hyderabad, Website design Hyderabad, Web designing in Hyderabad, Website design in Hyderabad, Website designing in Hyderabad, Website design company Hyderabad

15 SUGGESTIONS TO MARKET YOUR WEBSITE PROPERLY

With the New Year round the corner, comes a new start, new challenges, and new opportunities. This is specially the case in the world of business, where 2015 is expected to offer us a number of new and exciting ways to market our businesses. – Specifically to market your website.

A good online website presence had become a staple for any up and coming business in 2014, and yet as we go into the New Year, many business owners remain blissfully unaware of how important and how beneficial it can be to market their website. Others will have only recently created their website, again with no real efforts towards marketing.

Here at 3KITS Web we’ve compiled a list of the 15 most effective techniques for marketing your new website, all of which are guaranteed to drive successful sales, build your online presence, or improve your brand identity recognition.

Keep your branding consistent

Your brand identity is what improves recognition of your company, while setting you and your website apart from your competitors in the minds of your target audience. From a choice of colour scheme to tone of voice, all of your company’s output should resonate with your brand image. Your website is no exception, and neither are the articles or videos which you post on it, or the social media updates which link back to it.

Use search engine optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation involves making overt and covert changes to your website to improve your page rankings. Regular practice includes using relevant key words, inserting internal links, creating a site map, and regularly uploading unique content. The second part of SEO is offsite work. Basically getting links to your site which are relevant. You can also use analytics to review your performance, and ensure your website remains fully optimised at all times.

Create a calendar to improve and monitor your SEO

With so much competition in the market, and so many businesses developing websites and creating content, it can be quick and easy to undo the good work which you put into your website marketing, especially from an SEO perspective. Create a schedule for uploading content, assessing your website analytics, sharing content on social networking websites, and any other tasks. In order to achieve the best ROI you’ll need to remain consistent with your efforts.

Start blogging

At 3KITS Web we practice what we preach, which is why you’re reading this article on our blog. A regularly updated blog can convey your professionalism and trustworthiness to customers, while interesting and informative copy will give them a reason to head back to your website. A blog can also do wonders for your search engine optimisation plans, as you’re given the opportunity to include relevant keywords, while increasing the likelihood of back-links and sharing on other websites.

Use video marketing

Videos are becoming an increasingly popular method for the marketing of websites, products and services. Use YouTube or share on your own website, and give your customers something more exciting and engaging than a block of text. Videos are also preferable to users browsing on smartphones with smaller screen resolutions, where reading large paragraphs can be particularly time-consuming. Also, YouTube videos do get listed on the main Google results page so in theory youyou could get listed twice on the same google page result.

Make sure you’re mobile-friendly

Statistics from September 2014 showed that nearly 15% of the India’s internet users connect through a smartphone or tablet, so it’s essential that your website displays and functions properly on all devices, like the Apple iPhone or Google Nexus. Ever-growing numbers of us are using our phones or tablets for work and social browsing, so a mobile-optimised website ensures you aren’t alienating a portion of your potential audience. Also, Google gives priority rankings to mobile specific websites on its mobile search feature.

Partner with larger industry blogs

There are popular blogs for reviews and news articles from all number of industries, all of which have the potential to improve your brand recognition and drive traffic to your website. Why not contact some blogs from your respective industry and discuss the possibility of a review, news update, or even a guest post?

Attend local networking events

Business networking events allow you to meet with representatives from other industries, offer a small pitch about your products or services, and exchange business cards. This will open your website and business up to a new potential audience, as other attendees may require your services themselves, or pass the information on to others.

Make the most of your content

Although duplicate written content can deter visitors and negatively affect your search engine optimisation, you can still make the most of the time and money spent on unique content by uploading it in a number of formats. You could create podcasts or videos to accompany your articles, providing a second option for users with a particular preference or accessibility issues.

Use free social media tools.

Over 52% of us use Facebook in India, 35% use Google+, 23% use LinkedIn with a further 30 million on Twitter. Social networking is an effective way to share your unique content and bring fresh traffic to your website, but also to encourage discussion by sharing articles or videos on your industry as a whole. You’ll be able to directly interact with potential customers and other individuals, by responding to queries, retweeting, sharing, and so on.

…And paid for social media advertising

The likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all offer paid advertising, which can be of particular benefit for smaller businesses without an online presence or large following. You can set daily or lifetime budgets, to ensure you potentially reach millions of customers while still remaining under budget. Whichever social networking platform you choose, you’ll be able to specify exactly what you’re paying for - from pay per view to pay per click, to featured Tweets or featured profiles.

Build an email mailing list

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective but far reaching methods of communicating with customers, with no printing costs or postal errors. Correspondence is sent directly to the inboxes of your customers, complete with links back to your website or social media profiles. Offer an incentive for customers to join your mailing list, such as a promotional offer or a particularly engaging or interesting piece of content.

Use regular calls to action

Make sure that calls to action are present throughout your website, your social media profiles and nay other marketing material. A call to action draws users to your website, encouraging them to click and proceed further down the conversion funnel. The result is not only an increased online presence, but also a better chance of a successful sale.

Offer web-only deals or discounts

Many businesses offer unique online-only deals and promotions to increase traffic to their websites. Customers may not follow through with the deal, but increasing numbers of them are likely to visit your website and browse your products or services. You could even promote your special offers on your social networking profiles or mailing list.

Finally - Get help from the experts

Perhaps the most beneficial piece of advice we can give is to consult experts for your website marketing. Despite the initial investment, the return upon investment is usually much higher which ultimately means that it is usually cost-effective to enlist the help of SEO trained web designers or a specialist larger digital marketing agency like 3KITS who can provide you with expert-level assistance for search engine optimisation and internet marketing advertising, as well as connect you with and train you into using analytics to assess your website’s performance

If you’d like assistance with either web design, SEO, branding or any of our other services why not get in touch with us today for a free no obligation initial chat.

Looking to build a Website for your company? - Call +91-40-65891579 / +91-9030416219

Wesite - http://www.3kits.com/

Our Work - http://www.3kits.com/web-design-work-hyderabad

Google + - https://plus.google.com/+3kitsWebdesign/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/3kits

Twitter - https://twitter.com/3kitss

Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/3k-it-services-pvt-ltd

Blog - http://blog.3kits.com/

Web designing Hyderabad, Website design in Hyderabad, Web design company in Hyderabad, Website designing company in Hyderabad, web development company in Hyderabad, Ecommerce development in Hyderabad, 

Useful Social Media Marketing Strategies For E-Commerce Websites

Marketing has been disrupted and redefined by the social media. In the past, we had traditional marketing and mass media which includes radio, television and newspaper.

Now, it has been replaced by the internet through Google Adwords, email marketing, banner advertisement etc.

Apart from all of these, social networks and social media sharing websites predominantly plays a major role in online marketing. Regardless of the economic status, gender and age-almost 75% of the people around the world are using social networks.

A research conducted by one of the leading marketing company reveals the percentage of population (among 3,000 people), who use social networks in the following three categories:

i) Educational Sector:

Nearly 71% of people purchase the educational products and discuss about the same on social media (courtesy-Academia.edu).

ii) Electronics Sector:

63% of the people who would like to purchase electronic products are discussing about them in social websites. Remaining 22% of the people make a decision of buying electronic products, as a result of seeing something posted on a social networking websites (courtesy-Amazon).

iii) Health Sector:

In this sector, almost 43% of the people love to buy health products in online and discuss about the same on social networks. Remaining 28% of the people make a decision of buying such products as a result of seeing them on social networks (courtesy-DietKart).

So, if you are running an e-commerce website, maximize your social media presence and create effective social media plans. So, then you can stand out in the crowd when compare with your competitors.

Here are some useful social media marketing strategies for your e-commerce websites:

Strategy #1: Know Where Your Customers Are?

Even before signing up for social media accounts, do some research, collect the datas and information’s regarding at which social networks your targeted people are available in a large number, which types of products they usually looking for or discussing in the social networks, which types of products they usually recommended or sharing with their own profiles, which products getting more social media traction etc.

Based on all these queries, optimize the beneficial social networks for your business and start to set up an account.

Generally Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus plays significant role. They not only helps to entertain people but also to promote the business. Apart from these networks, the image-driving services like Pinterest and Instagram also will help a lot to increase sales and traffic.

Strategy #2: Engage with the people:

So, once you have set up an account you need to engage with the people. If you want to make your previous customer into an regular customer, you must make them feel appreciated and respected. You can do this via some real and open dialogues.

You can easily engage with your customers via content. Because, your friends and followers are not always want to sell something to them, instead they are looking for some useful articles, impressive images and quotes, customer stories etc. Here is where you can engage with the people and can sell your products.

Strategy #3: Build Trust:

The e-commerce brands must build a trust to the people, unless until they cannot sell their products. One of the best way to do this is to show your genuine willingness to help.

For example if you are doing social media for any health products, don’t always sell your products, just give some beauty tips or how to use the products. It shows how you care your customers.

Strategy #4: Add social sharing button:

The e-commerce websites must add social sharing button in their websites, so then the viewers can easily share the images in their networks and can reach more people. You can even add the sharing buttons in all pages of the blog and website.

Strategy #5: Create Videos:

Videos open many doors for the creation of compelling content – whether you are providing tutorials, product demos, how-tos etc. Because people love to see the products in action. Another advantage of creating videos is; it offers another social component to your marketing endeavors.

Strategy #6: Give some exclusive offers:

The exclusive offers really drive more traffic and sales for your e-commerce site. So, offer an exclusive item to social media followers or fans, such as free shipping or a weekly coupon. You can even offer “breaking news” that does not appear anywhere else, like pre-product release announcements or an inside look at your company’s inter-workings.

Strategy #7: Analyze about what your competitors are doing?

Whether your ecommerce business is new to the social media marketing, or just need to take your efforts up a notch, the competitive intelligence is very much important. So, spend some time and analyze about your top 5-10 competitors on the social networks. It must include:

The type of content your competitors are publish on the social network

At which social networks they are active, and how much fans/followers they are having in every network.

How they are promoting their products, events, programs by using social media etc.

Strategy #8. Don’t always push products and promotions:

Although, the primary goal of the e-commerce websites are selling products don’t just concentrate on that particular thing alone. Just encompass wider range of tactics in your social media strategy which includes:

• Create a blog on your e-commerce site and feed blog content to your social accounts.

• Share any stories or messages from other resources.

• Post pictures or videos from your company events or engagements.

• Ask questions, participate in discussion of others, create poll to your customers using social media.

Strategy #9: Invest in an Infographic:

For past few years, the infographics become more popular. So, invest some amount in professionally designed infographics, it not only gives high traffic but also a number of high value back links, which will be extremely helpful for SEO.

So, spend some time to research an interesting topic in your niche and find entire points that you will cover in the infographic.

Strategy #10: Serve for your customers:

The e-commerce site owners should remember that, the social media is not only for extending the network of the business, but also to serve for your customers. By using social media, you can easily reach your customers and can know about their satisfaction, problems, complaints etc.

If you get any negative reviews, you can easily address the issue before they emerge into a bloom with the help of social media. If they lost their sales, you can help them to get back by chatting with them directly.

Visit our Website - www.3kits.com

Web designing Hyderabad, Website designing Hyderabad, Web designing in Hyderabad, Website design in Hyderabad, Website designing in Hyderabad, Website design company in Hyderabad, Website designing company in Hyderabad, 

What is Google Webmaster Tools and do I need to get involved with it if I’m not a webmaster?

We all know that Google offers phenomenal free apps that can be very helpful for business and increase productivity.  With regards to website performance and digital marketing, the most celebrated tool is perhaps Google Analytics, as it gives you lots of data about the interaction of your clients with your business. But many business people neglect the opportunities that Google Webmaster Tools give you to get control of the health of your site in the eyes of Google.

The reason it is neglected is because it sounds too techy, and business people are not usually webmasters anyway.  The truth is Google likes to democratize information so that more people are able to use, although it is very successful at hiding some of the most important and insightful pieces of data, which not even the savviest professional can analyse with certainty.

What is Webmaster Tools?

In essence, it is a free tool which you can use to monitor how Google crawls and Indexes your website. It also allows the webmaster some degree of control in terms of what you want Google to crawl and how often. Another key feature is that you can help Google crawling your site through XML sitemaps. At the same time it also allows you to tell Google what you don’t want from your website to be crawled.

It is the only opportunity that Google gives you to tell them information about how to understand your website. Having this possibility means that Google has more reasons not to like a bit when webmasters try to trick their algorithm with spammy links and other black hat techniques.  So be thankful to the almighty.

How can you Use it?

There are lots of data that this tool can give you about your website and the crawling process, but at the end of the day we need to hand pick a number of points depending on our goals and convenience.  Here is a selection of the most urgent areas that any business person can understand and delegate action upon.

1) Analyse your search queries and discover keyword opportunities

This is a feature that is often overlooked and it is very helpful to identify keywords to which Google has served your sites and analyse the click through rate (CTR) of those search terms. It also helps to see any ups or lows in the amount of your impressions (the number times where your website appears in the search results), so that you can suspect it you have been penalized by some algorithm or by any other reason such as sudden spikes in back-links.

2) Check the overall health of the site

Google may alert you if anything Is needed to look at on an urgent basis. It will not tell you however if your site has been algorithmically penalizes, you would need to delve into that with more insight. But it does tell you if your site has been manually penalized and it tells you the reason and in some cases, the possibility of rectify your actions and getting back to normal rankings.

An overview of GWT Dashboard

3) Refer to it when the rankings are low

Google Webmaster Tools should be the first stop in know what is wrong when organic traffic from analytics shows a decrease. Check the alerts that Google might send in the dashboard. It also tells you if the Googlebot is finding any errors crawling the site and what to do about it. It might be that a document called robots.txt is blocking for Google some of the main pages and needs to be urgently edited.

This is what a Robots.txt file looks like

4) Identify Crawl Errors

If you want to have a more in-depth analysis of the way Google is crawling your site, you can check on crawl errors and see which links in your site are returning 404 errors or which ones have thin content that Google does not like visiting because it is a waste of their resources. The response to this is to make it easier for the Googlebot to read your site so that you do not waste its time, as it is an incredibly busy machine.

This is how Google informs about Crawl Errors

5) Identify html duplication

As you might already know, duplication is a ‘no no’ in any website when it comes to SEO. Google wants your site to have unique pages with unique content because the fact that you have spent time creating every single page of your website for a specific purpose means that your site is higher in quality and therefore more worthy of people visiting it. One thing you can do to troubleshoot duplication (but this is just the tip of the iceberg) is by checking the duplicate meta titles and meta descriptions. These are very likely to appear in any site, and clearing these issues will be incredibly beneficial for the number of pages that make it to Google index.

HTML improvements displayed by GWT

6) Check the backlinks to your site that Google has identified

There are many SEO tools out there that analyse your back-link profile with very good and useful qualitative data on where they can from and which might be harmful for your PR (Page Rank) or reputation in Google’s eyes. Google actually tells you about which back-links the Googlebot has identified. This is incredibly useful to compare against the links that other tools identify for you. You might be surprised of how this information differs. There will be links that Google has found and other tools have not, or vice versa, and it is important to understand that if Google has not identify a back-link already it does not mean that it will not do in the future!

7) Ask Google to Ignore Harmful backlinks

Closely linked with the previous point, Google actually lets you nowadays to tell them which back-links you consider harmful and want Google to ignore. This sounds great but it does not work in a very straight-forward manner. Google listens to this but it is not a top priority for them to attend your issues, especially when you got those links in the first place to trick Google’s algorithm. The best way of minimizing the harm of your links is to disavow them and at the same time delete them physically, if you can.

You can do this by uploading a single csv table with the backlinks that you want to get ignored by Google.

How much time do you need to get control of GWT

Simply put, 2 hours to understand it and 5 minutes every day.

If there is some serious problem or you need more information, then it would be necessary to hand it over to professionals. The most important is to identify problems well in advance to take actions as soon as possible, as Google can be rather slow in re-crawling the site and understanding changes, depending on the size of your page and the frequency and intensity the Google spider crawls your site. For instance it might take months before links you have disavowed are taking into consideration and improving your Page rank.

Our SEO professionals at 3KITS can help you troubleshooting your crawling and anything related to back-links to your site through Webmaster Tools.

Visit our Website - www.3kits.com

web designing in hyderabad, web designing companies in hyderabad, web designing company in hyderabad, web designing hyderabad, web designing in hyderabad

Understanding the Importance of the robots.txt file

You’ve created a whole heap of relevant content for your website.  You’ve got some good in-bound links from high page ranking websites and your website is fully optimised for all the keywords and key-phrases your customers are searching upon – great.

But how is your robots.txt file doing?

This little file can make the world of difference to whether or not your site will get the page ranking it deserves.

What is the robots.txt file?

When search engine crawlers (robots) look at a website, the first file they will look at is not your index.html or index.php page.  It is your robots.txt file.

This little file that sits in the root “/” of your website contains instructions on what files the robot can and cannot look at within the website.

Here’s a typical robots.txt file example (line numbers are for illustration purposes only):

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz

OK, so what does the above example mean?  Let’s go through it line by line.

Line 1: The “User-agent: *” means that this section applies to all robots.

Line 2: The “Disallow: /cgi-bin/” means that you don’t want any robots to index any files in the “/cgi-bin/” directory or any of its sub folders.

Line 3: Left blank intentionally for aesthetics

Line 4: The “Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz” tells the robot that you have already indexed the structure of the website for mydomain.com.

So, as you can see from the example above, the robots.txt file contains instructions for the robot on how to index your website.

Do I need one?

No.  You don’t need a robots.txt file and most of the search engine robot crawlers will simply index your entire website if you don’t have one.  Actually, there is no requirement for any crawler to read your robots.txt file and indeed some malware robots that scan websites for security vulnerabilities, or email addresses used by spammers will pay no attention to the file or what is contained within.

So what’s all the fuss about?

Well.  There are two issues to address here; do you know if you have a robots.txt file and what it contains? And is there anything on your website you don’t want a robot to see?

Let’s look at them both in turn.

Do you have a robots.txt file and what’s inside it?

By far the easiest way of finding out if your website has a robots.txt file is to type in your website address with “/robots.txt” appended to the end such as: www.mydomain.com/robots.txt where mydomain.com is the name of your domain.

If you receive an “Error 404 Not found” page then there is no file.  It’s still worth reading the rest of this section though as we’ll see just how much damage a malformed file can do!

Ok  – if you haven’t got an error page displayed then there’s a pretty good chance your looking at your websites robot.txt file just now and that it is similar to the example a few sections ago.

Let’s just jump ahead a little and see how useful the file can be in protecting the sensitive parts of your website before we tackle the problems it can cause.

Got anything to hide?

If your website interacts with customers using forums, blogs, databases or if you have subscribers to newsletters etc. then all that sensitive and private data is being stored in a file somewhere on your website, whether it’s a database or configuration file doesn’t matter.

Search engine crawlers are a lot like simple insects.  They have a purpose in life to index website content and index they will – everything, unless instructed otherwise.

Private and sensitive data should always be encrypted when stored but in reality, for small business websites, it largely isn’t.  This may be because the particular software components your website use don’t have encryption abilities or because it’s was a speed versus security issue.

Regardless, a robot crawler will index all the plain text content in all the files on your website.  It has no morals.  So let’s give it some.

Just say, for example, you have “/newsletter” folder that contains all the regular newsletter emails you send out to all the website subscribers who’s email addresses and subscription passwords are stored in a “/newsletters/admin/subscribers.txt” file.

To get lots of good relevant content, you want the robot crawlers to index all your email newsletters, but certainly, you don’t want it to pick up on your subscribers email address or password.  Just image one of your subscribers searching Google with their email address and up comes your website www.mydomain.com #1 on the search page with their email address and password!  Yikes – that’s not good PR.

Thankfully you can use the robots.txt file to exclude parts of your website that shouldn’t be indexed.  In our example above, you would create a line such as “Disallow: /newsletters/admin/”

This means that anything within the folder “/newsletters/admin/” shouldn’t get indexed by robot crawlers that adhere to the standards.

The dangers of a robots.txt file

OK – as we’ve seen from the examples above, the robots.txt file assumes that everything on your website is game for indexing unless specified otherwise in the robots.txt file.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make is to disallow the root “/” of the website.  This is the starting folder for the entire website.  If you disallow this folder then you are effectively telling all the robots not to index any part of your website and this will be catastrophic for your marketing campaigns.  Check your file to make sure that robots are not being turned away at the front door.

Have a look through your website structure paying close attention to the folder names.  Sometimes you can pinpoint folders that could potentially contain sensitive and private data.  These are the ones you should be preventing robot crawlers from indexing.

Other types of folders that you don’t want a search engine robot crawler poking around in are those containing executables.  For example, your /cgi-bin/ or equivalent.  This folder can contain web programs that would normally be run by users of your website after, say, entering information into a web for, but if they are look at (sometimes the same as being run) by a robot crawler, can produce unwanted results.

An example of this would be the program your website uses to issue email newsletters.  If the program has been developed and tested correctly, then running it unexpectedly with no form input should not be a problem, but what if the program was developed in a rush and not tested 100% correctly.  A robot crawler activating such a program could cause it to behave in all sorts of strange ways.  Last thing you need is your 10,000 newsletter subscribers receiving 100’s of unwanted duplicate newsletters every day or week.

Also, highlighting the areas of your website that you don’t want robots to look in, does raise a flag of interest that potential malware robot crawlers could exploit.  Where better to look for sensitive data than the places you’re not meant to be? It’s a risk that you may have to take.

Best Practice

Dangers aside, pretty much all websites will have a robots.txt file to help control the indexing of content.

To get the most out of using a robots.txt file, try to adhere to these simple rules.

1. If your website is static with no customer information – don’t use one
2. Check that you are not disallowing the root folder “/”
3. Make sure you disallow any folders that may contain private and sensitive data
4. Disallow any folders containing executable web programs
5. If your website has a sitemap already generated, add this to the file to help indexing.
6. Don’t use comments in the file.

Visit our Website - www.3kits.com

Incoming Links The Most Important Factor In SEO

Incoming links is no doubt the most important factor that decides how your website is going to be ranked in the major search engines. No other factor is perhaps as important is as incoming links to your website. Why is it so important you ask? Well, because that is the way Google knows that your website has worthwhile content which made other people link to your site. When someone links to your website, it is counted as a vote in favour of your site. The more people link to you, the more votes you get in favour of your site. The quality of the sites linking also matters. If the sites linking to you are of higher quality, then incoming link has a higher weight age and is more valuable. A general rule of thumb you can apply is that the higher the Google PR of a page, the higher the value of the site in Google’s books.

This also raises the question that can a websites reputation be harmed if unfavourable websites link to them? That is, if willingly someone puts an incoming link from a not so reputable site to harm your reputation! Fortunately, most SEO experts would agree that this would have no negative effect on your seo reputation. This is for the simple fact that you do not have any control over who links to you. And since this can be used to harm someone, therefore, any unwanted incoming links will simply not have any effect at all. So that means either links will help you or they will not have any effect at all. Therefore, the focus should always be on the quality links.

Another factor that is of significance is that the more links you get from related websites the better. For example, if you have a travel related website then it would be better if most of the incoming links to your site are from travel related websites. The incoming links would carry more value this way as it shows that people from your industry has voted in favour for you by linking to your site.

All SEO Strategies involve around getting more incoming links to the site. There are a few ways this can be achieved. First is to simply ask for it. Most seo experts would agree that this is perhaps the best and the easiest way to get good back links from similar sites. In return, of course, they may also want you to link to their site. This is essentially called a link exchange. It is very common in the seo arena and is an accepted method for increasing incoming links.

Other strategies include directory submissions where you submit the site to hundreds or even thousands of web directories for inclusion. It is up to the directory editorial team to decide whether they want to accept it or not. When you have just started out and your site does not have much authority, the number of rejections would be higher which would become lesser and lesser as your site gains in authority over time as you continue with your SEO strategy.

Then you also have the option of writing articles on blogs, press releases, and social media optimization, also known as SMO. I will write about them in my upcoming articles as how they can be used in gaining valuable backlinks to your site. It is too elaborate to cover in a single post.

However, it must be kept in mind that it is like an ongoing battle that needs to be fought continuously. Everyone is striving for more links. You may be at the top today, if you stop your SEO efforts, other sites will gain more relevance and therefore higher ranking. Also, the rules of the game keep changing with the introduction of new technologies. As you suddenly find there are more options available now for getting more incoming links.

Therefore, it can be easily concluded that incoming links and their quality are the most important factor in determining your success in your SEO campaign.

Visit Our Website - www.3kits.com