3 Key tools of a web designer or web marketer

In order to design a successful website, you need to ensure that it is appealing to the eye of those who will be using it. The appeal of a website is critical due to the fact that you are not going to be able to make face to face contact with your actual website visitors; and the first impression they get from your website should be a memorable one. Since you cannot convince your ‘customer’ in buying your product or visiting your web page by the means of one-to-one conversation, you should aim to use your website in order to encourage sales through an impressive design. A web page or its design becomes utterly useless when web designers or web marketers do not think about their website in this fashion. Being focused on the appeal of your web page will ensure that it becomes as successful as you want it to be.

This article will list the 3 important key tools in creating an impressive website:

Tool # 1 – E-Mail

An analysis pertaining to the ways and reasons that people use the internet has revealed some startling facts. Several research and studies were carried out, and the results have demonstrated that most people make use of the internet primarily to send and keep up to date with their emails. The people who use the internet for this purpose often refer to surfing the World Wide Web as their secondary objective. From this discovery, you can imagine the importance of having an email id that contains the name or nature of your company or even your web page’s domain name. Moreover, having possession of an email account like this, gives you customers or consumers the impression that your company is thorough and professional. If you are using your website as your email id, it conveys that you see your website as an important extension to your business.

Tool # 2 – Online Payment options

Nowadays most people prefer paying for products and services online rather than issuing a check or paying by cash. Hence, irrespective of whether you are a web page designer or a web marketer it is highly important that you have a fair amount of knowledge on this subject. For those who are actual web designers, you should be aware of incorporating online payment features within the web sites that you design. For those who are web marketers, you should aim to have the online payment features enabled on your web site so that customers who make use of your services, have the ability to pay you online.

Tool # 3 – Web page design

You need to be aware of how well and in what ways you can present your website, in terms of design. Whether you are a web page designer or a web marketer, this aspect is actually the most important. Not all professionals need to be aware about all aspects of design and it is not necessary for you to be the best web designer in the world, you just need to be able to understanding what type of design will appeal to your target customers. They key is to design a website that represent what you are trying to sell.

Although there are quite a number of tools available for a web designer and marketer, the above three are the most important and effective.

How to achieve keyword optimization?

Keyword optimization is very critical and important when it comes to ensuring that you have a competitive web site that generates a lot of traffic. Online businesses heavily thrive in search engine listings if the website representing the business has good keyword optimization.

Keyword optimization is very important because of the following factors:

• The right keywords attract a higher number of potential customers; and the majority will actually end up buying your products or utilize your services
• Websites that are built with good keywords, earn the highest of ranks among popular search engines
• By including good keywords into your web site scripts, you have the potential to save huge amounts of money that will be required to spend on other forms of advertising

It is a fact that web pages designed with specific keywords describing the product or services that you host, have the ability to rank higher in search engines. However, care must be taken when using key words as web pages designed with a higher number of keywords tend to lose focus and hence, earn very low ranks in search engine searches.

The following points are just a few tips on finding the right keywords in order to attract your target audience:

• Try and imagine yourself in the shoes of your potential customer and think like them - Think about what you would like to find within your web site and what features or information would tempt you into purchasing your product or service.
• Try and include descriptive phrases as your keywords rather than simple ones. For instance if you are selling candles online, try and use ‘aromatic incense candles’ or ‘painted gel candles’, etc. Choose phrases that contain words that best describe your product or service.
• Make use of keyword selector tools such as the one provided by Overture at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.
• Take help from your friends, relatives and colleagues in order to find out what words they will type in search engines to find the product or service that you sell.
• Use the Webster’s dictionary or thesaurus to find similar words or synonyms that describe your product or service and consider all three forms of that particular word.
• In case you already own a web site, try and incorporate a search box/form for visitors to make use of. This search box/form should find items or information within your own web site and will also give you a great insight as to the different words that people use while searching for items, products or services online.

You can also incorporate your websites’ server log to preview what potential customers are looking for, when it comes to keyword searches. Once you have collected a sufficient list of keywords and key word phrases, you can then go about selecting and choosing the best among them and use those particular keywords for your web site.

Link Analysis Tools

Link Analysis Tools

Link analysis is a field which has lost a bit of its importance over the past couple years. Google has clamped down on paid links, web directories, and article directories. At the same time more people are blogging online, and more webmasters have become aware to the field of public relations and the value of links. These combine to make it is much harder to catch up with a competitor if you are trying to duplicate their link building strategy.

To some degree link analysis has moved away from PageRank and anchor text toward analyzing news in the marketplace and understanding why stories are spreading (link analysis is evolving into media analysis and public relations). Here are 6 of my favorite link analysis tools

1. Yahoo! Site Explorer
2. Google Blog Search
3. Google Webmaster Central
4. SEO Link Analysis
5. Xenu Link Sleuth
6. Advanced Link Manager

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Google and Microsoft generally show rather limited link data to the public. Yahoo! Site Explorer shows a much deeper and more representative sampling of inbound link data.

SEO Link Analysis

SEO Link Analysis is a free Firefox extension that adds link anchor text, PageRank score, and if a link is nofollowed to Yahoo! Site Explorer results.

Google Blogsearch

While Google tends to show a small sample of backlinks their Blogsearch is much better at detecting new links from blogs.

Google Webmaster Central

If you verify you own a website inside Google Webmaster Central, they will allow you to download a list of links pointing at your site. If you notice your rankings for a keyword are decent (but could be better) you could look through some of the people linking at your page and ask them to link at your page using more specific anchor text.

Xenu Link Sleuth

Xenu Link Sleuth crawls websites looking for broken links. This helps you keep your website maximally clean and functional by finding any broken internal links and any references to documents that are no longer online.

Advanced Link Manager

Advanced Link Manager is a paid software package starting at $199 which allows you to automatically track new backlinks obtained by competitors. It also crawls pages to find anchor text, if the link is using nofollow, and the PageRank score of the linking page.

We also created a free tool somewhat similar to Advanced Link Manager, named Backlink Analyzer. We have not updated our tool in a while though, and it is sorely in need of an update.

PPC Tools

PPC Tools

As search ad networks have become less transparent many PPC tools that did things like bid gap management have been rendered useless, while Google has built out a powerful AdWords API, an ad platform that allows you to bid per click or per conversion, and the Google AdWords Editor.

1. Google AdWords Editor
2. Google Website Optimizer
3. Speed PPC
4. PPC Tools suite
5. PPC Analytics Tools

Google AdWords Editor

Google AdWords Editor is a free desktop tool advertisers can use to quickly edit their AdWords campaigns in bulk.

Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that makes it easy to test and improve your landing page and conversion process. Conversion Rate Experts offers a great overview article about how to take advantage of Website Optimizer and other conversion boosting tools.

Speed PPC

Speed PPC is a paid desktop software program which makes it easy to generate many cross referenced ad campaigns and landing pages for geo-targeted keyword combinations. At $497 Speed PPC is not cheap, but if it is beyond your means and you are a good programmer then Zipcode Guy offers a free database of U.S. cities and zip codes.

PPC Tool suite

My wife has build a free collection of useful web based PPC tools including a keyword list generator, a keyword list cleaner, a typo generator, a keyword wrapper, an ad group generator, and a ROI calculator.

• The keyword list generator can be good for creating a quick list of keywords to plug into a PPC account to see what variations get the most search volume, then trim back the fat after you collect some account feedback data.
• The keyword list cleaner is good for taking a dirty keyword list and making it useful. For example, lets say you have a list of MP3 player related keywords. This tool allows you to quickly filter out any keywords related to car and automotive MP3 players.
• The ad group generator makes it easy to create ad groups for Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter at the same time.

PPC Analytics Tools

• Many big affiliate marketers create their own bid management software, but newer affiliates may find tracking tools like Optimize My Site and Tracking 202 useful.
• Many enterprise level websites create custom bid management software for their company, but for enterprise level merchants who do not manage paid search in house, firms like Efficient Frontier can help with management.