Friday, December 29, 2006

Sắp thi rồi

Tuần sau là thi rồi, nên tuần này phải cố gắng học thật nhiều thôi...
Dzậy mà mấy hôm nay đau đầu hoài chả học được gì cả. Hồi tối đau dữ quá làm mình chẳng ngủ được là bao. Hy vọng là mai nó sẽ hết... hơi xui nhỉ?
Không biết mấy bạn ta chuẩn bị cho thi cử như thế nào rồi? Chắc là mọi người tốt cả... ít đứa chịu để nước đến chân mới nhảy như mình. Dù thế nào thì cũng chúc mọi người thi thật tốt nha! (để còn có học bổng dẫn ta đi ăn chứ...)

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What's In A Landing Page

First, I'd like to wish all a Happy New and Prosperous Year.

Find below my article on "What's in a Landing Page". Landing Pages can still be a viable way to advertise, if done correctly -- and if you follow the rules of Google so you won't be penalized.

The most important thing is to experiment, what might work for some, may not work for you. As I stated below, if you are experimenting with multiple landing pages for the same product or service be sure and but a "NOFOLLOW" on all the other landing pages, and just index the general landing page, this way you will not be penalized for duplicate copy.



What’s in a Landing Page?
By Vickie J. Scanlon

What’s in a landing page? First and foremost it is a very good marketing tool if done correctly. But what is the structure of a landing page and how do you use it in the advertising process?”

Purpose of Landing Page

The basic purpose of a landing page in online marketing is to motivate, to inform, to persuade and to sell the product or service to the visitor that landed on your well-designed page. That sounds pretty good.

To begin constructing your landing page, you need to consider page structure, your words, and your keywords in the total mix. If you do it right you will get sales, or convince someone to fill out a form or survey, etc. I’m sure you get my meaning.

Structure of a Landing Page

When a visitor clicks on your landing page, he/she should see the following structure.

Headline

The headline should do three important things:

· Grabs the attention of the visitor
· States the purpose of the page
· Compliments and coincide with your banner or ad

You have only one moment to grab the attention of the visitor, thus, the heading should entice the reader to continue on to the next paragraph or subheading. So choose your words, font style (Arial, Verdana are good choices), font size to your advantage.

And remember, if the headline does not compliment or coincide with your banner or ad, they, your target market, are gone.


Body Structure

The body should consist of the following:

1) Paragraphs -- Paragraphs should be short with white space. Why? Most people will hit a site, but not read it word for word. Then what do they do? They scan the page. Which brings me to the next important part of a land page—sentences.

2) Sentences – First, sentences should be short, snappy, too the point, and without twenty dollar words. You have to assume scanners are in a hurry; they want the information as fast as you can give it to them without putting them to sleep, and without having to pull out a dictionary.

Second, the first sentence of every paragraph should contain the summary of the paragraph. “A Call To Action”(Buy Now! Try Now!) should appear throughout the body of your copy, as well as, at the top and bottom of your page.

Bold subheadings – Bold subheadings should identify the topic of the paragraph or paragraphs that rest under the subheading. This will allow the skimmer to read or skip the paragraph – in search of the information they are most interested in.

3) Bulleted Information – Bulleted information is a lifesaver. Bullets help to condense copy into short, thorough, easy to read, sentences without being boring. Utilize them.

According to Eyetrack III Research, a smaller typeface encourages more focused reading, while larger type encourages scanning. With that little tidbit of information, you may want to experiment with font size in the body of your copy.

As you can see from the structure of the body, we are looking for a tight-written page with well-defined bold subheadings and bulleted information – to ease the scanner/reader through the copy without having him/her click away.

Things To Consider

1) Place the most important information above the fold.
2) Avoid distracting material in the sidebars. If the information in the sidebars distracts the visitor – focus is lost and that could mean a lost sale.
3) Add pictures or a form if relevant, but be careful about size.
4) Put your “Call To Action” above the fold, at the end, and balanced throughout the length of your text.


Keywords and SEO

As with every other web page on your site, keywords are important. Your landing page content must be keyword rich, but not keyword stuffed, for the search engines and your targeted traffic to find you.

Once the content is completed, then you should make sure that you optimize your landing page for the search engines. Images should have an alt tag description. Try to describe your images with specific descriptions. Example: If you have a picture of a Schnauzer, put ‘alt=Schnauzer’, not ‘alt=”dog”’--Go for the specific description not the generic. Why? When you do a search, would you look for dog or Schnauzer? In most cases, I would bet on the Schnauzer.


PPC, SEO and Keywords

If you are writing your landing page for a Google Ad (PPC advertising), again, make sure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and to the text of your ads. There are two reasons to heed this advice: 1) Your traffic will click away and go elsewhere to find the information they are seeking; 2) Google will penalize you.

You should also optimize your landing page for any searches people will conduct through the search engines. Yet, another avenue to quality traffic. However, if you should use several landing pages for the same product, with only slight wording variations, it would be wise to index only the general landing page and have your robots meta tag include a “NOFOLLOW” so they won’t be indexed – this will prevent the search engines from incurring duplicate copy penalties.


Google Adwords New Algorithm for Landing Pages

Google now assigns quality scores to landing pages, to determine the positioning, pricing, and other factors. A recent change in Google’s algorithm for landing pages affected many established websites. This change caused hardships for some, for others it closed their business.

Thus, if you do not want to be penalized with higher bid prices for your keywords, or a shift in page positioning of your ad you should follow keep the following information in the back of your mind when developing a landing page.

1) Relevant content
2) Links to page that provide relevant and accurate information related to ad
3) Your landing page should have at least 500 words (which isn’t much).
4) Remove all adsense ads on your landing page.

Testing Your Landing Page

Testing your landing page is important. You will need to tweak your copy on a continual basis until you feel comfortable with the copy and it is providing the results you want.

To conclude, landing pages can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Design it correctly, follow the rules, and it will be your successful friend for life.


Vickie J Scanlon-- Visit her site at: myaffiliateplace.biz for tools, "how to" of affiliate/internet marketing, ebooks, computers, software utilities, tech accessories, and more.


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Friday, December 22, 2006

Contemplating Using CSS?

If you are a growing site and using html alone, you may begin to think that their may be a faster way to update your web pages. Yeah! me too. I've been looking into CSS, but wanted to know the benefits and some of the pitfalls of using CSS. Well, in my research, I came across an article
by Mikhail Tuknov called, "Benefits of CSS in Search Engine Optimization".

For those who do not know what CSS is, let me define it: CSS (cascading style sheet) is a single page of formating insturctions that can control the appearance of many HTMl pages at one time.

From all I have been reading, CSS does help to improve the maintenance of your web pages/website, helping you to make changes when you need too, faster.

Now, I've seen some of the great benefits, I'm still going to do some addition search to learn the pitfalls -- there's got to be some. And...as to the learning curve, I'm going to have to find me a tutorial and do some experimenting.

As to CSS cross browser capabilities -- another area I will have to reseacrch. I don't want to find my website being viewed by a few because of incompatibility problems with different browsers.

And are there different languages to choose from when you construct your style sheet?

I know there are some questions I have to answer? When I find them, I'll share them with you. In the meantime, enjoy the article.

Benefits of CSS in Search Engine Optimization
by Mikhail Tuknov

There are many benefits of using CSS. One of the major benefits of using CSS is the easy maintenance of the website. Maintenance of a website made with CSS is much easier compared to the ones which are table based. CSS splits the presentation style of documents from the content of documents and makes the maintenance of the site easier. Aside from being able to make site extensive changes with no trouble through one CSS file, the clean code it generates makes it easier to update. Webmasters can characterize the appearance of a site in one place, and change the whole site by changing just one file. With CSS, when you decide to craft a change, you simply alter the style, and that element is updated automatically anywhere it appears in the site. So, if you have to alter the color of all pages in your site, you only have to edit one style sheet. This saves you enormous amount of time, particularly if you have to edit each page independently. CSS generally requires less code compared to table based. This makes your code lighter and cleaner. Clean code makes a huge difference in maintaining your site.

Cascading Style Sheets Benefits and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another major benefit of CSS is that it makes your website SEO friendly. The reason behind this is simple. The search engines spiders are actually very lethargic. They do not go through the bundles of HTML codes to get to the indexed codes. Font tags and tables make the HTML code very cumbersome; thus, reduce the accuracy of the results. If you use external CSS files to design and determine the design attributes; the HTML code will be clean and it will result to better search engine rankings. With some knowledge of CSS you will be able to change the code layout without destroying the actual visual layout. For instance, you could easily make the main content of your site to show up above the header or navigation menu in the code of your website; thus will help to show search engine crawlers the importance of your content. I personally saw a huge boost in rankings in fully CSS web sites. When I look at someone’s website that was built using old school HTML code with tags such as: TABLES, TD, TR, FONT and so on, I feel awkward and immediately convert that site to a fully table-less CSS layout. There are many tools on the Internet that shows the actual code over text ratio weight of your site. Do you know why? Because modern search engines such as: Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted websites. They want to see your content; the text, not the code. With CSS everything is possible. You practically externalize excessive code into external file, thus leaving the actual page clean and simple.

Website Accessibility

CSS makes your website more accessible. The number of users browsing the web through hand held devices are continuously growing tremendously. It is estimated that by 2008, one third of the world’s population will be using hand held devices for accessing Internet. It is always important that your site is accessible to them also. You can make an additional CSS document particularly for handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document; which is not achievable with a tabular layout. CSS benefits accessibility chiefly by separating document structure from presentation. By separating style from markup, webmasters can simplify and clean up the HTML in their documents, making the documents more accessible.

Increases Download Speed of Your Website

CSS code downloads faster than tables. Browsers read through tables twice previous to exhibiting their contents; first to work out their structure and then to determine their content. Moreover, tables are shown on the screen as a whole, no part of the table will be displayed until the entire table is downloaded and rendered. Tables support the use of spaced images to assist with positioning. CSS generally requires less code than cumbersome tables. All code to do with the layout can be placed in an external CSS document, which will be called up just once and then stored on the user’s computer; while the table layout stored in each HTML document, must be loaded up each time a new page downloads. Also with CSS, you can manage the order of the items downloaded into the screen. You have the control to make the content appear previous to the slow loading images, which is liked by most of the web users.

Cross Browser Compatibility

For all webmasters out there! CSS makes your website more professional. Taking the benefits of CSS like making your websites load faster and easy to maintain, you save a lot of time and labor. This in turn makes you lots of money. CSS makes links of the website look more attractive and dynamic. Using CSS, you can slot in rollovers easily and effectively, without having to use a single character of JavaScript. Thus, CSS gives your websites a professional look. It is wise to use CSS to jive with the current trends of the industry. All major browsers like Firefox, Explorer, and Netscape presently recognize CSS and it is definitely safe for web designers to use CSS now.

About This AuthorMikhail Tuknov, search engine optimization specialist and a founder of Infatex.com, search engine marketing company. With an extensive backgound in Internet marketing and web site development, Mikhail offers web site promotion services: SEO, Link Popularity, PPC, SEO copywriting and ROI Tracking.



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Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Lại sắp được làm việc thiện nữa rùi!

Nô en tới mấy đứa trong lớp tổ chức phát quà cho trẻ em lang thang mới dzui chứ!

Mình cũng phải làm gì đó cho tụi nhỏ! Nhất định là thế rùi! Phải cho chúng thật dzui dzẻ!

Hôm trước mình đọc lại những bài viết trong cuộc thi chuyện đời tự kể! Những câu chuyện về những kỉ niệm, những số phận là mình thấy xúc động và dzui ghê!

Dzui vì trong cuộc sống bình dị mà mình tiếp xúc hàng ngày lại có những niềm vui, những số phận biết vươn lên và cả những tình thương cao cả không chút tính toán vụ lợi.

Mình thấy đọc những câu chuyện này dzừa làm ta dzui+yêu đời, vừa bồi bổ tâm hồn và cũng tăng thêm vốn sống cho bản thân nữa, nên mình quyết định cố gắng đọc càng nhìêu càng tốt trong 3500 bài dự thi...

Một lần nữa chúc mọi người nôen thật dzui dzẻ nghen@!! Có đi chơi đâu nhớ rủi tui!

video noen fun fun!

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Friday, December 8, 2006

Autoresponders--How Useful Are They?

It is been said that people will not buy the first time that they hit your site. On average, they may have to be exposed to your product about 7 times before they decide -- that is why a name and email address is important.

Even though autoresponders are nice, you have to make sure you do not spam your customers-- and that is why a double-opted in capability is essential. Why? Spamming can have monetary consequences for merchants, that is why merchants are strict (or should be strict) on how their product is presented to the public by affiliates.

Here is an article on autoresponders called "Autoresponders--How Useful Are They? This is a quick overview of the how, what, where and types of autoresponders.



Autoresponders – How Useful Are They?
By Vickie Scanlon

Autoresponders, how useful are they? Autoresponders can be your helping hand and an ultimate time-saver. They can help you to get in touch and to stay in touch with your customers, and ultimately, build your business. But how can you use them in your business, what are the types and what should you consider when you are in a market for an autoresponder?


What is an Autoresponder?

Let’s first define what this automated marvel is first? An autoresponder is an automated e-mail marketing software or service that can help you manage your newsletter and mailing list. An autoresponder has also been known as an “automatic responder system”.


Example of Uses

When would be the best time to begin utilizing an autoresponder? For most, it is when your business is beginning to pick up momentum, and you are feeling the strain and stress of answering the same questions from customers over and over again or you have a newsletter or list that is growing faster than you can keep up with.

For ecommerce sites, an autoresponder should be considered from the beginning. Why? It can be one of the most helpful aids to getting specific information to your customers. Such as: when specials hit your site, requested information about your company, requested information about your products or services, and requested pricing lists, just to name a few.

When you have a fledging business, you usually will have time on your hands. But once your business starts growing you will soon see your time dwindling. This is when an autoresponder can help you to answer the questions that need to be answered, as well as, give you the additional follow-up support your customers need and want, while keeping your focus on your business and your customers.


Types Of Autoresponders

There are different types of autoresponders, offering different capabilities and options.

Limited capability autoresponders: Some autoresponders only allow for a single pre-programmed message that the sender can download – with the capability of retaining the senders email address. This type of service, more times than not, are offered through your web server, if at all.

Full-Capabilities autoresponders can offer limited broadcasting or unlimited broadcasting and can be packaged either as a stand-alone software program or an online-based software program.


Choosing the Right Autoresponder

When choosing an online autoresponder you should consider:

1) Your needs and your money supply.

2) The type of contact you will need. Are you going to be contacting your customers on a continuous basis? If so, then unlimited broadcasting may be your best option. However, if you know that you will be contacting your customers on a minimal basis, than check out the limited broadcasting services, you may save yourself some money.

3) Double-opt-in capabilities. With double-opt-in capabilities you will eliminate the calls of spamming by your list. And, may I just add, that if you do an overkill with contacting your list – don’t be surprised if your list soon begins to dwindle to nothing.

However, if you are short on money you can go with a free web-based service. You can go either with a straight free web-based service or a program that offers a free service with an opportunity to upgrade to pro-- both are great options when you are a fledging business. But be aware that with the free service, you will have to allow their ads to be shown to your list.

If you choose to go with the stand-alone software program, be aware of the software’s limitations, your limitations and your e-mail server’s limitations/rules. For example, some e-mail servers will allow only a certain amount of emails to be sent through their systems at one time or limit the amount going out per day. Thus, make sure the software meets your needs and your server’s requirements.

As you can see, there are autoresponders that can fit every person’s needs, wants and pocketbook. Thus, if you are feeling the strain of success, or just wanting a break from the necessary grunt work for running your online business, look to autoresponders to help automate your business.

Vickie J Scanlon-- She has been working on the Internet as an affiliate marketer and an avid researcher -- Visit her site at: myaffiliateplace.biz for tools , "How To" affiliate/internet marketing information, ebooks, where to join affiliate programs, computers, software utilities, tech accessories and more.
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