1. Don't Use Busy Backgrounds

2. Don't Use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS

Using capital letters in the body of your text makes reading difficult and on the internet can be interpreted as shouting!

Compare this paragraph in all caps to the previous paragraph:
USING ALL CAPS IN TEXT IS GOOD TO EMPHASISE A WORD OR TWO, GOOD FOR TITLES BUT DON'T CREATE LONG SENTENCES OR PARAGRAPHS IN ALL CAPS. IT'S TOO HARD TO READ AND PEOPLE WONT READ IT!

3. Do Update your Website Regularly

One aspect of your website is its ability to "pull" people back.

Up-to-date information will ensure customers return regularly to your website to view the latest information. Make sure your website's content is current. Out-of-date information reflects your business. Be efficient, be up-to-date and be informative.

This is just one aspect toward high Search Engine results.

4. Do ensure Navigation is Easy

Your customers must be able to move around your website with ease. If it is difficult for your customers to find what they are looking for, they will leave.

My Rule-of-Thumb on navigation - 2 clicks MUST get a customer where they want to go. If it takes more than two clicks, they will leave.

Ensure links are working properly. If they are not working, your customer will leave.

Ring (02) 4455 6667 NOW or email Online Creations
to update your website.

Good Passwords

Keeping your information safe is becoming more of a challenge every day. Here are some simple tips using Good Passwords that are hard to break.

• Never give your password to anyone - A real bank will NEVER ask you for your password!!!
• Use alpha characters and numerics
• Use something that isn't easy to guess
  For example:
  • NO - birth date
  • NO - phone number
  • NO - user name
  • NO - your name
  • NO - spouses name
• Try to put a character in the password that isn't an alpha or numeric (if allowed) ie. % * ~ # / etc
• Use at least six characters
• Never give your password to anyone - this is important - that's why its here twice!!!

Questions from last month's Newsletter

I have a website and I keep getting emails to pay for Search Engine Submissions - what are these and should I pay?

Search Engine Submissions

Search Engines (ie. Google) gather their information from two main sources:

1. Crawling the internet; and
2. Through manual submission to the search engine itself.

Different Search Engines index websites differently. Some crawl websites at varying intervals, others depend on submissions while others again, depend on both crawling and submissions.

There are hundreds of search engines on the Internet, not just Google or Yahoo.

Submitting your website can be a time consuming and exhausting task - once completed it should be performed regularly, however, submitting once is a good start. As part of your strategy in increasing your search engine results, it is advisable to have your website submitted to search engines using a website professional. The general fee for this is around $59.95. Search engines can take up to 6 months to return positive results and take 1 day to return a negative result.

Search engines are extremely secretive in their algorithms - no-one knows for sure how Google examines a website to determine its search results. We will look at Google next month in more depth and provide some known working strategies to follow.

Call Online Creations on (02) 4455 6667 or email us and we will submit your website to over 100 search engines for just $29.95.