Verecom Web Design Blog

Businesses based in Sydney acknowledge the importance of good web design in Sydney to stay competitive and up to date. This has naturally bolstered up the pace of growth and development in website development arena in Sydney. Faced with a swarming crowd of web design and development companies in your region may, however, leave you baffled. Here are a few tips on how to choose your vendor wisely.

Great rates should come secondary to good quality. It is a good idea to associate with a website development company in Sydney with innovative or latest tricks for web designing, development and search engine optimisation.

It is also important that the range of web design templates with Sydney based vendor be comprehensive. It should be competent to handle all industry verticals and various degrees of complexities.

The vendor must focus on every aspect of web site development in a balanced manner. The developer’s portfolio may give you reliable clues to this quest. A look at the websites developed by the vendor for different industries and purposes may assist you at understanding vendor’s expertise at designing an overall satisfactory web identity for you.

Associate with the vendor who develops aesthetically appealing websites that are also convenient to browse and equipped with best of search engine optimisation methods.

Edited By Gary Smith

In recent years it is popular to use website as a marketing tool, but how does website operator know exactly the information of website traffic, page views, browsing rate, advertising and other related? This Article will introduce four powerful tools for website-related statistics, so you can quickly analyse your website and generate a professional report.

SeeTheStats

As the name suggests, It can assist the Webmaster to export data from GoogleAnalytics, but only if the webmaster must sign up for a Google Analytics account first in order for SeeTheStats help to automatically generate variety of charts or reports.

In other words, Google Analytics and SeeTheStats have a complementary relationship. SeeTheStats is able to compile the Google Analytics data into clear and easy understand reports and statements.

This tool has very clean and simple user interface, similar to Office software which can produce all kinds of statements. SeeTheStats can help users to quickly establish a clear and beautiful data reports, users can also set up website to show their own analysis of data, as well as a daily automatic update function.

GoingUp

GoingUp would come in handy when you want to improve the sale and visits rate of your website.

GoingUp features a rich AJAX interface which is very easy to use. The interface is clear and user friendly which using a large number of line charts, graphs and pie charts to clearly point out web data, such as visitor tracking, monitoring of sales, browsing rate and also provide web page optimisation tool to improve the search engine strategy. In addition it also provides a detailed analysis of the reports, such as enterprise collaborations and integration solutions etc…

W3Counter

Similar to previous web analytic tools, W3Counter also use a large number of statistical tables and charts to show the web visitors behaviour, such as the where the users come from? What search keywords they use? Which topics is the particular interest? Which web page or links attract most users to click? W3Counter can record these data and provide detailed statistical reports.

In addition, W3Counter has a special function called “Live Visitor Map”. From large area like country to small area such as towns the visitors’ location can be marked, simply open the map function which will tell you which area the visitors come from most, and it updated map information regularly to allow webmaster to fully control the web analytics. W3Counter provides free and paid services. Free user can track up one website only with one account, and can have 30 kinds of real-time dynamic Web site records without time limit. However, there are still restrictions for free user and it can only record up to 5000 data everyday.

mon.itor.us

In the web analytics tools, the user interface of mon.itor.us is more beautiful, clear and simple, makes a very pleasing look. Not too much text description and emphasise that “there are pictures and the truth”. It is almost complete use of variety of statistical tables and charts to provide a detailed description and it is free.

mon.itor.us use software as a service (SaaS) concept and emphasising monitoring as a service (MaaS), in addition to accurately record the visited web pages, advertising page clicks, browsing time, visitor maps, it also provides web-based solutions, easy and efficient maintenance and management tools. For company, mon.itor.us gives your website more enormous commercial potential, such as e-commerce or blogs sale, to adjust marketing strategies in order to achieve significant results, thus creating more profits.

Edited By Henry Lu

Through many negotiations, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a number of cooperation in the search engine market. Yahoo will use Microsoft technology for all its search engine assets, while it is also responsible for online ads sales for both side platform. From this 10 years co-operation, Microsoft can exclusively access to Yahoo search engine license, and Microsoft can also integrate yahoo technology with its own.

From Revenue-sharing agreement based on the two sides, Microsoft will pay Yahoo for the traffic generated by Yahoo Website; Yahoo is expected to increase 500 million U.S. dollars annual revenue and cash flow of 275 million U.S. dollars, while saving 200 million capital expenditure.

“The cooperation will benefit our clients and industry greatly” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said in a statement. “I believe this cooperation laid the foundation for innovation and development of the Internet into a new era” Bartz said.

Microsoft and Yahoo have more than a year to discuss cooperation, at beginning Microsoft plan to buy Yahoo, and this request was refused by Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang. However Jerry Yang was been removed from the board of director and replaced by Bartz, hence triggered this negotiation for cooperation.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer also commended the cooperation between the two sides will benefit Microsoft’s new search engine www. Bing.com and great opportunity to challenge current top 1 search engine giant, Google.

“Through the cooperation with Yahoo, we will be able to develop more innovative search technology to benefit our advertisers, and also to provide more market choose for consumers beside Google.” Ballmer said.

“The success of search engine businesses needs innovations and users scale, our search platform www.Bing.com provides a breakthrough innovation. And the cooperation with yahoo will provide the scale we need for the rapid development on relevance and the availability”

Based on ComScore’s survey, Google currently holds the 65% of search engine market in US, Microsoft only has 8% and Yahoo has 20%.

Edited By Henry Lu

IT industry testing released the report says the growth rate of Microsoft search engine Bing.com already run ahead of rivals since his launch on May this year.

Microsoft new search engine provides many search services. According to data released by Hitwise showed that, the growth rate of Bing.com reached 25 percent in June. But however, its
U.S. market share is still only 5.25 percent.

This new search engine attracts the close attention of media. Microsoft plan to spend 100 million U.S. dollars to promote Bing.com, and intends to take the territory from Google, the current number one search engine company.

However, Google still remains the dominant position of the U.S. market with 74 percent market share. Yahoo still has the second largest market share of 16%. Ask.com has fourth place with 3.2 percent market share.

Analysts said that, the growth rate of Bing.com is faster than the other three well-known search engine companies. And Microsoft hopes Bing.com can grab more market for online ads.

On Thursday’s stock trading, Microsoft shares fell to 22.44 U.S. dollars. And Google rose 2% to 410.39 U.S. dollars.

Edited By Henry Lu

Now blog has become more and more important in online sales. Many companies and online business owners have achieved great success through using the blog well. There are uncountable examples you can hear about that.

Then, what are the good things blog can bring to sales? Actually blog can fulfill all the following purposes AT ONCE.

1. Improve search engine ranking
If you use the key words, hyperlinks skillfully, and update the articles regularly, then surely you can increase the media exposure on some main search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, and ultimately improve your ranking.

2. Save sales cost
You can reduce your expense on traditional sales methods, like making advertisement, finding sponsors.

3. More closer to the potential clients
One of the most essential things for the future growing of the company is to locate the potential customers who are not easy to access. However, a dynamic, opened, and rich blog can reach the potential clients using the method, which is irreplaceable for the other tools, easily.

4. Be the evidence for company to use in making sales decision
Blog can receive customers’ responses and market information at the first moment and help the company to make the right business decision based on highly accurate information.

5. Grow brand loyalty among your customers
Blog can help the clients and business mates to know the company movements; this is the best way to allow the clients to keep their motivation to communicate with the company.

6. Grow your volunteer promoters
Every reader visit your blog are doing this by his own will. They are willing to interact with your business and grain more information from your blog. This powerful method of communication can grow a group of people who are willing to promote your company and your products.

7. More effective marketing survey and product testing tools:
One of the reasons why blog became more and more popular in online business is that it can change marketing survey and products testing tools into one-to-one interacted communication.

On your blog, you can not only post the articles introduce your products and business, but also your reflections, the stories of the company, the sharing of your administration experience, even the reviews of the movie you like.

You don’t need to worry about that your blog is not “commercial” enough, the benefit it will bring to you can be more than the “practical reasons” we mentioned before: it helps you to expand your society circle, let you have chance to learn from your seniors and even built your company image and create the company culture…

When blog truly enter into your life, when no matter you open the computer, firstly you will check blog traffic and new comments then we can say an important seed of online sales has truly been put into your heart, and this small seed may grow into a big tree with great fruit in the future.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Actually it is really an old topic about how to use Blog to earn money. There are so many experts discussed about it and they even published books to give the solutions. However I still want to share some my own experience and wish it will give some helps.

Recently I saw a blog value list which is made by a blog observing survey. In this list, blog value is estimated by three indexes, link value, advertising value and article value. In my point of view, using these three indexes to estimate blog value is very precise. Now I will try to explain these three indexes one by one:

Blog article value index

Most new blogs in the first year are still unknown to the web users; if their traffic can reach 1 millions pv then it is already good enough. However, with this traffic, it is still very far away from entering the advertising market. The possible income for blogs in this stage is article license fee. If the articles in the blogs can be purchased by MSN or other bigger websites, the blogs will not just earn money but also let more target people know their blogs. The writers may also have the chance to be invited to open their own columns and sell the articles.

Simply say, if the blogs has won some reputation in their specific field, the profit from making the lecture, opening the column, publishing the books even the consultant’s fee should be counted as the blog article value. I believe this is the most realistic way to get real profit for normal blogs.

Blog link value index

In my Opinion, blogs suppose to receive highest rewards in this part but the reality is blogs always earn the least in this item among all. If blogs develop very well and are recognized by SEO company by high Page Rank value and great traffic (these two items have to time together to have high SEO effect), then they may be willing to pay to the blogs to link with their blog keywords. Although it is better than none, this income is still much lower than web master’s expectation.

In recent years, Google search engine do gives Blog product higher rank, and some well managed blogs start to have the chance to earn more though selling SEO product, even writing praise articles. For example, the blog which has good page rank post an article praising certain product, when users search this key word they may see this article, and then accept the product because they agree with the article.

This product has combined the article value, advertising value and link value, but the key point is about link value. Without considering the moral issue, this is the very unique product blogs can provide; therefore it supposes to bring more income to blogs.

Blog advertising value:

Even the blogs are developed very well, but it is still very hard to enter the “advertiser- media agent- media” value chain. The reason is very simple but also very critical, because blogs still cannot be counted as streamline media.

Therefore the most difficult part for blogs in creating its value is to let the advertiser buy the banner advertisement directly. Most of the blogs cannot get enough advertisements at the beginning; it may take them few years to really enter the mainstream value chain if they keep striving.

How to enter the mainstream value chain? Actually I cannot tell the answer. The only two clues I know so far are 1. Change to web media site through blog and then enter the mainstream 2. Find good salesmen.

In mainstream value chain, when people mentioned about blogs, naturally they get the impression of an unknown small website with BSP service. A single blog cannot avoid to be underestimated in this situation. Therefore, most webmasters have to introduce their websites as “the web media established based on blog”, or it will be very difficult for them to take the second step. The fact that blog sounds very “cheap” in mainstream value chain, is something really sad.

Then you need to find salesmen who are very familiar with the traditional mainstream value chain and let him use the way which is acceptable for traditional mainstream value chain to introduce the websites and present the powerful advertising effectiveness data , then the websites may have chance to enter the mainstream advertising market.

But it is difficult for a single blog get a salesman. If there are capable salesmen who don’t willing to under the rule of certain companies but wanting to set their own business, they can try to contact some top blogs, and form an assembly, then directly sell the advertisement to the advertisers and agencies. Surely this will be a good business and benefit both sides.

Last but not the least, there is one thing I have to mention, blogs still have to balance these three value indexes. The intensive information blogs have to lower down their page rank index. Because these blogs are very familiar with the characteristics of internet, they always have very good page rank, and the articles on this kind of blogs are very enough to be recognized by the web users in this certain field, their article value will also be very high, but this doesn’t means they will have same advertising value.

Edited By Vicky Yin

We have discussed both Alexa and Aro last time; in the final part of these articles we talk about Google trends. Google trends is a user friendly tool provided by Google, and is quite similar to Alexa. First go to Google Trends Website www.google.com/trends and on the search bar type the websites you want to compare, and use the comma to separate the website.

The above Pic is the result of two famous portal website: www.yahoo.com and www.aol.com. Goodle trend use the Daily Unique Visitors to compare the traffic volume of each website.

On the first part of these articles, we mentioned that Alexa has the difficulty of compare the traffic volume of website’s sub-domain for different regions. Google trends overcomes this problem by the “regions selection” function box on the top-right corner. By selecting the region on this box you can get the traffic data on the particular country, the pic below shows the traffic volume of these two website on Unite States.

We can also use the Time period option to view the recent traffic volume. Google trends can provide the absolute traffic volume and user can use it together with Alexa to get much better traffic detail of website.

Edited By Henry Lu

Besides their own back stage system, most of the web masters are using Google Analytics as an important analytic tool to detect their website traffic. Through Google analytics report, the web master can quickly find out:

The data about the web visitors, this data packet includes:

The most important: The numbers of unique visitors. From the perspective of marketing (include advertisement and sales), the number of unique visitors who really browser your website is the most solid and critical data for you website. Because even if one people click your website twenty thousand times it doesn’t means your website has twenty thousand visitors. Actually Web Reach is build up through unique visitors.

The second important: Page views. The reason why this data is important is because, currently, web advertisement is charged by CPM. For example, when CPM=40, if the website has been viewed 1000 times, in other words, the advertisement is also viewed 1000 times, then the advertiser should pay the website 40 dollars.

The web masters can think in this way: if the Page Views of the website for one month is ten million, and CPM for one advertisement is 40 dollars, then if this page is sold out for one month, the income from advertisements will be 400 thousands. If we put three pages for advertisement in the website, then the income of advertisement for all these three pages in this month will be 1,200 thousands. Of course, this is just an ideal number in mathematics view, if the website can sell the advertisements simply rely on traffics then the webmasters of XXX analytic or fortune telling website had already become millionaires.

How the visitors find your website?

1. Type the link directly
2. Through search engine
3. Though click the link on other websites

The best ratio of the numbers of visitors using these three methods respectively is 3:4:3

As Google Analytics is the best tool for you to know the data of your own website, which tool is the best to analyse the competitor websites for the web masters and advertisement agency? Currently there are a few good choices: Alexa, ARO and Google Trend.

Alexa:

Alexa has become a basic tool for nearly all the web masters, I will not explain too much about how to use Alexa. I will directly point out the blind spots of Alexa.

1. Alexa data is very easy to be manipulated: Through installing Alexa tool bar, Alexa can detect states of the web users and then estimate the number of online user through statistical inference. But the sample number is not defined strictly. The effect is that the bigger the website is, more precise the data Alexa can provide. However, on the contrary, the smaller the website is, the data is less representative. Therefore, to Web Reach, the data from Alexa can only be used as suggestion reference value but not the absolute reference value.

2. The problem to compare the local website with foreign one: For example, the business news website IBTimes(www.ibtimes.com) has the Australia sub-domain (au.ibtimes.com), and if we compare the traffic between au.ibtimes.com and its Australia competitor The Age(www.theage.com.au), it will say au.ibtimes.com has the greater traffic then its competitor in Australia. But actually it is not true. www.theage.com.au has lots more traffic than au.ibtimes.com in Australia. That is because Alexa treats all the traffic source for au.ibtimes.com as same as its parent domain www.ibtimes.com. Hence the Alexa cannot provide reliable comparison if webmaster want to compare the traffic data with the foreign website with sub-domain.

The shortage of Alexa can be fulfilled by the other analytic tool: ARO(Acess Rating Online) and on the next part, we will discuss the details of ARO and Google Trend.

Edited By Vicky Yin

After we learned how to be a good student in the eyes of teacher and started to find the favour of Mr. Search Engine then the next thing we must really consider about is what kind of keyword you want to use to let the web users find you.

Defining keywords for your website requires originality and brainstorming. The one interested about doing SEO for their websites needs some reverse thinking: what kind of keywords your target group will use to search the website they want to find. If you can use these keywords to optimise your website then the one visit your website will be the visitors your really aim to target.

Actually SEO means optimise all the pages in whole website and let every page of the thousands which is using different keyword to gain good rank (As good as possible, but not always first). For example, let us say there is one website has ten thousands pages. If each page can bring 1 traffic per day, then in one day, this website can has ten thousands traffics.

How to find keyword for SEO

Actually analysing keyword is a very hard and long term work. The right way of SEO is to keep increasing the web page, which also means to keep finding the effective keyword. It looks very simple to find the proper and effective keywords, but actually even the SEO expert sometime can not get in door. There are some simple skills which will help you find the suitable keywords.

1. Who, what, when and where: no matter what kind of website you are making, the basic information it provide should include: who, what, when and where. for example, using Italian restaurant (what) in Newtown (where) as keyword .First of all, you can start to analyse the keyword from these elements and see whether there is any keyword you can use inside of these 4 Ws.

2. Brand and model: if your website provides various products, especial 3C products, then don’t forget to consider the brand and model as the keyword. For example, normally, the one sale the mobile may think “mobile phone”, “cell phone”, or this kind of keyword should be the main keyword for their website, but actually it is wrong.

Most of the internet users will use the keywords like “mobile phone” as main keywords when they just want to check what kind of mobiles is popular. When they found the mobile they are interested in bigger website, they will focus on this mobile’s brand and model to do further research. And search volume of this kind of keywords can be accumulated in a very astonishing level; it can be 10 times more than that of the keyword like “mobile phone”. At the same time, normally, users will search brand +model; the chance for this kind of user to purchase the product is much high than the one just generally check the information of mobile. Therefore the more specific the keyword is, the higher the search accuracy is, and, the higher chance for this deal to be done.

3. After you list down all the keywords you can think about, the next step is to observe your competitors. You have to see what kind of titles you competitors have listed down, you may find some keyword you neglect, and it can be a good reminder for you. This is a method really save lots of time.

4. Use keyword advertisement: if you have permission to use keyword advertisement, you will find that normally there will be a tool which can suggest keyword for you on keyword advertisement. Under this tool, you can find many related keywords. This is also a sound way.

5. Use web traffic analytic: please add traffic analytic tool on your website, it can help you to know through which keyword the visitors find your website. Always you can find many keywords you neglect but really help people to find your website. If you find the traffic volume of these keywords is not bad and rank is not in front, then you can enhance this keyword to let it has better rank. However this method needs long term operation and observation. Although it may take long time, the keywords you find are always the keywords you can never think about by yourself.

6. Write the article diligently: this point is related to the third point, when you write the article, there will be more words in your website and have the chance to be searched through search engine. Only when you accumulate more articles, you will know more deeply that which keyword has been neglect.

7. Connect with the “hot” keyword: this is the most advanced method. When you are reading the newspaper or watching TV or listening to radio, you can find many popular topic people really interested at this period. You can use some of these popular issues to create your own keyword. For example, recently the news about poisoned milk in China is very hot. If you are a soybean milk products, you can use poisoned milk as a keyword, and in your website, you can post the article about the benefit of the soybean milk, how to use soybean milk to replace milk to make coffee, and so on. Of course this may requires certain level of professional knowledge, but normally this kind of “hot” keywords has terribly great volume. It may just last a while; but if you can successfully get a good rank using these keywords, it can bring great traffics in very short period of time for you website.

Edited By Vicky Yin