1. Target Niche Key phrases. High quality visitors is defined as the site visitors who are genuinely interested within the web sites content material. You are able to draw high quality site visitors towards the web site by targeting niche key phrases. Lack of knowledge about search engine optimization could be detrimental to this fundamental step of lookup engine optimization. Your target ought to be to analyze key phrases from your niche and choose the ones which are a ideal blend of competitiveness and popularity. Fiercely competitive key phrases take over a year to rank. Thus, you ought to work on ranking nicely for a number of long tail key phrases.

2. Produce Search engine optimization Friendly URL’s. A retail web site is bound to include a number of hundred pages. With addition of numerous items, this number is going to improve. A Dynamic web site is developed utilizing a programming language whose URLs include session ids. This type of URL structure isn’t search engine optimization friendly as the searchbots ignore them. Don’t use unique characters within the web site URL except hyphen. Also, maintain the URL structure typical throughout the web site.

3. Add Fresh Content material. Search engines like google love web sites which get updated frequently. Webmasters have a great scope of adding a range of non repetitive content material towards the retail web sites. Content material could be added within the form of item description, comparison with other items and consumer reviews. You have to make sure that the content material doesn’t get repeated within the web site. Don’t stuff the content material with key phrases. A keyword ought to be distributed within the content material 3-4 times at relevant places. Usually write for that visitor and not for that search engines like google.

4. Optimize the Pictures. Picture optimization if a part from the on page optimization strategy. A retail web site is full of item pictures which the lookup engine can’t study. You are able to use the alt attribute within the picture tag and input relevant text. For e.g., if the item picture consists of the Harry Potter book, the alt tag can study, Harry Potter- the Sorcerer’s Stone. Rather than reading a blank space, the search engines like google will encounter the above text. With thousands of pictures, picture optimization is totally required for a retail web site.

5. Optimize PDF Files. It’s typical practice on a retail web site to provide a item catalogue within the PDF format. If optimized nicely, a PDF file can rank quicker than an html page. An picture dependent PDF file is like an picture towards the search engines like google, who don’t study them. So that you can rank nicely in search engines like google, text dependent PDF creators are a lot more helpful than the Picture dependent PDF creators. You ought to usually fill the document properties of the PDF file, particularly the title. Lastly, maintain the size from the PDF file towards the minimum. This will make sure fast loading from the file.

All the search engine optimization methods applicable to a normal web site could be utilized for a retail web site. This includes off page optimization activities like link building and lookup engine marketing. A nicely optimized retail web site not just increases the ROI but also enhances the user encounter.

5 SEO Tips for Retail Websites is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

One of the most common mistakes companies make is hiring an SEO consultant after their site has been built and launched.  They usually start looking for help after a few months of poor traffic results and are confused why they aren’t getting the leads or sales they anticipated.  This is akin to building a new shopping mall and wondering why no one is shopping after it’s done because you never contacted retailers to rent out the spots within it.

Search engine optimization is not a magic bag of pixie dust that can be sprinkled onto a site and have instant results with the demographic of your ideal site visitor.  SEO is to some degree, a science of cat and mouse, chasing the top keywords to gain the highest possible results in major search engines that result in an upswing in traffic to your site.  Hiring an SEO consultant after your site has been built is often costly and can require added time to see results; all because the planning wasn’t put in place prior to launch.

Getting a jump-start by consulting with an SEO analyst during the conception, development and design stage of the site can be an integral part of the puzzle resulting in a total victory when launch day comes.  They will have the ability to cover overall site design flow and how a visitor may potentially use the site, integrate search engine friendly URL slugs and help improve the site’s functionality and end user experience.  Once the site is built, it’s hard to make changes effectively to any of these factors without having some negative impact, most commonly time and money to fix the problems.

An SEO consultant can help way the pros and cons to running a pay per click, or PPC, campaign compared to organic search engine results.  Both are valid ways of bringing traffic in, however one has an ongoing expense (PPC) while the other (SEO) will continue to draw in the desired demographic to your niche for months, even years after the work is done.

The best way to get SEO to work in your benefit is to have the commitment from all involved to help achieve this.  There are many steps along the way and not everyone will always understand why certain coding needs to be done or question the placement of elements on the site.  Rest assured, a trained SEO consultant will have proven methods that will result in continuous traffic to your site for the long haul.  Being honest and up front with them in the beginning, and absorbing the cost of their service in the overall design and deployment costs of your site will save the time, headache and in the end, loads more cash to achieve the same results.

Building from nothing is always easier then going in and fixing someone else’s work, this is true in almost every aspect of life, and the Internet.

SEO In The Beginning is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Do you want to get your website listed on the first few pages of the search engine? Do you wish that its page rank should increase on Google? Are you planning to go to a company to do these jobs for you? Then please hold and read on, because listed here are some simple ways to get a good page rank by SEO techniques. You can apply these to your website and can get significant results.

Just go to your website’s source code and you will see some meta-tags at the top, such as Title, Keyword tags and Description. Although Title tag is not in the category of meta-tag but since it is very important, it is considered one of them. All you have to do here is give a good title. The title should consist of a keyword or two but avoid stuffing the title with too many keywords.

In the description tag, again the technique is similar; avoid pushing in a lot of keywords. It should be more like a sentence than a set of commas. Just give one or two variations of a keyword in the keyword tag and move on to the next keyword.

Another important tag is the heading tag(h1). It provides the search engine, the user, and the web browser some of the key points about the webpage. Equally important tags are
h2 and h3…these give priority to content and page.

Moving from tags to images, give the images a descriptive and concise alt attribute. This way you will be able to put more relevant text on page and increase its chances of getting noticed by the search engine.

Coming up next is another important part of a website – link. Try and make links more descriptive as it helps the user and the web browser to know more about the upcoming page. Use “tool tip” which will pop out some text whenever a mouse will be rolled over the link. Instead of giving a keyword, give a description in the “tool tip”.

The most important quality a website should possess is relevance. The content of the website should be relevant to the user as well as to the Search Engine. It is important in terms of SEO that a webpage consists of lots of keywords to get a high page rank but it is equally important that the page content should be revolving around the keywords. Just giving good meta-tags, tool tips, alt attributes will not solve the purpose as the user is more interested in the information contained in the page. The retention of the user to the website is ensured mainly with the content.

Next in the list of Simple ways to get a good page rank by SEO techniques is page rank. There is no fixed formula with which the browsers can calculate it. The algorithm of SEO keeps on changing. So let’s talk about an important factor contributing to it – the number of links pointing to your website. One easy and effective way is to link your website to others and they will link back to yours in exchange.

Apart from technicality, another factor that plays an important role is social networking. Reach out to your network of people and help your peers and colleagues, give them meaningful advice and tell them about your website. You can reach out to social networking sites as well and promote your website by writing blogs etc. But keep in mind that you don’t have to push the content. People should reach out to your site because of its usefulness. As a consequence, the traffic on your website will increase.

So don’t wait now, just follow these simple ways to get a good page rank by SEO techniques and give your website a good start.

Simple ways to get a good page rank by SEO techniques is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Matt Cutts said that Google Caffeine would be rolled out in January and we are very near the end of January. That with the fact 75% of my sites are moving all around the past few hours in the SERPs from +70 to -70, something is happening. Either Google has specifically singled me out to mess with or they’re updating. My guess would be that Caffeine is getting rolled out.

A search for “Cafineen Update” on Google Blog Search doesn’t turn up anything, so who knows maybe it really is just me ;p

Is the “Caffeine Update” underway? is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

If you’ve learned about video production, or employed someone who does know about it, the next big task is to get your new video noticed. The internet has millions upon millions of voices all wanting to be heard in one capacity or another. You now need to make sure the video is worth the time and effort put into making it.

Being noticed is the holy grail of all marketing and advertising strategies. Companies who can, spend millions of dollars a year on this activity, often for unpredictable results. Many strategies include video marketing on sites like YouTube so competition is stiff. Imagination and inventiveness is more likely to let you succeed than throwing money at a problem.

For example today’s top videos on YouTube include Martha Stewart pole dancing, a video parodying Hitler and Scott Brown, and a video blog about a family dog. So you see, it isn’t about budget, it’s about producing something people want to watch. If you can entertain people and offer them something they can’t get elsewhere you’ll be a hit. Show them something already done and welcome to obscurity.

Submitting even a couple of videos to the major video sharing sites will provide more visitors to your website. Using the following tips should help you maximize the amount of visitors you get.

Firstly watch other videos similar to yours, or for products similar to yours. You can then post the URL of your video as a response that will be there for all visitors to see. Curiosity will get at least a few people clicking on your link, which should lead to more visitors, and more prospects. This is called “coat-tailing” as in riding on someone’s coat tails, but it’s an effective move.

Secondly, check out the competition. Watch their videos, check their production values, content, titles and descriptions. This gives you a benchmark from which to make your own video production. Don’t steal their ideas, get better ones, but implement anything about them you like, and if they have high traffic, mirror them if you can.

Third tip is about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Google has a keyword tool that you can use to check keywords on your website. Use some of the most prominent ones in the title and description of your video to maximize the value of it. Google also owns YouTube and rates videos the same way it does websites. If you produce a video that has similar keywords as your site, and links to it, it will all help with your site SEO, as well as the other benefits.

Producing a good quality video, or having one made for you is essential if you want to attract new business. A professional quality video will promote a professional image, be attractive to prospects and have a positive effect on the brand. All good things in marketing.

By being clever with your video material and making the absolute most of it at every opportunity, you can squeeze as much marketing and promotion out of it as it allows.

Tips to Get Your Marketing Video Noticed is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Web technology has been an evolution, just like every other industry. What started with basic HTML, CSS, then XTML, is now CMS and soon HTML 5. It is a maturing technology that keeps on getting better.

CMS, or Content Management Systems come in many different guises. There are the huge, like Interwoven who offer enterprise sized CMS solutions for large organizations, to the smaller like Zope which is an open source project run by enthusiasts. Whatever the scope of the CMS, the theory and operation is exactly the same. To have something that allows the mechanics, design and content to be completely separate from each other.

We are all good at some things and not others. A CMS platform allows people to play to their strengths and provides the opportunity to separate the functions you aren’t so good at. A web designer can concentrate on the design or the back end while a contributor can just provide the content without having to get embroiled in the way the site works. Nobody has to do something they aren’t good at, and everyone can work on the site at once without bringing it down or getting in each other’s way.

This streamlining of the workflow is what makes a CMS such good sense. Work can be carried out while the site is live without affecting operation. Templates can be created to completely change the look of the site without taking it down, changing the way everything works and without having to manually design each page.

Changes can be created, approved and published within minutes, not days. Website users and contributors can collaborate and interact on the site freely. Discussions, comments and other interactions are easy to manage and moderate and can be seen almost instantly, creating a community feel to any site.

No longer do we have to create pages that are backwards compatible or code for older browsers. No more tweaking a page for IE5 or something else equally obsolete. The CMS is designed to recognize the browser type and will automatically provide the appropriate template for it. It will show a smart new version for recent browsers, a slightly less ambitious one for older browsers, and a special, cut-down version for cell phones or screen readers.

There is a problem with this new technology though. We as designers and developers have to change or be left behind. While a CMS can indeed to the work of several of us, that means we have to adapt to the new technology and learn how to use it quickly. It is no time to get left behind, as CMS and CMS type applications are the way forward.

Any system that provides the freedom, and relative cost effectiveness to clients is going to be attractive to them. That is until the next new big thing comes round the corner and we have to start all over again.

The benifits of a good CMS is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Inside the HostGator cpanel you have a tool called “fantastico” which is an automated script installed. It installs a variety of scripts like WordPress, Joomla, ETC.

Apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to have the robots.txt file set to not allow for indexing of the blog. I have about 20 new websites that this issue created a problem for. Like most people in SEO they know there is a waiting period or “sandboxing” that you need to wait for before Google will start sending traffic and indexing your site nicely. I wanted about 6times longer than it usually takes and then I started getting angry. Why the hell weren’t my sites getting indexed?

The robots.txt was the last place I actually looked, I even checked .htaccess before robots.txt because I knew that I would never EVER set the robots.txt to disallow searc h engines. In fact, the only time I ever create a robots.txt is when I want to black a certain part of a site from being indexed, otherwise I usually don’t even create a robots.txt.

So anyway, to make a long story short I realized that every new blog I had installed using HostGators fantastico over the past 4-6 months had the robots.txt set to not allow indexing.

What’s bad…and embarrassing, is that I’m in the field of web design and SEO and it took my that long to realize what was going on. The main reason it took so long is because I have so many sites I wasn’t really focusing on these wordpress blogs and everytime the question on why they weren’t being indexed came up in my head I would just write it off and sandboxing and tell myself “meh, give it another few weeks”. This ultimately lead to month after month of not being indexed. Finally when I actually stopped what I was doing and really looked into the situation I figured it out. But for the average Joe out there this could have been a serious problem.

I’m sure there are a LOT of people having the same issue as I was having. Some are trying to figure it out but can’t, some probably don’t even know that there is a problem, others don’t even know what a robots.txt is. Hopefully HostGator will look into this issue.

HostGator has all their fantastico WordPress installs set to not allow robots to index the blogs is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

Article – Making Talking Heads Speak to the Audience

For those who don’t know, a talking head piece is where someone is talking to camera, either full on, or three-quarter profile in medium close up.  Watch any news item or interview to see the talking head in action.

This is probably the most common shot in video production, so anyone wanting to make it big in movies needs to get this shot down as soon as possible.  The talking head shot, as already mentioned features heavily in news show, talk show, commercial, current affairs, documentary and so on.  It is used whenever there is someone with information or an opinion to give that is pertinent to the story.  It is also the simplest method of imparting information in a movie or video.

The most important aspects of any talking head shot is the camera position, the subject position, the light and the microphone.  Each will influence how effective the finished piece will be, so adequate thought needs to be put into each one until they become second nature.

The camera and subject positioning go hand in hand.  In the vast majority of scenes, they will be fairly close together, either close-up or medium close-up.  The angle is also important, it will either be close up or three-quarter profile, it is often the subject who will decide that.  The effect created by each is different, the face on shot is more intimate and the viewer feels the subject is talking directly to them.  The profile puts the viewer in the position of observer, which can be good for emotive or controversial contexts.

You will often see politicians use the profile because they don’t always want to be associated with the subject matter.  If a politician gives you a message, then backs down it won’t look good.  If you felt he spoke directly to you, it is possible that you would take it personally.  The President often talks face-on in order to speak to the public.

Two things you have to be aware of when shooting a talking head shot is head room and nose room.  Head room is how much room is above the subjects head in a straight-on shot, and the nose room is how much room there is between the end of the subjects nose and the edge of shot in a profile.  Each makes a difference in the composition of a shot.

The standard face-on shot will be close or medium close with the bottom of the shot ending mid-chest.  The top will add a bit of head room, or more if there is context in the background.  The same for a profile shot, space should be left at the edge of shot for some background to appear to add context to the shot.  For news pieces or current affairs, there may be graphics added in editing so there needs to be space for that too.

Shooting these kinds of shots takes judgment.  Get in too close and it may seem invasive, too far out and it might feel remote.  Training and experience will become the barometer for these kinds of shots

Miami Video Production is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

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Article – Using Camera Angles for Best Effect

When you hear a movie director critiquing another’s movie you often hear the choice of camera angle criticized for one reason or another. I think it’s worth exploring the use of angles a bit in this post to let you all know what they are talking about, and how to choose a good mix of angles for your own productions.

The vast majority of any movie is going to be shot with standard angles, height and perspectives. Think of unusual angles as salt. A sprinkle here and there adds flavor to any dish, overdo the salt and it spoils it.

In my opinion, it’s better to get the standard shots in the bag first. Concentrate on the long, medium and close ups from natural angles. Get the vanilla footage down first, then think about adding a little salt by planning a couple of unusual angles for the piece. Depending on the scene you could stand on a ladder, sit or lie on the floor. Looking down on someone can make them look insignificant and weak, whereas looking up at them does the opposite. It can make them look powerful. Using shots like this can add drama to a piece and add dialog to your movie without having to say a word.

To add a little extra flavor to a scene what about placing the camera inside something? Inside a refrigerator when a subject is getting something to eat, inside a suitcase when they are packing/unpacking. Your imagination is the only limiter here, just keep it sensible and make sure the message still gets through loud and clear.

The other way to spice up a scene is by adding focus pieces to it. Find something interesting to put in the fore or background. How about a nice bottle of wine in the foreground of a wide shot of a couple at dinner? A bunch of flowers in a romantic scene? Something that adds to the scene or dialog can make all the difference to how your movie communicates to it’s audience.

To learn about camera angles, do what movie makers do best, watch each other’s work. Especially that of the greats. Looking at still pictures in a gallery or book can also be an inspiration when looking at composition and placement within a scene. Take inspiration from anywhere you want as long as you use it creatively, and sparingly within a piece.

Remember an unusual angle is the salt, not the main ingredient. It should never overwhelm or become the main view of any scene, but the little extra ingredient to make it that much more interesting.

Orlando Video Production is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design

RT Design offers a wide range of video production services throughout Naples, Fort Myers, and the rest of SWFLA. From video editing, production, or promotion, we can do it all. If you have any questions or would like to speak with someone please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Article on Digital File Formats – Part 2

Video compression is a balancing act between making the file size more manageable and keeping a decent level of quality in the recording.  Some of the file formats used are lossy, like the aforementioned .wmv.  The format is excellent for size sensitive movie use, but not to so good if you want quality playback.

We are going to continue the discussion of file formats and will explore some of the others on offer.

Apple wasn’t late getting in on the act and produced the .mov file format.  They are just the same as .avi files, not very compressed.  They look good but then they should if they are up to twenty times larger than a .wmv file.  Apple users will probably extol the virtues of this format, but if you’re a Windows or Linux user, it doesn’t offer anything new.

Flash also have their own file format in the .flv.  This is the middle ground between .avi and .mov as the file size is reasonable but it retains much of the original quality.  The .flv format is the most popular web-based movie format there is.  Sites like YouTube will take a movie of any format and encode it to .flv format in order to be able to stream it.

No list of file formats would be complete without mentioning MPEG.  In this case MPEG2.  This is the format of the domestic DVD.  These files are also large as they are completely uncompressed.  MPEG2 is not suitable for any kind of streamed or portable media at all, but is ideal for home use with a DVD player.  MPEG2 is often the final phase of a production as once it’s MPG2 you can’t edit it or modify it in any way.  Many digital movie cameras will shoot in MPEG2 to offer consumers the ability to “plug and record” home movies straight into their DVDE players.

The other MPEG entry is MPEG4.  This is a more recent file format that combines a good file size with decent quality.  MPG4 is popular for sharing movie files as the size is small enough to be able to download without hitting any bandwidth caps.  It’s also becoming more popular with mobile video providers too as it is easily small enough for a cell phone but good enough quality for some of the higher resolution screens now available.

Those are just some of the most popular file formats around.  They all offer something different and lend themselves well to different situations.  If you want a small file size to email then use .wmv, if quality is utmost then use MPEG2, if you want to export to a mobile device MPEG4, or use on the internet use .flv.

Fort Myers Video Production is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design