Design Tips for Web to be SEO Friendly

How you developed your website contributes greatly on its optimization with the search engines and the success of your website with its marketing.

I formulated a list or tips that would help the design of your website to be search engine optimization friendly.

• SEO Friendly URLs. Make sure that the urls that you are using are Search Engine Optimization friendly. By this, I mean that it is better if your targeted keywords would actually be part of it. Avoid characters like "=" or "?", rather use "-" or "_" to separate words. Separating the words are not that important for search engines, yet is suggested so that human visitors of your site would easily understand the content through the clear representation of the url.

• Using Semantic Tags. Using semantic tags would help on website development would help the search engines to understand which terms are being emphasized and is put into importance. Use this list to of sematic tags to help you on your web development and website optimization.

• Use Text for Navigation. Avoid using flash for the main navigation. Search engine crawlers cannot read flash. If this is used, they will not be able to proceed to the next pages. Yes, the only negative thing about this is that you are sacrificing the attractive designs you are aiming at. This can be, however, fixed by putting a little portion of your webpage at the bottom a sitemap, in which all your main pages will be listed in pure HTML.

• Optimizing Images. There are instances that you will be using images to replace the content of your website. The problem is that spiders and crawlers are blind, they are only able to read but they cannot see. Thus, the text placed on the images will be useless. To optimize the images, first, you must be sure that the file name of the image will contain your targeted keywords for displaying the image. Secondly, be sure to put description of what message the image is trying to convey. Place alt tags on your images. Optimize the keywords in it. Lastly, optimize the image size. I would be honest, I hate pages that takes so much time to load, so I think any of you. Make image sizes smaller. It researches has stated that people leave the website if it takes up to 12 seconds to load. Imagine how short it is for web development optimization and how long it is for the browsers.

• Optimized Links. Build only quality links. Be sure to use important keywords for your anchor texts. Be sure only to link on important and theme related site. Optimize the link flow of your site by linking to your own site content. Spiders love these.

• Keyword Research. Optimize your keywords. Not only use your targeted keywords, explore to related words. If you theme is ice cream, don't focus on ice cream all the time, use other words like chocolate, vanilla, sweet, tasty, etc. Also base your design concept of your theme. Do not make a site full of the color yellow if your theme is blue, the same as to not to use pink if your topic is soccer.

Always be sure to think about how you would react when developing and designing a website. Take constructive comments from other people especially those who know nothing about you.

Don't have any idea to build a website that is SEO friendly? Do not worry, there are many good virtual assistant outsourcing companies that offer webmaster services and well trained virtual assistants on a low price.

The Good Way of Marketing your Website

Making a webpage in the world wide web is only a step. After that, the next one would be to market you website. But is there really a need for Internet Marketing?

What is Internet Marketing? Internet marketing is the concept that refers to the ways and the strategies that are applied to promote products or services on the web, marketing procedures. These strategies would include SEO or Search Engine Optimization, online marketing and promotions, building quality links, website development strategies or creating a valuable, informative and useful site, and many more.

Do I really need this for my website? My answer would be yes. The importance of Internet Marketing has increased throughout the growth and expansion of the Internet Itself. Plus, this is also one of the main reasons why one is building a website, to promote their products, services or organization. So what would be the use to create a site that would not be seen by its intended and targeted audience? This is why promotion of your webpages is one of the most crucial stages of web development and maintenance.

In other words, the main objective of Internet Marketing is let people see your site, adding traffic to it.

There are many ways to market your site. There are ofcourse procedures that can give immediate results yet are against the rules set by the search engines that proves to be destroying the quality of the web and user satisfaction. These should be avoided. The good thing is, there are effective ways to promote your website while staying under the rules. Including are building only quality links, joining on social media only on related themed websites, and maintaining quality content. These procedures may take some time, yet it proves to be the most efficient.

Do not have any ideas? Worry not because there are great outsourcing companies nowadays that offer these services. Hiring a virtual assistant not only lessens your work burden, they do only the trusted and "good" ways to market your website and their services are always cheap.

Protest Against Longer Working Hours by an IT-BPO Union

My post today would actually be about a current news with the Business Process Outsourcing industry.

It is very much known that many of the industries today, especially the Business Process Outsourcing sector, sometimes would need "extended" working hours as to have the job done. And as per law and mandate that the regular working duration is eight hours a day, companies require to pay for the overtime.

But there has been a recent problem that has been identified in most IT firms in India. These firms allegedly has an "arbitrary policy" reportedly enforcing longer working hours that violate this working mandate. Because of this, the Union for Information & Technology Enabled Services (UNITES) Indian section has plans to file a PIL or public interest litigation.

UNITES is affiliated to the Indian National Trade Union Congress (Intuc). It is also India’s first union in the IT-BPO sector. It claims to have around ten per cent of the total IT-BPO workforce of two million as members, and stated the numbers have been rising over the last two months on the back of lay-offs in the sector. UNITES is also part of Union Network International (UNI), which has over sixteen million workers in thirteen different sectors from 163 countries.

On the part of these IT sectors, they are saying that workers are still working for eight hours in one day, six times a week, therefore this is not a violation. And since most companies work for only five days, this , they say, creates the wrong idea.

R Karthik Shekhar, UNITES’ secretary general for India does not buy their response. He then speaks about the Business Standard. "The labour law in India allows an eight-hour working day, whereas in most IT companies in India people are involuntarily working for over 12 hours daily," he stated.

He also says that this is just a business strategy of many IT companies in the country. And he calls this tactic "a double standard by the IT firms, who, on the one hand are firing people saying they are not getting enough work, and on the other hand, forcing employees to work more since they are getting more work".

But it seems that few of the workers tend not to agree with the idea of the union. "In call centres people are used to long working hours. During peak season (December-January), they work even 14 hours a day. But now due to the ongoing crisis, expectation levels are very high. Performance is being monitored frequently," a team leader working with vCustomer stated.

And the companies actually act on it seriously. "Earlier we could extend our project deliveries by a day or two. Now the management has mandated to deliver by the deadline otherwise it will be marked on performance sheet. Our performance is being evaluated every week. This was a norm from earlier times, but now the management is taking it seriously," a software engineer with Satyam Computers added.

Infosys Technologies HR head TV Mohandas Pai explains and makes a statement about this issue. "The IT industry in India still follows the best practices it had introduced earlier. But this does not mean employees will work less. If they are being asked to stick to duty hours, this will increase the productivity," he explains.

Well, lets wait and see how this problem gets fixed.