1. Construction Signs

Construction signs are a dead giveaway of a beginner in online marketing and web design. Only those who are inexperienced will use the man shoveling dirt icon to signify that a page is currently under work. Instead, design like a professional by not adding content until it is finished. That way, a professional image can be portrayed at all times.

2. Useless Wizbang Gadgets

Sure, I think the cool rotating clock of characters is a cool idea. But it doesn’t add any value to a website other than entertainment. Instead of adding useless features, focus on adding features that drive value.

Website No-No’s

1. Macromedia Flash Landing Pages (These do nothing to help other than wow a customer.)
2. Music on a webpage. (Especially if you can’t turn it off!!)
3. Cute little animated characters.
4. Overuse of color.
5. Visitor Counters (That’s why we have statistics packages)
6. Guest Books (Replace with a email form)

3. No Navigational Organization

Website with little or no organization can be very difficult to navigate. If a visitor cannot find what they are looking for, having a website losses its value. Having a defined structure and navigation will not only help visitors find content, but also increase the chances of having a positive impression.

An important design tip to keep in mind when creating a navigation plan is to organize information around how customers think about a product. Many times companies organize information about how they categorize products (Cisco is a major example of this) instead of how customers think about products.

4. Over-Use of Macromedia Flash

Many clients ask for a Flash landing page. It’s use is primarily intended to create a sense of awe before entering the rest of the website. However this can be deceiving in many ways.

Bandwidth Intensive

Flash introductions are very bandwidth intensive and users with dial-up access will probably have a hard time loading the website and probably move on.

Search Engines Can’t “Read” Flash

Search engines at this time cannot effectively read content embedded within flash. What that means for a site that makes extensive use of Flash is that they will fail to have good rankings for search on Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Proper Use of Flash

Flash is an extremely powerful technology for quickly conveying information to customers about complex products, services and technologies. A properly placed Flash demonstration can create a professional image and explain a product or service in a clear and concise manner.

5. Spelling & Grammar

Spelling and grammar are seemingly harmless mistakes that can really poke its ugly head at the worst possible time, when customers are getting their first impression. Not only will they see that the website doesn’t seem professional but that it lacks the polish that is expected from a professional company.

Professional Services

Make sure that your website doesn’t suffer from the same design flaw too. Contact Onepax today for a free consultation.

Before search engine optimization became a booming business, PageRank was the preferred method of determining how important a specific link was. You may recognize this as the little green status bar you see in your web browser when you download the Google Toolbar.

Now that Google has become such a target for online marketers, Google’s coveted PageRank has now starting to lose it’s value. Google’s entire search foundation still operates on the principles of links and continues to have a heavy influence in search engine rankings. Website that have more links are therefore more popular. Since amassing a large amount of links is very difficult to do, website that have many of them are often favored by Google simply because the founders of the site would have to make a major investment in ensuring their content is up to par.

Top Tips for Linking Strategies

Links that are relevant

Links to your site should be related to your product or service. You certainly wouldn’t advertise baby shampoo at a tattoo parlor, so why would you do the same thing online? Directories such as Yahoo! and DMOZ are a great place to find relevant links. In addition, try looking for links on industry related websites.

Attract links from websites that can drive traffic

Getting links to your website also includes generating traffic. A real world example of a bad link would be like putting a billboard in a remote location. No one will ever see the billboard. Consider the link the same as that billboard, you want it to be placed where people will see it. A great place to find sites that drive traffic is to search on Google for your specific industry and try and find websites that appear in the top ten results.

Attract the traffic you want

Attracting traffic is easy, however attracting the right traffic is very difficult. If you sell a product, chances are you want to attract only customers who are possible candidates for using your product. However if your links are too broad, you may not be able to selectively pick out your customer from the rest of visitors. Make sure that your links are targeted and well placed on websites that your target customer is likely to visit.

Professional Link Building

Onepax has the experience necessary to ensure that your website can grow year after year. Contact Onepax today for a free link building assessment.

When trying to find information on the internet, over 56% percent of users reported that they use search engines on a daily basis. (SearchEngineWatch.com) However, if your website appears after the first page of search results, you chances of being found are reduced. By regularly monitoring your search engine placement, you can keep track of your placement and help keep your team proactively making changes.

Creating a Strategy

Before you can begin effectively monitoring your placement in search engines, you must have a strategy in place to monitor and continuously improve your listings.

Onepax Monitoring Method

1. Examine current keyword placement.
2. Optimize keywords within your website.
3. Repeat from step 1.

The entire process is that easy! However it is long and tedious work. No one likes to manually monitor their search engine rankings or make painstaking changes to their website. However this is the only way to truly make effective changes in online marketing. Ensuring that you continue the cycle of making changes ensures that your ranking will last for years to come. This process is especially effective because it helps you monitor your site so you can proactively make changes before the website begins to slip due to negligence.

Sample Report

The following is an example report of what our monthly marketing report looks like for keyword rankings. It provides an excellent way to log and report on search engine positions.

Professional Monitoring

Don’t’ have the time or experience to monitor your website every month? Let Onepax search engine professionals monitor your website for you and generate consistent and professional advice. Contact Onepax today for a free consultation.

German auto manufacturer BMW was recently banned from Google according to a recent ComputerWorld article highlighting the company’s tatics in online marketing. Google’s Webmaster Design Guidelines outlined the use of displaying different pages to users than search engines. BMW.de used this exact same technology that presents users with a different webpage than users would normally get. This tactic is often used by shady search engine marketers to create webpages that simply state keywords so many times that it would not make sense to a normal person. But when a user finds that page, they are presented with a different page that is more human readable. This type of marketing is very heavily discouraged by Google and resulted in BMW being banned.

How do I know if my site has been banned?

There are two ways to determine if you website has been banned:

Check your Google PageRank

In order to check your PageRank, you will need to download the Google Toolbar. Once you have installed the toolbar, navigate to your company’s homepage and view the PageRank bar. (You need to have advanced features enabled for this to work.) If your PageRank is 0 of 10, you may have been banned. By default, Google starts all webpages at 3 out of 10. Your score can increase or decrease from there, but factors such as how long the domain has been registered and whether Google knows about your site in the first place can cause a 0 PageRank.

Check Google’s Cache

In order to see if you website is listed in Google’s cache, go to www.google.com and type in the search box: cache:www.yoursite.com. See an example of Onepax’s website in Google Cache. If your website shows up, Google knows about your site and has it indexed. If your website does not appear, there is a good probability that either Google does not know your website exists and you need to submit it or your website has been banned. The key is that you should know if Google previously had your website in their cache.

What to do if your site has been banned

The great thing that Google offers is a second chance. Read the Webmaster Guidelines on Google’s website and make sure that your website complies with the rules. This includes removing any hidden text, cloaking, pages with irrelevant words and other sneaky tatics used to gain search engine ranking. Although they may help rankings temporarily, they will absolutely destroy your ranking if you get caught. If you are a small business, count on closing the doors if you don’t get re-listed!

Once you have removed the questionable content, try and contact Google via email or web forms (there are many ways to do so) and tell them that:

• The offending content has been removed.
• The webmaster of the website has acknowledged the fact that this practice is against Google’s policy.
• The company promises that this is a one-time incident and that it will never happen again.

Most bans last usually 2 to 4 weeks. At the end of the ban period, the website is inspected by robots for deceptive marketing tactics. If the page is found to still be using deceptive marketing tactics, it will be re-banned until it is eventually permanently banned. If your site is found to be clean of deceptive marketing techniques, Google with schedule your site for re-inclusion.

Need professional help?

Onepax has been providing support for businesses who have been banned from Google for over 4 years. If your company’s website site has been banned, don’t play the wait game with Google. Onepax has the expertise and skills necessary to ensure your company makes a swift and successful comeback from this potential show stopper.

I’ve seen it time and time again. Businesses get complacent with their existing procedures and methods of accomplishing tasks and often miss out on the tremendous advantages that technology is making. The technology that can cut their work in half often confuses them and they dismiss it.

The hard truth of the matter is that most of the time, there is software out there that can reduce the time of everyday tasks for businesses.

How businesses can break free of complacency

Don’t be afraid to try new things

The first and critical leap for discovering new technologies is not to be afraid to try them in the first place! Many companies setup a test box to see if an application can provide some value to the business. Worse comes to worse, you simply wasted a tiny bit of time investigating an application. In the best case, your investment in investigate the new application could save tons of time everyday. If time is an issue, hire a consulting firm to come in a try the application for you.

Look for opportunities to automate tasks

Just because your company has been putting together a monthly newsletter through the regular mail for over 10 years doesn’t mean that you can’t find ways to automate the task. For example, to help automate the task of sending newsletters to customers, try using an online e-mail newsletter to automate the task of creating and mailing the newsletters. Not only does it save time and money, but it also reduces the chance that there will be any errors! Automating monotonous tasks will save businesses tons of money and your secretaries who put together the newsletters will thank you!

Get the team involved

Have a monthly meeting with employees and discuss the most inefficient things your business does. It probably won’t be something you will want to hear, but it’s important to know so that you can address them. More often than not, there is a software solution that can help alleviate the burden of the task or even completely automate it!

There are many things that make a bad password. Knowing what components of a password that provide the strongest protection is key.

#1 – Don’t use the same password for multiple accounts.

Using the same password for different accounts is like having the same key for your house, your car, your safe and your bank accounts. Once hackers get ahold of your account password, they will try all your accounts to try and retrieve your sensitive information. Also for system administrators, they will try the same thing with multiple servers on your network. Have a different password for each account.

#2 – Write your passwords down

Traditional security practices tell you that users should not write your passwords down. However, writing passwords down often result in passwords that are difficult to remember and are typically stronger. Passwords that can be easily remembered are more likely to be weaker. Make certain that the hard copy of the password is in a physically secure place so that your list itself cannot be compromised. Never store your list on a computer.

#3 – Know what makes a good password

Having a good password means that it is very difficult to successfully guess it. A good password will posses the following qualities:

• Have at least 6 letters or numbers
• Have at least one letter, number and special character (!, #, %, @, etc…)
• Not an actual word in a dictionary

#4 – Never log into websites through links sent through email

If you receive a link from popular online sites such as eBay or other online banks, don’t click it! It could link to a potentially dangerous site that is designed to steal you password. Always type in the address of a website directly into your browser so you know that the site is legitimate.

#5 – Change your password regularly

The best thing that can be done to protect an account is to change it regularly. Common schemes include appending a number to the end of a special sequence. For example, docat44 can be incremented to docat55. The important thing is that you pick a password that you will use diligently.

Additional reading on password security

Microsoft – 5 tips for top-notch password security
Microsoft – School is in: 7 computer security tips for students
Yahoo! Security Center – Choosing Your Password

In a recent post on ComputerWorld, the IRS finished redesigning their website in what is a triumph over the traditional grind for government. Forms are often buried deep inside sections that are difficult to find or even inaccessible. All that has changed with the introduction of the new IRS website. By conducting usability studies, the web designers were able to create an incredibly useful website that allow users to be able to find what they were looking for quickly. One example includes the addition of a section entitled “Most Requested Forms and Publications” that allows visitors to quickly find IRS tax forms. It’s a great start and other branches of government can learn a lot from them.

Where can I learn more about designing usability?

The art of usability is a difficult art to master because of the complicated methods used to measure and design usability. A great resource to get started is a website by Jacob Nielsen, a foremost expert in the field of usability design. His website, useit.com, provides extensive information about the field of usability and how it can enhance user’s experiences.

A great book to read and learn more about designing usability into websites is called Designing Usability by Jacob Nielsen. It’s a fantastic book that walks a user through all of the considerations that a web designer must take into consideration when designing a website.

In an recent article on ComputerWorld, Google was disclosed to have close to 40% of the US Search volume, giving it a major advantage over the nearest competitor Yahoo! With websites now becoming a crucial part of many businesses worldwide, good search engine placement on Google is crucial for a company’s continued success.

What webmasters can do to improve their Google ranking

The number one thing a webmaster can do to improve their Google search engine ranking is to get links to their website. The core piece of Google’s search technology is it’s amazing index of links. A website that has many links to it will rank very well in Google’s search engine. This is because webpages that have many links usually have good relevant information and Google will reward them by ranking them higher than sites with lesser links.

Great Places to Get Links

• Yahoo! Directory ($299/year listing fee)
• Open Directory Project
• Your local chamber of commerce
• Industry specific websites
• Friend’s blogs

When it comes to designing a website to represent your business, a cheaper designer is not always better. A website is an extension of an organization and should represent it in its entirety. It should be easy to use for users, functional and create a great interactive experience, and it should market itself to viewers to return to your bottom line. To help businesses understand this investment, try thinking of websites as another form of advertising. It simply should earn its value back over time much like radio, print and television and contribute to the bottom line.

The Myth

Many businesses believe that websites are a simple one-time investment that will rake in huge profits overnight. This major misconception leads to a path a terrible road of deceit and predatory online businesses who promise overnight business success for $500.

The Truth

A good investment in a web site is the result of many years of research and development. It comes from understanding your customer and their needs. Building a successful website takes a time and requires a significant investment. Over time, websites gain an extremely powerful advantage that will leave competitors scratching to catch up. A strong business web presence creates value for your existing customers, captures new customers and helps your business stay in front of your customers. Eventually, the website will reach a point where customers can answer their own questions, order their own products and increase their satisfaction with your company. One client of Onepax glowed about their website, “Our customers love our website! By the time they call us they already know what they want, how much it will cost and when they will have it! I’ll take those calls any day!”

But many times, people are asking the question, “But I thought the Internet boom long past? Doesn’t everyone already have a great website?” The truth: They are dead wrong. Almost every industry can benefit from a website in ways such as reducing the cost of customer service, increasing monthly sales to providing tools for employees, the future is seemingly endless. The key to harnessing the web is by recruiting experienced web developers who can orchestrate business goals and technology into a beautiful symphony.

An Analogy

Good and bad web designers can be compared to housing contractors like roofers, electricians or plumbers. When you hire a contractor, you want them to do their job quickly, efficiently and correctly. I recently witnessed a construction site that hired the cheapest roofer they could find. The contractor showed up late, didn’t have all the materials they needed to repair the roof and even caused some major damage to their roof. The owner of the house had to pay almost two times the original cost for an experience roofer to come in and roof the house. The experienced roofer had to come to the building and remove
the damage caused by the bad roofer.

The same principal applies to good and bad web design. When it comes to your business and your customers, they deserve the very best. But in the business setting, cheap contractors are damaging your reputation, your customer relationship and even your bottom line. How much does will a business loose before they hire professionals? Businesses shouldn’t skimp when it comes to web sites since it could be the first impression your customer has. It provides a channel of advertising for businesses that can draw in customers for pennies compared to traditional marketing methods. The following table drives home a great reason why you should consider investing in a website for your business in addition to traditional marketing for your business.

Printed Advertising	Radio Advertising	Internet Advertising
$5-$15/customer	$3-$7/customer	$0.15-$3.0/customer

The key to great placement on Google consists of two major parts. The first part is what the page is about and the second part is how many websites link to the website the page resides on.

Page Content

When it comes to web sites and placement on Google, content is king. Website should contain lots of content that provides relevant information about the site or business. Not only does lots of great content give visitors reason to visit your website, but also gives search engines lots of content to use for searches. It’s a win-win situation! Visitors will love the content and search engines will refer even more visitors. The goal is to fill the website with lots of documents that is related to the topic of the website and provides valuable information to visitors. How-to articles, tutorials or even opinions are great ways to create content. Just keep adding content constantly and regularly.

Website Links

The other component in addition to your page content is the number of links to your website. The Google search engine works off the number websites that link to yours. Obviously, the more links that point to your website, the more popular and important the information on your website is. This technology is known as Page Rank and assigns a number from 0 (lowest score) to 10 (highest score) to let Google know how important your page is. Currently, most websites start off with a PageRank® score of 3 the first time it is added to their search engine. However it is up to you to get more links to your website to increase the PageRank®. The more links you get, the more relevant the pages will appear to users.

The great part about PageRank® is that it’s very difficult to get lots of links with little or no content. It forces people who want to build a better PageRank® to make sure their content is quality and relevant.

How to get started

To get started, check to see if Google knows that your website exists. To check, goto www.google.com and search for links:www.onepax.com and replace www.onepax.com with your own website. If Google shows you a cached version of your homepage, then Google has visited your site. If your website is not in Google, submit your site to Google by using the Add your URL tool. Warning: Do not submit your website more than once every few days or you will get banned!

A great way to check your Page Rank is to download the Google Toolbar and enable the Page Rank feature. Every time that you visit a website, the Page Rank for that page is displayed. It’s a great way to keep up to date with your site’s Page Rank!

A Word of Caution

For those who are considering the $15 for 1 bazillion link campaigns, be careful. A lot of times these companies will give you a lot of links. Google knows about these companies and their massive ‘link farms’ to pages that have no content and often discredits those links. Almost every time, they are a waste of money!