Basics

Last week we had many designs for final delivery and this really kept us a lot occupied. There were clients asking for "their" way of layouts, there were clients asking for their preferred colors, there were also some who wanted their sites "on the lines" of some xyz site...
Many meetings and details and this kept us recalling the "primary" basic of design...the arrangement
I spent my time telling the team these basics:
1] Check out the size of the page and the sections in the page. Are they proportionate? Keep the size of the sections directly proportional to the importance and frequent usage the particular section might have.
2] Where you place what makes the entire difference (Just imagine your favorite site with all the placement haphazard !). Got it? :)
3] Where attention is to be drawn use bold and subtle colors. This helps give depth, sense and meaning to the page. Add sensible contrast and you have a great effect there.
3] What and where you want the visitor to look and to instill & maintain their interest in the page? Any answers? Well the best approach to this would be to understand what the site is all about and who are the visitors (target audience). The page "should" lead to instant sales i.e. business. The navigation should be user friendly and interesting.
The best designs don't necessarily have to be complex. With the clarity towards design basics you could create wonders with every design that you make !

Content, is this all?

I recently had a discussion with a friend and he was of the strong opinion that it is ultimately the content which dominates the traffic to a site. His point was that a good content has good keywords,references and probable intelligent inclusion of good and "healthy" links within the content itself.
I though disagree with my friend. I am of the opinion that no matter how much good the site content is, it cannot alone "make" the traffic come to a site, increase its rankings and popularity.
It is in fact the balanced combination of good SEO friendly titles, effective social networking, articles, blog & forum submissions and yes, the last (but not the least important) directory submissions.
Without a complete SEO strategy no matter how good the site content is, how much nice the site design you got, what extent of effective keywords you used, the site you have there has constant "want" for good and professional "parenting" i.e. result oriented SEO :)

Directory Listing, Is it really worth it?

All SEO guys know what Directory Listing is where all of them might have done Directory Listing at one time or the other :)
Though there are a lot "new & attractive" things in SEO now and SEO guys these days adopt a mixed strategy of the various techniques for their projects, the undercurrent (which I have observed at times)is that people start neglecting Directory Submission activities with more emphasis on the other techniques.
In my opinion Directory Listing is one of the most effective technique for getting the site the desired place in search results. Submissions in relevant and good PR pages works wonders as it shows the Spiders that the site "sits" good on the factual and advantage grounds in other sites too. This also enables getting good traffic and Search Engines always respect such sites. Directory Listing in sites having a "dofollow" attribute are really effective. Let me point out here that some good Directories giving paid link services are really helpful to a great extent. (The same is with Article Submission sites too!). At a considerably low cost your site link would show up in top slot in the particular Directory and the keywords being "sensitive" for such links, your site would be among the top listings in search results. Such Listings make the keywords important for Search Engines and this means a definite advantage as the keyword that you worked on is considered as "important" by Search Engines !
As they say, there is nothing like free lunch, the same goes with good SEO practices. Good Directory Submissions mean that they are relevant, clean and enjoy preference over the "free" ones !

SEO and Sales !

A recent Sales promotion campaign my friend did for his business left me wondering whether it was really worth it !
My friend had advertised heavily through print media and on net about the extension of his furnishing business. He had taken two shops adjacent to his own and had now one of the largest showrooms and services staff in the city.
Months of advertising and many discount coupons and then when he checked back after a month of the promotional activities (after the coupons expiry date) he found out that only 17% of the coupons were not claimed and yet his sales were somewhat same as before ! This clearly meant that though the coupons were redeemed by the customers and there were huge crowds the entire month, all had happened was that the majority existing customers had utilized the coupons in their regular purchases/services! He called me then to find out the reason for this.
As it came out very clearly, the promotion campaign and the tools which my friend had put into service were not effectively utilized. I found out that there were ads on his site and related sites too but the entire campaign lacked direction.
No "specific" terminology used, not a single instance of effective and researched words (Keywords) and phrases and not at all focused on the market segment and business type they wanted to target!!
In the name of sales promotion, the entire activity had clearly suggested that it was best if my friend had not thought of using it at all...what a waste of time and money and a sorry wastage of a wonderful chance of using the simplest SEO things for effective and practical results !!!
I hope other business people are not going the wrong way !

Do we use Keywords effectively?

Just came across a site and I must say I really wanted to contact the site manager to tell them about the mess they did on their keywords.

The site people had used misformed phrases, improper keywords and there were the tell tale signs of "over stuffing".
The proper way to use keyword/phrases is to use them in titles, sub-titles, bullets and in the beginning/end of paragraphs etc. Again, these should be used keeping the language factor in mind. Proper language with meaningful words go a long way in showing the "real" thing in site content. The same is true for articles etc.

Keyword stuffing means the site would be shifted back many pages when Google comes to know about it. This effectively kills all the SEO shortcuts people use but also kills all the previous good SEO efforts as well.

Links, How Many

We all look out for good links and the more and relevant they are the better it is to have them.
However people tend to overdo this technique and at times it leads to harming the site/s they were working on. There should be a limit (human limit) on the linking activities. For example if one site had 1000 links in three days then it spells like "overdone" in Google's language. Result, the obvious :( This is a typical feature with Link Farms which is considered a big no-no in SEO now. Search Engines penalize sites resorting to such things. Also, there are inbound and outbound links between which there should be a healthy balance.
Links and the practice of linking is crucial just like any other SEO technique and should be evaluated, checked before going ahead for Link exchanges. Relevancy and content should be looked into really seriously :)

Keywords, Do We Use Them?

Many write-ups and many opinions about the "Keywords" thing but the whole idea seems to evolve itself at a very impressive pace.
In fact this is true with all the aspects of SEO. There are umpteen changes and things happen and improve so fast because of SEO being a part of the I.T. world.
No matter what the changes, the basics of SEO remain the same and would always be like this (for a long period of time for now).
Taking the keywords for instance, it is always better to have the keywords in "good" usage in site (not misuse or overuse please!). Also, if you have a blog, use the keywords in the articles in all "relevant" ways and make it a practice to use them.
Again, the effectiveness of a keyword depends on its proper and practical selection and usage.
This ensures the efficacy of your keywords and makes your site keyword "reactive".
The basics remain the same, no matter what the changes in technology.