Golden Rules for Effective Web Site Navigation

Golden rules are very special rules that a person should always keep in mind and review frequently. They are very important and useful guideposts to keeping us on course and headed in the right direction.

As soon as you define your goals, begin looking for the Golden Rules that connect with it. Chart your course by these Golden Rules and permit them to steer you to achievement and success.

Listed below are 5 of the very best Golden Rules for designing Web Site Navigation.

Golden Rule # 1
Design the web site navigation with the end users in mind.

The rationale behind this is that they are the ones who are going to be using your web site. You need to picture what is in the mind of the end user as they explore your web site. One of the first steps in web site design is to create profiles of your web site users. With these profiles in hand you can determine what is most important to your end users.

Golden Rule # 2
The navigation system should consider the many ways that visitors will want to find your content and applications on your site.

It is important to have an understanding of how users will use your web site. The user profiles help determine what each type of user will want to accomplish. Take into account that you will have many types of end users, with varying levels of web browsing skills and interests..

Golden Rule # 3
Provide multiple ways for users to access content.

This is important because some visitors know exactly what they are looking for, while others may just want to browse through your site. You should consider a global navigation that provides links to the site's main sections. You may also need sectional navigation. Other things to consider would be a site search function and a section index.

Golden Rule # 4
Create a consistent navigation system throughout your web site.

Once you have decided on the global, sectional, and supplemental navigation methods, these systems need to be consistent throughout your web site. This will help the end user go back to areas they have already visited.

Golden Rule # 5
Use navigation labels that are consistent and easy to understand.

The best site structure can be undermined by poor navigation labels. Use words that your visitors will understand. If you use graphics in your navigation, be sure to include text link navigation as well.

Carefully follow these golden rules to create effective web site navigation and you will find greater success with your web site and your end users will have a better experience as well.

Getting Started the Right Way in Internet Marketing (part 10)

This is the final part of the series, 'Getting Started the Right Way in Internet Marketing'. This article will focus on one very important part of off-page SEO namely linking.

The previous article was all about backlinking. The more backlinks coming from reputable sites and blogs pointing to your website the higher will be your site's search engine ranking. The coveted target is to get your website listed on the first page of Google, preferably in the number 1 spot (it is said the number 1 spot on Google for any keyword receives on average 41% of all the traffic).

Steady backlink building will gradually push your website up the rankings. But there is a way to speed the process up.

Do more than just build backlinks from reputable sites and blogs pointing to your website. Make these reputable sites and blogs point to each other also. Suppose you wish to target the keyword, 'Betta fish diseases'. You can build web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger, Wordpress and Weebly sites with articles containing the anchor text 'Betta fish diseases' hyperlinked to point back to your website.

To increase the 'link juice' of these links, have articles within each web 2.0 property point to another web 2.0 property also. For instance, the Squidoo lens could have a link pointing to the Weebly site (besides pointing back to your site). The Weebly site (which also points back to your site) has a link pointing to the Hubpages hub. Then the hub points to your website as well as back to the Squidoo lens. This is called a link wheel.

Each keyword you target should have its own link wheel with links pointing back to the web page on your website where you have an article with the targeted keyword as the title. Each web 2.0 property is like a spoke in the link wheel. And the more spokes you have the more 'link juice' goes back to your website.

The most powerful effect of the link wheel is that it connects each of your web 2.0 properties with each other and each one back to your website. Then when the search engine spider finds one of these web 2.0 properties, it will be led to the next one and the one after that and so on. Building link wheels is a powerful way to boost your search engine rankings because the spiders find your site easily with all the links leading it from one site to another and eventually back to yours.

That concludes the 10-part series on 'Getting Started the Right Way in Internet Marketing'. Now all that is left is for you to take action by applying each of the ten parts one by one.

Do You Want To Profit From Your Blogging?

If you have a blog and are looking to make a profit from it then it is imperative that you get it to the point where it is attracting lots of traffic. You can have the most attractive offers in the world to monetize your blog, but if you don't get the right volume of traffic, you are not going to make significant money.

With the above in mind, if you are intending to make money from your blog, your first priority has to be to make your blog as popular as you can by taking every opportunity you can to grow your readership.

How do you go about this? Well, as a first step, it is vitally important that you know the demographic of your target readership - if you don't know this, you won't be able to consistently write in the correct way to capture and keep your target audience.

Ideally, you should be writing on a subject that is of interest to you - always supposing, of course, that you have interests in areas that are popular and where people are proven to spend money.

If you hope to make money blogging then you are going to have to update your blog with fresh content on a regular basis - this will certainly be a lot easier if you are writing on a subject that you know and love.

You don't have to be the greatest writer in the world to make money from blogging, but you do need to be writing in a style that attracts and keeps the attention of your readership - popular blogs are never boring - if you don't entertain the people who come to your blog, you'll not develop a fanbase of the size needed to sustain a decent blogging income.

So, just how do you drive traffic to your blog? Getting links back to your blog from other Websites is what you need to focus on. You can do this in various ways such as finding forums about the topic of your blog, joining in with the conversations and putting a link back to your blog in your forum signature. Writing articles and submitting them to a few of the top article directories putting a link back to your blog in your resource box is another good way to drive traffic.

You can monetize your blog with affiliate programs related to the subject matter and contextual advertising programs.

If you have a blog where you regularly post interesting and topical content in a popular subject area, where you promote attractive, related products and services and spend time building traffic on a regular basis, there's absolutely no reason why you cannot earn money from your blogging.

Solid-State Drives the Hard Drive Replacement of the Future

Solid state drives, known as SSDs are amazingly fast, and silent. In fact they are good in so many ways that it is inconceivable that one day they will not eventually replace hard drives in everyone's computer.

At present there is only one thing which is preventing their widespread use, and that is the price, which is still too high for most people.

However, an SSD revolution is coming, and just about all the hard drive manufacturers are producing their own models.

For conventional hard drives there are limitations on improving their performance. They have still been improving, but not as rapidly as the other components in the average PC. That is because a real technical limit is being reached in how fast metal disks can be spun and read from, and still operate reliably for many years, in all temperatures and after being mishandled, dropped and bashed.

To read and write your data on one of several reading and writing heads in the hard drive, the heads must be able to very rapidly move (seek) a pre-selected position over the spinning disk, and hover over the surface for a split second while the information moves past the head, for the head to read it.

The technology that moves the head so accurately is amazing, but not only that, the heads have been getting smaller and seek times have been getting faster. In addition the rotational speed of the disk (or platter) has been increased numerous times over many years, so that now spinning a metal disk cannot be speeded up much further.

Size of storage/amount of data which a hard disk can hold has also increased massively. However, in this respect as well the developers have now reached a point where it is getting harder to squeeze more data onto the disks.

The hard disk has been around for a long while, and now the dominance of this technology is being challenged by the SSD.

As its name suggests, the technology used in an SSD is, entirely solid and without any moving parts. In fact, it is very much like the much smaller storage capacity USB flash or "pen" sticks which have been around for some years now. However, SSDs are much bigger in storage capacity, and faster.

Also, SSDs have the ability to transfer data much more quickly than hard drives, and they start up quicker too. They don't need to spin up in the way a hard drive must, before it can respond to queries for information.

A hard drive head has to move from one position to another to read a large file, as only a small amount of data can be read from any one platter position. It is this that normally slows down sustained large file transfers, and over time this gets worse as things get fragmented. Fragmentation means that the file storage areas on the hard drive become increasingly smaller as files are written and re-written to the hard drive.

By contrast, and due to the solid-state nature of SSDs, the sustained data transfer rate does not slow down after the first burst, so the impression, and reality, is one of lightning fast drive performance.

Other improvements which can be found in SSDs lie with the reduced energy consumption of an SSD when compared with a similar sized hard drive. They also have a longer long life in use, and run cooler. The manufacturers of SSDs are, in fact, so confident in the durability of their products that they are offering them with a longer guarantee than they would normally give for a hard drive.

Gradually reducing discount prices mean that before long SSDs will replace existing aging hard drive technology. In fact many enthusiasts have already started using the smaller SSD versions to speed up their PC's performance. They have not been slow to notice that it is only necessary to move the PC's operating system to an SSD, leaving all the rest of a computer's files on the old hard drive, to see a big improvement.

Choosing a Good Domain Name

When planning a website, one of the main concerns will always be the domain name. A domain name is what your website is known by. The internet identifies websites by numbers, but this is not a very human-friendly way to go about it. Words or letters are then used, and these commonly end in ".com", ".biz", ".net" and many more.

Although there are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, and many ways of combining them to give new meaning, picking out a good domain name can still be difficult. But having a good domain name is important, especially as this will often be the determining factor in the success or failure of your website and your business.

A good domain name ensures that your website will be visible. It gets included in searches more often. It becomes more popular, and gives you credibility. It attracts more visitors, which help in increasing profits.

A domain name, therefore, should always be properly planned and thought out. Below are some tips to making the right choice for a domain name:

1. Pick a domain name that says something about your website, or the services and products you sell. It can start with one word up to a whole sentence.
2. Make it catchy and easy to recall. So while it is okay to have a whole sentence as a website, you still have to make sure it's short enough for anyone to remember.
3. If you feel like creating a new label, go ahead and make up your own words - even if they don't make sense. It will still work as long as it can be pronounced. If the domain name can be uttered vocally, the brain will have an easier time assimilating the new term, as compared to a random combination of consonants.
4. Don't stop with just one choice - generate a list of all names that you can possibly come up with. Be creative! That list will prove its usefulness later on when ticking off domain names that you have already checked, but are presently taken.

When you're ready to register, pick a good domain hosting provider. Some web hosts offer free domain name registration as part of their services, which gives you a great deal. Just remember to read the terms carefully, so that you still get to take your domain name with you in case you intend to switch providers in the future.