VBWebSites

July 2009 Newsletter

2009-07-08T04:40:00.000-07:00

Since 2002, VBWebSites has been working with the small business sector. We pride ourselves in helping businesses succeed. We have been on the front line of the ever changing web to ensure we stay on top of the World Wide Web in order to deliver the best possible presence to our clients and their customers.

Over the years, a huge trend for clients having the need and desire for custom content management solutions has been a fun task as we deliver precisely what our clients need so they have the ability to maintain their own sites. Every site is unique. We develop each solution custom. Learn More

e-Commerce and the opportunities to sell on the web. Attract + Convert = Growth, Expand Your Market, Versatility and Freedom. e-Commerce sales will experience double digit percentage growth in the coming years.

e-Commerce Video Tours

Frontend Tour

Backend Tour

Video as a doorway to your website

2009-07-08T04:38:00.000-07:00

With Google giving more and more attention to video in the search results one can really gain a good deal of traffic by utilizing video search engine optimization. I stress the word “optimized videos” because its not just about uploading videos to YouTube and other sites. Its about making sure that the videos are tagged with the right keywords in the right places for the search engines to pick up and drive relevant traffic to your website.

Here are some tips for optimizing videos on your own site. Take the source video file and infuse it with your keywords; in the Title, Description, and Keywords tags. Make sure your video is the main feature on a page and surround it with relevant text and embedded links.

Syndicating your Store

2009-07-08T04:37:00.000-07:00

Getting your store on the web is a task. Once your site is up, you need to be able to get your items everywhere possible to achieve better traffic and more sales.

Google Base is an online tool that allows your store to be syndicated. We launched a new Hardware and Tools website for Harper Hardware of Richmond, VA. Once we published the website, we syndicated 20,000 of their items to Google Base. Look HERE. Google Base equates to almost half their traffic.

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which will be made searchable on Google. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches.

City of Hampton Website Grant

2009-06-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

VBWebSites is proud to announce that we have been approved to be a Certified Service Provider for the City of Hampton, VA e-Commerce Grant Program and wanted to pass this information along to you.

If you have a business located and licensed in Hampton and don't quite have the web presence you deserve or have no presence at all, Grants are now available up to $2,500 for qualified companies. Certified minority and women owned businesses (SWAM) are eligible to receive awards up to $4,500.

Grants are made on a first-come, first served basis. Get a Quote here and Follow the guidelines as instructed at Hampton Economic Development website.

The Hampton IDA along with the assistance of the Hampton Department of Economic Development has created a E-Commerce Grant Program aimed at assisting Hampton businesses in order to optimize productivity, marketing and technology plans that will assist in retaining and growing employment, and business profitability.

The type of assistance includes, but is not limited to the following e-commerce services:

Web Design and Development Services including custom website design, information architecture and graphic user interface planning, database driven website design and development, content management solutions, usability testing, advanced scripting and programming, custom database development, collaboration and social networking (Web 2.0), website accessibility analysis, and maintenance contracts.
Consultation Services including information technology strategic planning, e-commerce needs and marketing assessments, domain name registration assistance, hosting service needs assessments, website analytics, and website security assessments and testing tools.
Internet Marketing Services including email marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, e-newsletter, bogs, RSS, Wilkins.
E-Commerce Services including shopping carts, donation and membership systems, online security assessments and testing tools.

Grant Amounts

Individual awards range from $1,500 to $2,500 each. Certified minority and women owned businesses are eligible to receive awards up to $4,500.
Maximum grant amount shall not to exceed 50% of total project cost or the allowable grant, whichever is less.
Funding is subject to appropriation and grants are made on a first-come, first served basis.

Requirements

Technical and business assistance will be available to all Hampton for-profit businesses which are licensed in and maintain their principal places of business within the City of Hampton, Virginia.
Projects must be legal, no adult only material, ethical, and commercially viable
Grants are made on a first-come, first served basis.

Get a Quote Today: Click Here
More Information can be found at: http://www.hampton.gov/ed/business/e_commerce_grant.html

Thankfully,
Brady Behrman
President, VBWebSites.net
Office: 757-271-8296
e-mail: brady@vbwebsites.net

May 2009 Newsletter

2009-04-30T03:34:00.000-07:00

There is light at the end of the tunnel

It seems as though things are getting better and more and more companies are focusing new marketing efforts to the web. We all know and understand the importance of a professional web presence. Your business represented well on the web proves credibility and is your doorway for new exciting opportunities.

The problem many companies face is Where to Start. Here is a list of what to do when seeking a presence on the world wide web.

Contact a Web Design Company that has proven results.
- Whether you choose VBWebSites or not, the following info will help you along the way.
Whichever Web Development company you contact, if they do indeed care about their clients, will help you devise a plan and structure for your website.
- This plan is achieved by researching similar companies and learning what your company offers.
Once a plan is made, the web design and development company will start working with you to establish the content.
- This is often the most tedious task. In our practice, If our clients have problems creating their own content, we call and setup an interview with the client by a professional copywriter that will work with our client to help establish this content.
Once the structure / content is figured out, design and development begin.

Based off the content, it is important to use images in the design that best represent your company and services. Images and Pictures play a huge factor in a great design.

From here, it's just putting the left over pieces of the puzzle together.
Final Steps pre-launch are checking for Search Engine Optimization.

By doing this, your website will have effective results from launch.

After the first month, We carefully review the website traffic reports to analyze and make sure we are focusing our efforts on our clients niche key words and search terms to ensure up most optimization.

We hope that this helps you get your website established. Again, whether you choose to inquire with VBWebSites (we care and deliver results.. shameless plug) or go elsewhere, make sure the above is handled correctly so your web site investment proves to be a positive experience for your company.

Last but not least, don't have your friends sisters uncle who has a friend who knows someone that can build a website do your website. This often is wasted time and money. Your company deserves the best presence possible, go to a reputable company and get results that you deserve.

We hope you enjoyed this newsletter, feel free to share it.

Thankfully,
Brady Behrman
President, VBWebSites.net

VBWebSites.net on Twitter

2009-04-15T04:44:00.000-07:00

Four Old-School Reasons Why You Can Thrive in this Recession

2009-03-06T08:31:00.000-08:00

So, how’s the economic meltdown treating you? Excited about the opportunities, or sick to your stomach worrying about how your bills will get paid?

Exhilarated or freaked out?

Maybe a little of both?

It’s impossible to really see massive change when we’re still in the middle of it. But there are a handful of things you can bank on. One of them is that human nature doesn’t fundamentally change, even though the environment can change radically.

And if you look back over most of the time we human beings have been on the planet, you realize that it’s in our nature to be entrepreneurs. In most times, most people created something valuable, then arranged to exchange that for something else.

The Industrial Revolution came along and we started to think it made sense for most people to work for somebody else. Just a few people knew how to do very complicated things like run factories. Most of us had to settle for being the faceless masses who could be trained to work in those factories.

The shake-up we’re in now could change our lives as profoundly as the Industrial Revolution did. Every week, thousands of employees are becoming entrepreneurs, whether they wanted to be or not. A job, once seen as a necessity, might be a pretty scarce resource for awhile.

So it might be time to think about the ancient traits that have helped entrepreneurs since the dawn of history, and how they relate to the emerging 21st-century economy.

1. Self-reliance

Back when we moved from farms to factories (and later, to cubicles), once we got a few things like child labor and worker safety straightened out, a lot of us got into the habit of letting a company take care of us.

An 18th-century farmer and a prehistoric cave dweller had one thing in common: if they didn’t hustle their asses off, they starved. There was no benevolent employer who would make sure things turned out OK.

Often, things didn’t turn out OK at all. But you worked hard and you kept your eyes open and you made your own luck.

Today’s version of self-reliance is unimaginable luxury in comparison. You’re highly unlikely to get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, if you get appendicitis it probably won’t kill you, and if you need to figure out how to do something, you can tap into the better part of human knowledge at any public library.

Enjoy the incredible benefits of the 21st century, but don’t lose that ancient human drive to make our own fates. Keep hustling.

2. Great ideas

Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom (two wild and crazy guys) argued in Funky Business that Karl Marx was right. The workers now control the means of production. Because in the emerging economy, the means of production are between your ears.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t (necessarily) about making physical things any more. The value you can create now comes from your own wisdom, perceptiveness, style, intelligence, flexibility, and creativity.

Even if you’re making an object, it’s the design and intelligence you put into that object that make it valuable, not the physical molecules.

In every market, you win by offering people what they want and need. The winners in the new marketplace will sell information, road maps, digital tools, education, and entertainment—often, all contained within one product.

These aren’t capital-intensive projects. They don’t require armies of workers to build physical infrastructure, or legions of slaves to dig plantations or build pyramids.

Every entrepreneur is the product of a specific cultural environment, and the environment we’re in now is information overload. The normal human brain was never meant to process this much data. Most people are completely overwhelmed by the endless tangle of information, and it just gets more complex every day.

As an information entrepreneur, you can navigate that roaring river and pluck out just what your customers need, then wrap it in the package that makes it exactly what they want.

Pay attention, keep learning, and keep evolving. Entrepreneurs have always prevailed by solving problems in smart new ways. There are more ways to do that today than there have ever been before.

3. The village is your customer

Once upon a time, the bread baker and his village were stuck with one another. If he baked lousy bread, he had to look his neighbors in the eye and face their scorn. The fact that his customers were his neighbors kept him on the straight and narrow. There was no difference between his professional reputation and his personal one.

Huge 20th-century industrialism made that seem irrelevant and quaint. We had no idea what kind of person made the toy or car or loaf of bread we just bought, and we forgot to even wonder.

Now the village is back. If we blow it, customers publicly rap on our window (with social media, blogs or Twitter) and give us a piece of their mind.

Once again, our reputation and our products are one and the same. What we create doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to show that we give a damn.

The inconvenient part is that the village isn’t stuck with you. If your baguette isn’t great, your customer can FedEx something from an artisanal bakery in Napa or Madison or Boca Raton.

The cool part, though, is that if you make something handmade (even if it’s delivered in pixels), personal, and/or magnificently useful, your village can and will find you. Whether you make homespun yarn or an interactive course on how to start a dog-walking business, your product can find its own profitable village of happy customers.

4. It’s in your DNA

The human being is an inherently creative, flexible, resilient creature.

You are an inherently creative, flexible, resilient creature.

The times may well get worse before they get better. But compared with a lot of history’s darker moments, this one’s pretty comfortable.

And the opportunities that have opened up because of technology and communication are nothing short of breathtaking. No, not everyone’s going to become an information entrepreneur.

But you can.

Embrace the entrepreneurship that’s in your DNA. Keep your eyes open for problems to solve and markets to serve. And buckle up. Like every exciting ride, this one’s got a few hairpin curves.

Credit for this article goes to: Copy Blogger

Small Business Prevails

2009-03-03T12:58:00.001-08:00

It is truly an amazing time for America. Stock Markets are crashing, people are losing jobs but now there seems to be a new scene of new start up businesses making their mark on the community.

More and more compainies are shifting their marketing efforts to the web. Why is that?

More bang for the buck
Increased web awareness
targeting customers
There is no form of better and cost effective advertising / marketing

In these times, a business without a professional web presence is not much of a business at all unfortunately. Companies as well as consumers seek and research who they do business with. Credibility plays a key factor.

We hope to help you and your company in this new year, a fresh start is just around the corner!

Visit us online: http://www.vbwebsites.net

Brady Behrman

Hello 2009, Goodbye 2008

2008-12-19T04:30:00.000-08:00

As 2008 draws to a close, a new prosperous 2009 is in our future. Statistics show more and more companies, especially in this economy, will be shifting efforts to the web. Your web presence is your diamond in the rough. Your website promotes your products and services to a much larger audience than any advertisement will do. Most of all, credibility plays a key factor when consumers seek your services.

Since 2002, VBWebSites has made it's place on the web, delivering websites that are effective and achieve results. We have the know how and most of all, pashion and desire. http://www.vbwebsites.net

Some known facts about the future of the 2009 web:

Geographically Based Search Strengthens
Rise in corporate use of social media marketing
Overused web design trends will become tired
RSS Feeds will increase in women-focused niches
Targeted User-Controlled advertising will be on the rise
Blogs are going to rule the Google-verse
New online startups are going to be everywhere
Sites that go mobile are going to have the advantage

It's our job to educate and help our clients. Visit Us now

SEO Essentials

2008-12-11T06:38:00.000-08:00

Search engine optimization is not intuitive. It’s a learned skill. But it can be confusing for someone who has never encountered it from the backside of a website. The language alone can scare some people: Keywords, link relevance, anchor text, meta tags, CSS, dynamic HTML, site architecture, and all the rest.

While there are a great many things to learn about SEO from a technical point of view, there are some bare essentials that everyone should know. If you own a website of any kind or do any kind of business online - whether you build your own websites or have someone else develop them - then you should be aware of the basic elements of SEO. But what are those?

There are four key areas of search engine optimization where website development is concerned and you should have a basic understanding of at least three of these four:

Keyword-focused content - Keyword-rich content is still the meat of most websites today. You should understand how keywords fit into the overall design and development of a website, what they can and should be used for, and the dangers of going too far.

Link building - Links are important on the web. Outbound links, inbound links, and internal site links are very important. You should have a basic familiarity with the types of links and how to employ them for maximum benefit.
Website design - Not all website designs are equal. There are some elements that are better for optimization of your website than others. You don’t have to know it all, but you should be familiar with design elements that don’t provide the best benefits, and avoid them.

Code - You can’t build a website without code. You don’t have to be a coder to understand that every kind of code has its purpose and to go beyond the means of that purpose could hurt you.

Every website owner, even if you don’t do your own coding or website design, should be familiar with the basic elements of SEO.

Credit to: SEO Journal

2007-12-06T14:14:00.000-08:00

In web design, when we think about flow we usually think about “task flows” or “flow charts” but there’s another type of flow that we should keep in mind. It’s that feeling of complete absorption when you’re engaged in something you love to do without being disrupted by anxiety or boredom caused by tasks that are confusing, repetitive or overly taxing.

Flow, as a mental state, was first proposed by psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is characterized by a distorted sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and complete engagement in the task at hand. Software engineers might feel it when they’re writing code, gamers might feel it when playing Guitar Hero III, Christopher Cross felt it when he went sailing. For designers, it’s exactly the feeling we hope to promote in the people who use our sites.

How do we create sites that inspire that feeling? Well, it starts with a site that solves a challenging problem and is complex enough to require a certain amount of learning by the user. The goal should not necessarily be to create a simple site. The goal should be to create a site that feels painless to use no matter how complex it really is. But wait, you might be thinking, hasn’t there been a simplicity movement in web design over the last few years? Yes, but there’s a learning curve for any site that seeks to solve a complex problem. We shouldn’t confuse simplicity with a desire to avoid needless complexity.

The way to make the complex feel painless is to design with flow in mind. By designing a site that is fluid and intuitive and inspires flow, you help new users get up-to-speed more quickly, reduce the chance that existing users leave your site to switch to another and create users that evangelize your site to other people. That results in more users, increased activity, and greater awareness of your site.

The following four rules are based on Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (more info) and are meant to help nurture the flow experience in users.

1. Set clear goals
The first step in designing for flow is to set clear goals for your users. It’s important to create both an overarching goal as well as smaller, incremental goals. Goals help users understand where they’re going and each step they’ll take to get there.

Marketing copy is often low on the list of priorities, but it can be key to helping users form their goals. When describing their products on their company homepage, 37signals avoids the typical marketing jargon in favor of down-to-earth language. Campfire’s description: “It’s like instant messaging, but optimized for groups. Especially great for remote teams.” These descriptions help visitors understand product differentiations and how each might be used in real-world situations.

On personal organization tool Backpack, 37signals provides a fantastic set of examples to help users understand the specific uses for the application. They show how one might use Backpack to plan a wedding, comparison shop or organize employee searches. For users who have a difficult time figuring out what they’re supposed to do with a site and who find a list of features meaningless, these examples can be invaluable in setting goals. Realistic examples help users understand how they might use the site and inspire them to achieve what they’ve visualized.

2. Provide immediate feedback
Once users understand what they can achieve via the site, they’ll want to start making progress towards realizing their goals. It’s the job of the site to provide the necessary guidance so that the user feels they are actively achieving them.

Wufoo, an application that helps people build forms and collect information, does an excellent job of guiding users through form creation. Their wizard-style interface provides instantaneous feedback by showing a live preview of the user’s form as they create it. By doing so, they’ve removed the potential anxiety of not knowing what the end product will look like. Users can see that the tasks they are performing are continuously moving them toward their goals.

Flickr’s Flash-based image upload tool is another good example of providing users with immediate feedback. File upload on the web has always been a less-than-ideal user experience. Typically, a user selects a file using a file upload form control, submits the form and waits, sometimes for quite a long time, for some sort of confirmation screen. Flickr has improved upon that process by allowing users to see the progress of each image. Users no longer need to fear a long wait just to see an error screen. They can watch the progress bar and know that photos are being uploaded.

3. Maximize efficiency
Once a user becomes comfortable with a site, they’ll want to start using it more efficiently. When they’re experiencing flow, users want to work more quickly and want the site to feel more responsive.

Google Reader has several features that make it feel fast and effortless. Perhaps the best example is the “endless scroll.” It eliminates the need for pagination by fetching new articles as you scroll down the page so that you can read all the articles in a tag or feed without ever clicking to go to a new page. The user never has to disrupt their reading by clicking a link to the next page.

Another way that Google Reader ensures efficiency is through the email feature which, when clicked, appears directly below the article and allows you to send a story to a friend without losing your place. Google avoids causing a disruption in flow by reducing the mental cost of taking an action, thereby promoting more engaged use of the site.

Backpack provides a great example of efficiency with its options for reminders. Rather than selecting a day, a month, a year, an hour, and a minute, they’ve provided some extremely useful shortcuts to let you select options like “later today” or “in two weeks”. They’ve avoided forcing an unnecessarily complex interface on their users because they’ve thought beyond how the data goes into the database. They’ve removing the friction that would be created by forcing users to think about specific days and times, allowing them to choose an option that feels more natural.

4. Allow for discovery
Once a user has begun to work with maximum efficiency, there’s a chance that they’ll feel less engaged and grow bored with their experience on the site. In order to avoid this, you should make content and features available for discovery.

For content sites, this may be as simple as displaying newly created content in the hopes that it will catch the user’s eye. The website of The New York Times includes a “Most Popular” module that displays the most emailed, most blogged and most searched stories. Even though these aren’t based on information of individual readers, these are extremely relevant to most users since they pinpoint the stories that grab the attention of the average person.

Ebay makes features discoverable by placing them in the context in which users will be most likely to try them out. For example, when looking at an item on Ebay, underneath the link to “Watch this item” are links to mobile or IM alerts. The people at Ebay know that alerts lead to more active participation, so they promote them where users will be most interested in them. This kind of discovery allows users to continuously learn new things and find new ways to interact with a site.

Go with the flow
Flow is a powerful psychological experience. Designing for flow requires an enlargement of empathy and a deepening of emotional and intellectual subtlety. It is the difference between creating chapter markers and telling a story.

A site designed for flow must appeal to new users and power users alike. It must stretch both sets of users in a way they find enjoyable rather than daunting. Despite the challenges, the rewards of designing for flow are a user base that is loyal and enthusiastic—one that will evangelize your site to others—and a more profound sense of engagement between you and the people for whom you design.

Optimizing Your Web Sites Real Estate

2007-10-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

Screen Resolutions Explained: Your office mate has her monitor set to 800x600 pixels, while yours is set to 1024x768 pixels. You have more pixels, right? So how come everything looks smaller on your screen? It's because the pixels on your screen are smaller, so more of them fit into the same space. While this "more for less" concept sounds like a great idea, it can affect the overall usability and accessibility of your Web site.

Put More Into Less Space

The term "screen resolution" refers to the number of individual pixels that fit within a given space. When we're discussing an 800x600 resolution, the number 800 refers to the number of pixels that the monitor can display horizontally, while the number 600 refers to the vertical limit.

Monitor size and optimal screen resolution are closely linked. As you increase the resolution, the screen elements appear smaller. In fact, the information contained on a 15-inch screen set to 1024x768 may be so small as to be virtually unreadable. But the same information displayed at that resolution on a 17 or 21-inch monitor would look fine.

That's because a 15-inch monitor set to display at 800x600 pixels has a higher resolution than a 21-inch monitor set to the same display. That means a 200x300 pixel GIF image will look smaller on the 15-inch monitor than on the 21-inch monitor. An image that size would still be readable, but small navigation buttons quickly become illegible - even for visitors with great eyesight.

Design For Your Visitors

Ideally, your site should be completely device and browser-independent - but that's an almost impossible standard. The next best strategy is to design a site that looks good and performs well for the vast majority of your visitors. That takes research:

Are you taking advantage of all your web space real estate? Staying ahead of the web design industry, VBWebSites will start building wider sites optimizing and utilizing as much space as possible. Get your old site redesigned, placed on Search Engines and ranked higher. Get a Quote, Its Free!

Thankfully,
Brady Behrman
www.VBWebSites.net

Why doesn’t your site come up in search engines?

2007-07-31T04:16:00.000-07:00

Many people believe that because you have a website, you should automatically come up in the search engines. The truth is, it takes month for your new site to get indexed. For this reason you should never change your URL after you have already established a website, instead, forward your new URL to your old URL; this way you will not risk losing valuable indexing and your customers won’t know the difference.

So, how does one get indexed? Well, this simple question has a complex answer. It is important to understand that all search engines have one goal: They want to provide their users with relevant content for every search term or keyword phrase entered. Each engine uses constantly changing algorithms to configure the relevance of your site.

This may seem daunting, but if you concentrate on great content you are sure to get indexed and increase your page ranking over time. The more content you have, the more likely you are to establish a higher page ranking. A great way to add content on a regular basis is to have a blog that is hosted on your site’s server. We have used both Blogger and Word Press and have experienced good results with both.

Inbound links are another way to increase your page ranking. You may consider opening an E-bay store and linking back to your own site. Every time someone features you on their site – they should link back to you as well. Think of this as footprints leading back to your site. The more you have the more likely you are to get noticed.

Ask your web master to add title tags to each of your site’s pages - these should be the most relevant keyword phrases and also describe each page effectively. The use of ALT, description and meta tags are also ways you can utilize your most relevant keywords throughout your site (though these are not highly valued any longer). For more on keyword phrases and site tags, read What are keywords and why do I need them?

MSN, Yahoo and Google are the most competitive search engines and each one places varying significance on different aspects of your site.

Google uses a page ranking system called PageRank – you can check your page rank at Alexa. It is likely that your site will first come up in MSN, Yahoo, and then Google – respectively; assuming you have diligently added relevant content and keyword phrases to your site.

Keep in mind, the longer your site is active, the more weight your site carries with search engines, so have patience. Add fresh content often and remember to ask for back links to your site.

Using Images to Increase Your Search Engine Rankings

2006-12-29T08:15:00.000-08:00

Pull in hundreds of visitors per day by optimizing your graphics and images. Learn 3 simple tricks that can yield in higher traffic counts and income.

If you are an online business owner then you must read this article. You could be losing hundreds or thousands of visitors each and every day.

Did you know that millions of people are using the web to find pictures of Old Faithful, a ’69 Mustang or a cartoon drawing of Bill Clinton? There are potential customers searching for graphics of your products and services right now. Are you capturing their business?

The major search engines have been collecting images from websites and sorting them by topics, keywords and alt tags. Are you optimizing your images properly to take advantage of this free advertising?

Google's Image Search forms about 12% of its regular search queries. That's a lot of searching for graphics. To give you an example, Google’s Image Search accounts for more queries than Ask.com’s regular queries. If your online business lends itself to photos, that percentage could mean a jump to 25-40% of your traffic.

There are a few basic rules to optimizing your images. While optimization is optional, I highly recommend taking the additional 30 seconds to add alt and title tags and proper graphic names. The difference in traffic and income could be drastic.

Some folks shy away from alt tags these days. I still like them and use them to my advantage. The trick is to code the tag so that it provides a line of information to your website visitor.
For example, I have a fitness website that displays photographs of different exercises. The alt tag for a particular exercise would read: Crunch- Keep Belly Button Pulled Into Spine.
In other words, use the alt tag to sum up your main point of having the graphic in the first place. Be sure to include words in your alt tag that help define the picture as well. The alt tag will only display if the graphic does not load, or if your visitor is using a text based browser.
Use the title tag in your images as well. The title tag will display when you move your cursor over an image. The title tag is built into the coding of the image just as the alt tag is. You should also use words that describe the graphic and provide additional information.

Another way to optimize images is in their file names. All graphics have a file name when you save them. This is a simple way to earn points with the search engine! Instead of naming your ab crunch picture 1yhjdk65789.jpg, why not name it ab-crunch.jpg? It’s all about using words to describe the image.

This may be reminding you of keywords. Images should be treated just as your online business content. I’ll even go a step further and say that images should be an integral part of your website content. Use every advantage you have to rank well at the engines!

One caveat: do not spam your alt or title tags. Search engines are growing smarter every day. Build your web business with dignity and honesty. The throwback will be tenfold.

Your hosting company should provide image search traffic analysis of your website. If your hosting company does not provide this, strongly consider switching hosting companies. Graphic and image searches are going to increase in the coming months and years. You must know how it affects your traffic and your bottom line.

http://www.vbwebsites.net