http://www.imtcva.org
What kinds of WordPress plugins work best? Learning the latest blog techniques can help you find a job. The Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia is an Internet marketing school designed to teach you everything you would need to know about selling your products online. No only can you sell your products and services, you can also get hired by companies looking for the same thing. Check out http://www.imtcva.org for more information.

We love our websites. We work hard on them, often pay good money for them and then want to show them off to our friends and family. But if you want your site to make money, you'll have to fix these common mistakes that many of us make:

– Opt-in forms not in a prominent area. If your opt-in form is not visible to your visitors, people won't sign up for your freebies and newsletters. An email database is the most important way to make money online. You can't build a list if your opt-in form is in the footer, only on your home page, at the bottom of your content or otherwise below the fold of the site.

– Using videos that are small, ineffective or out-of-date. Make sure you use video player software on your site that is easy to use and easy to see. Small Youtube embed codes, outdated flash players and broken player links will make your site look unprofessional.

–  Too many navigation links. If you want visitors to get around the site easily and possibly buy something, keep the navigation as simple as possible. If you make too many pages with too many choices, your visitors will get confused and leave.

– Font is too small or hard to read. Using a small font can be hard on the eyes, especially for older visitors. Website formatting is different than for print. Monitors are all different and some can make the font nearly unreadable. Using italics and other fancy fonts and colors can create a bad experience for your readers. Think about how many times you have clicked away because the font was too hard to read.

– Make sure that your content is current. Updating content will build trust with your visitors. They are not there to see old stuff. This includes fixing any broken links, updating old images and changing the copyright date.

These are just a few of the common mistakes we make on our websites. Find out other ways your site can make more money! 

Social proof is an important feature of a website if you don't want to isolate your visitors.

What is social proof? It's any place on the website where your showing off how many people have visited the site, subscribe to the site or a place where visitors can leave a comment or share the content with their friends. In the old days, visitor counters and guestbooks used to help in establishing the fact that people were visiting and enjoying the site. There days, it's far more powerful to let your visitors share the content with their friends and sound off with their opinions.

There's two main reasons why this may be more important than you think.

1) Google is rewarding websites that people ‘like.' How do they know what people like? Sites that have great content, that is shared using the Twitter, Facebook and Google + sharing buttons, look like sites that are entertaining, educational and relevant. Yes, Google can tell when people share content with their friends, stay on the website longer and leave comments. How is Google rewarding sites that people like? With higher search positioning.

2) No one wants to be the first to buy something they are unfamiliar with. If a visitor can see that others have been sharing, commenting and subscribing to a site, they'll feel better and more assured about buying something. Just like the review feature on Amazon, how others react to a site, product or service has a major impact on the buying decisions of others who follow. If your website has the ability to extract comments from your visitors, that will have a big influence on other people who visit in the future.

Social proof is fairly easy to implement. In WordPress, you can use a ‘comments' plug-in to get people talking. Also, a plug-in such as “Sociable” will give your visitors access to a vast array of social sharing buttons for Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Linkedin and more.

How Google ranks websites in the search results has changed dramatically…

The confused mind votes “no.”

That's an old saying concerning a new concept: website navigation. For some reason, we think that having a ton of links on our websites will make it easier for people to get where they're going or ‘force' them to go where we want them to. The real problem is that when there are too many choices, people tend to freeze up.

Navigating through a website should seem like coming to a series of doors in a hallway. If there are too many, it can instantly seem daunting. Given a clear choice of 3 or 4 can make the process clearer and smoother. We recommend no more than 6 – 7 navigation links on a home page. If you really need more, a drop-down window can help make it easier, because the choice to navigate further into the site becomes that of the visitor instead of something you thrust upon them.

Another way to keep top navigation more simple is page-to-page linking. A simple navigation link “Articles” will take the visitor to a page where more choices are, such as the titles of the individual articles themselves, and then clicking on those would lead to another dedicated page with the article body on it. This is similar to going through a house one door at a time, leading from room to room, instead of 14 doors to choose from as soon as you enter the foyer.

We often have a tendency to want to deliver too much information, just because we know a lot. For the website visitor who's just discovering this information for the first time, too much information can lead to headaches and indicision. Simple website design can make you a valuble resource to any industry.

Another great place to embed keywords that your visitors don't see but Google can, are in the image files of your website.

What files? For starters, the ones you directly upload from your digital camera, buy online or create from Photoshop. Every image has a file name. Most often, they are a registry number such as: 1220090034.jpg or some other identifier like that. After you save the image to your computer, and just before you upload the image to your website, right click on the image file and click on “rename.” You'll have the opportunity to overwrite the long identifier number and rename the file with a keyword. Choose something relevant to your business such as publicspeaking2.jpg (if your business is teaching public speaking). Do thorough keyword research ahead of time to create a list of keywords to choose from and do this to every image on your website.

If you are using WordPress for your site, you have another opportunity to add even more keywords to an image. In your Media Library, select the image and click on “edit.” In the edit section, you can change the “title” to a keyword or entire keyword phrase such as “presentation skills.” Then save your edits. For the most part, your visitor will never see these keywords, but the search engines can. That's because the search engines scan the source code for its information and these new image file names can be seen there.

Want to see what the search engines see? While viewing any webpage on the Internet, hold your mouse cursor in the middle of the page and right click. Then scroll down and select “View Source.” A window will open up that shows the ‘inside workings' of your website: the design elements, code and programming that creates the page. You do not have to know what all that code means. Besides programmers, most people don't. But the keywords that you have now embedded in the image files are there, able to be detected by Google. It's one more place to take advantage of SEO, without blatant keyword stuffing in your website copy, which can hurt you.

Additional keyword hiding places revealed…

Building a website can be exciting and daunting at the same time. In our zest to make the coolest website possible, we can easily forget to update our website by checking for broken parts.

How can a website have broken parts? Don't forget that a website has a fluid motion: navigation that takes the visitor to the other pages of the site, links embedded in anchor text and links to resources on other websites. If a search engine such as Google sees that your website has broken links, it can cost you valuable ranking in the search results. It also can quickly confuse or irritate your visitor and make them leave.

A broken link is simply a clickable link on your website that no longer goes anywhere, (page not found) or goes someplace else than it originally intended. You have to keep a constant vigil as to where your links are going to make sure that the original site has not been banned, been taken down or changed to some other site or service. The Internet is constantly changing so it's important to check for broken links often. Sometimes, when updating to new versions of WordPress, the linking code can be compromised, causing a broken link. Sometimes code just gets messed up for no reason at all. The only way to stay on top of this and not have it affect your search results is to spend time every couple of months going through your site and clicking on the links to make sure they are going to where they are supposed to.

All of this is an easy fix, even though checking on every link can be time consuming. It's worth it in the long run to make sure your website is professional looking as possible, and that you are not losing money or sign-ups with broken links to important resources.

Learn more about the latest website updates.

Unblockable Pop Up Boxes

New technology allows one type of pop up box that can’t be blocked by conventional pop up blockers and another type that gets blocked some of the time, but not all of the time.  You can use both types.

The first is called a “Hover Ad”. This is a box that uses “dynamic HTML scripting language. This language makes a box appear on a page, but the box isn’t really a separate page. It is an appendage to the page it’s on so conventional pop up blockers don’t recognize it as a pop up box.

Hover ads can be quite interesting. Some of them can be programmed to drop in from the top of your web page and bounce several times. It really gets the attention of your visitors. In fact, it doubled the subscription rate the very same day the IMTC founder put it on one of his sites. You can see examples at: https://www.antion.com and https://www.Public-Speaking.org.

Hover ads can only be used on entry to a page. They can be delayed before they appear, but you can’t use them as an exit pop like you would use when someone leaves a page without buying. There are inexpensive generators that help you make these unblockable entry pop up boxes.

http://www.imtcva.org

What kinds of WordPress plugins work best? Learning the latest blog techniques can help you find a job. The Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia is an Internet marketing school designed to teach you everything you would need to know about selling your products online. No only can you sell your products and services, you can also get hired by companies looking for the same thing. Check out http://www.imtcva.org for more information.