[tag]Blog usability[/tag] according to research, was proven to be the most significant factor in blog design. In fact, it is the influential element that keeps visitors returning to your site.

Usually the most overlooked aspect when [tag]designing a blog[/tag], usability has power over the web. When your visitors can not easily navigate your site, chances are, they will not utilize your library in [tag]search for information[/tag] and just go to other sites. Note that all blogs are just a click of the mouse away. Hundreds of thousands of other online stores that offer the same services or products as you are crowding the internet, making online shoppers more selective and choosy when concluding whether to stay and continue their browsing or just leave.

The internet offers online shoppers ample freedom and various choices; nobody will ever waste their time on a poorly constructed blog and/or website.� In order to provide web usability, you must involve or think of your prospect clients in designing it.

Not like a traditional “brick and mortar” store, a lot of online stores or websites do not permit their visitors to “walk through” inside the site as they can in a traditional store set-up. While this may seem an unworkable task to accomplish, if done correctly, a “user-friendly” approach to web design will easily accomplish this task.

When online shopping, all things must to be located where visitors expect them to be at. The practice of flooding a client with abundant item choices all at the same time and making them search for certain items that they need, is most definitely not the concept of web usability.

Your visitors must be taken into consideration all throughout your planning as well as designing process. Bear in mind that web usability must never be considered after the construction of a website.

Fixing and then testing your website only after construction is useless and will not yield satisfactory results. Your best approach would be to combine a replica of “pervasive usability” unto your web design and construction process.

According to surveys, here are top 12 reasons why visitors want to go back to your site:

•� � � [tag]Easy navigation[/tag] � � � � � � � � 74%

•� � � [tag]Quick download time[/tag] � � � � � 65%

•� � � [tag]Frequently updated information[/tag] � � 58%

•� � � [tag]Content quality[/tag] � � � � � � � � � 57%

•� � � [tag]Content quantity[/tag] � � � � � � � � 30%

•� � � [tag]Content organization[/tag] � � � � � 40%

•� � � Prompt [tag]customer service[/tag] � � � � � 40%

•� � � Website search tools� � � � � � 25%

•� � � Layout of homepage� � � � � � 20%

•� � � Enjoyment� � � � � � � � � 19%

•� � � Website appearance� � � � � � 18%

•� � � Inclusion of animated graphics� � � � 9%

Basing from these reasons, here are usability tips to help you design your website:

1.� Become familiar with your visitors based on their preferences.� You need a website with personality as well as content quality that accommodates your visitor’s taste; you should understand and recognize their color choices, technical skills, etc.

2. Create obvious and simple interface. The more apparent and recognizable the web interface is, then your visitors never have to undergo frustration in guessing how your site really works, and instead on concentrating on the interface, they should be concentrating on your site’s content.

3. Website readability.� Create “easy to read” paragraph, not using small text or font size.

4. Quick loading.� You need a fast downloadable page as visitors hate to wait.

5. Avoid hidden navigation, as your visitors need to know where and what to click in order to go someplace.

6. Get visitor feedbacks so you will know what is working and what does not.� Learn from your prospects.

7. Investigate on website visitor performance.� Determine how long it takes to perform a certain task? It should not take too long, the faster the better.� If not, work on your user interaction so to improve performance.

8. Provide a help section.� If your website visitor does make a certain mistake, then they truly will appreciate it if you provide ways to assist them.� “404 page” is great for directing “spiders” to crawl unto your webpage.
Testing for usability

Testing for usability is not complicated and very inexpensive to carry out. The easiest answer is to design a simple sequence of undertakings for web users to carry out trials.

Invite people or friends to your workplace, then request them to navigate your website, watching and observing while they surf.� Do not wait when your website is done before you test it; test it now.

The work can be simple like finding out a product’s information or finding out how a certain firm can be contacted or one can order a product and finding shipping policies information.

After testing, fix any problem and test it again.� Continue testing and refining web usability of your website until such time that there are no problems found, that the experience is efficient and pleasant.

Remember that website usability is concerned to not just the appearance of a site, but more importantly how your site performs and particularly, it gives emphasis on the experience of your visitors.

For a [tag]blog[/tag] to prosper in a [tag]search engine[/tag] string search and come out on top, the page has to essentially be “prepared” to be detected and well-received by the [tag]search engine algorithm[/tag].

Because of the high amount of browsers visiting search engines such as Google and Yahoo, a new form of process was developed to make full use of the pros and avoid the cons of the algorithms used by the search engine companies. This process of preparation is called [tag]Search engine optimization[/tag] (SEO).� Ih order to be effective you need to understand [tag]how to SEO your blog[/tag].

As the amount of information grows exponentially, search engines will play a more vital role in keeping order in the [tag]World Wide Web[/tag]. This has encouraged increasing numbers of people with something to look for to rely on search engines more. It simply is now a fact that you can find information faster if you use a search engine.

Because of this companies looking to attract more traffic to their blogs would pay for valuable ad space within search results sent by the search engines to browsers. Because browsers are more often than not set on getting information about something, placing an ad that totally dovetails with what they’re looking for makes it easy for the advertiser to make a sale.

What search engine optimizers do then, is to make every effort to make the site considered highly relevant and show up in the top ten listing of their respective search strings. The usual method of SEO is to improve content, and dynamically expand the site with even more relevant data.

Unfortunately, unscrupulous SEO’s have also devised ways to cheat the algorithms of search engine to keep themselves on top with low quality or even misleading content. Google, Yahoo and other search engines have fought back by using even more complex algorithms to filter the junk and garbage out of their engines.

To properly optimize a web page, please follow the following steps:

1.� � � [tag]Optimization[/tag] should be part of the design. To properly optimize a web page, it should be considered as part of the design process. It should not be treated as an afterthought after the fact. This will lead to shoddy worksmanship and create unnecessary strain in the browser looking for relevant data.

2.� � � Each blog post must be optimized. That is to say, each blog post must be unique, with their own [tag]content[/tag], titles and tags.

3.� � � It’s not just the search engines. Don’t create a site specifically for search engines alone. Most people who start out this way create a site that is unwieldy and has bad grammar. Most browsers pass over unprofessional sites with poor copy.

4.� � � [tag]Keywords[/tag]. Make sure you have a list of terms you want placed in the page. Also consider that the keywords relevant to page 1 stays in page 1 while page 2 keywords stay in page 2. This is to make sure each page is unique in its offering, avoiding redundancy. In terms to competitiveness, a linking campaign will probably create more traffic and better results than concentrating on keywords.

Place your keywords strategically in the following areas: Page title, Meta tags, Body, Headings, Images, Bullets, Links.� High quality blogs typically rank well in the search engines partly because more and more people recommend it to others via word of mouth, email, instant messenger, or even better, take the link and place it in their own website link sections.

Google considers pages with inbound links as a vote to the quality and relevance of that site, increasing its rank in the search engine hierarchy.

In addition to [tag]inbound links[/tag], search engines also send out spiders to assess the site for relevance against an algorithm. The spider basically goes to the site and analyzes all the text in the page, including markup items, the meta tags and the title.

If you are in the midst of considering the development of an [tag]Internet marketing program[/tag], you may be interested in hiring an [tag]Internet and network marketing consultant[/tag].� There are some factors that you should keep in mind if you are considering hiring the services of an Internet and network marketing consultant.

If you are interested in developing a comprehensive [tag]marketing scheme online[/tag] for your business enterprise — whether your business is located on the Internet and World Wide Web or located in the brick and mortar world — you should give serious consideration to retaining the services of an Internet and network marketing consultant.Â� There are many advantages that you can obtain through the hiring or retaining of an Internet and network marketing consultant at this point in time … benefits that have been realized by many different businesses and individuals in this day and age, business in many different industries and located in many different locations around the world.Â�

The most basic benefit that you can realize through the hiring of an Internet and network marketing consultant is the experience you will be able to obtain from such a consultant.� There are now a good number of Internet and network marketing consultants in business today who have amassed a good deal of experience over the past decade in the arena of Internet and network marketing.

Another of the benefits that can be realized through the retaining of an Internet and network marketing consultant is the ability to develop a long term plan.� Rather than coming up with a flash in the pan program, with the aid and assistance of an Internet and network marketing consultant, you can have created for your business and Internet and network marketing program and scheme that will deal with your current objectives as well as serve your interests well into the future.

It is all well and good to have a short term program for Internet marketing, but it is far more important to have the aid and assistance of a truly qualified Internet and network marketing consultant that will develop a long term and long enduring program.� This is a worthy and appropriate investment in the future of your business enterprise.