The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate programs are designed to allow a person (or business) to earn a commission from the sale of another (usually related) product just by placing a link to the company’s affiliate code on their website. If a visitor to the site bearing the link makes a purchase, the affiliate makes the sale, and so does the person promoting that affiliate product, just for referring the buyer to that particular

Don't Be So Square - Choosing Shaped Mouse Mats
Just because your monitor and computer tower are rectangular doesn’t mean your mouse mat has to be. In fact, with optical mouse technology getting better and better, you need less and less room for your mouse to roam. Choosing a round or custom cut mouse mat to promote your business speaks volumes about your company’s willingness to embrace technology and the unordinary.Round is RadicalThe problem, however, is that many Web designers still cannot grasp the purity of Google’s laser-like approach to search. It is the purity of this search that connects Web sites to one another.

Let’s look at a case study of a public relations agency.

Design Matters
In the case of Virginia-based Rourk Public Relations, www.rourkpr.com, the challenge was to communicate with potential clients using just the right balance of text content and Web graphics. Using Google as a search engine benchmark during the design phase, a good Web site designer understands that Google uses text content to index or list a Web site in the appropriate category. Another factor is a Web site’s locality. Have you listed your address, city, state, zip and phone with area code in “text form” throughout your Web site? This helps Google determine regional factors as they apply to your search engine ranking. Usually the best place to position this is in the footer or bottom of your Web site.

Rourk Public Relations features a nice balance of graphics and text with ample white space for readability. The design is striking, yet clean and easy to read. A Web site need not fill every inch of white space for the sake of filling up the browser space. If you’re still not convinced, look at Google’s home page.

Content is King
Search engines love content. In the Rourk Public Relations’ web site there is a ‘Team’ section with short bios and pictures. David Rourk, the agency’s president, shared with me that one of his clients found his Web site when searching for the advertising agency Barker Campbell Farley & Mans

lic Relations, www.rourkpr.com, the challenge was to communicate with potential clients using just the right balance of text content and Web graphics. Using Google as a search engine benchmark during the design phase, a good Web site designer understands that Google uses text content to index or list a Web site in the appropriate category. Another factor is a Web site’s locality. Have you listed your address, city, state, zip and phone with area code in “text form” throughout your Web site? This helps Google determine regional factors as they apply to your search engine ranking. Usually the best place to position this is in the footer or bottom of your Web site.

Rourk Public Relations features a nice balance of graphics and text with ample white space for readability. The design is striking, yet clean and easy to read. A Web site need not fill every inch of white space for the sake of filling up the browser space. If you’re still not convinced, look at Google’s home page.

Content is King
Search engines love content. In the Rourk Public Relations’ web site there is a ‘Team’ section with short bios and pictures. David Rourk, the agency’s president, shared with me that one of his clients found his Web site when searching for the advertising agency Barker Campbell Farley & Man

te category. Another factor is a Web site’s locality. Have you listed your address, city, state, zip and phone with area code in “text form” throughout your Web site? This helps Google determine regional factors as they apply to your search engine ranking. Usually the best place to position this is in the footer or bottom of your Web site.

Rourk Public Relations features a nice balance of graphics and text with ample white space for readability. The design is striking, yet clean and easy to read. A Web site need not fill every inch of white space for the sake of filling up the browser space. If you’re still not convinced, look at Google’s home page.

Content is King
Search engines love content. In the Rourk Public Relations’ web site there is a ‘Team’ section with short bios and pictures. David Rourk, the agency’s president, shared with me that one of his clients found his Web site when searching for the advertising agency Barker Campbell Farley & Man

r Web site.

Rourk Public Relations features a nice balance of graphics and text with ample white space for readability. The design is striking, yet clean and easy to read. A Web site need not fill every inch of white space for the sake of filling up the browser space. If you’re still not convinced, look at Google’s home page.

Content is King
Search engines love content. In the Rourk Public Relations’ web site there is a ‘Team’ section with short bios and pictures. David Rourk, the agency’s president, shared with me that one of his clients found his Web site when searching for the advertising agency Barker Campbell Farley & Man

age.

Content is King
Search engines love content. In the Rourk Public Relations’ web site there is a ‘Team’ section with short bios and pictures. David Rourk, the agency’s president, shared with me that one of his clients found his Web site when searching for the advertising agency Barker Campbell Farley & Mansfield. This search result was due to text within one of his team member’s biographies. Unfortunately, this competitor’s Web site was not found by the user, most likely due to the fact that their Web site is not correctly optimized for search engines.

Write meaningful, informative copy about your business. Write well-formed paragraphs that are error free. Google fine tunes its search algorithm daily. They have teams of coder-programmers who work to make Google 2nd to none in terms of pure search. So don’t write copy for search engines, write copy for your visitors. Talk about your company, your business, what you do.

Copywriters Can Increase Your Search Rankings
Writing great copy is no easy task, so it is well worth the investment to hire a good copywriter that will make your site sing and help elevate it to the first or second page of major search engine rankings. Rourk Public Relations has written copy for several of my Web clients with outstanding results. You may be the brains of your business, but you may not be a wordsmith. Hire a good copywriter. Competition on the Web is tough. You need to put your best foot forward if you want to tap into the billions of dollars that well designed and written Web sites are generating.

You have no doubt seen ads on the Web or