Glend Article

Does Your URL Work Without The ‘www.’?

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Go into your browser and then enter your website address without the ‘www.’ ,eg. yourdomainname.com

Press the ENTER key and see if you can still reach your website. If you can, then congratulate yourself and have an early lunch/go home early.
If not, then read on.

This is a simple problem to rectify. If you have access to your web server then you need to adjust the DNS configuration and enable or disable the www/no-www functionality. You can also setup your server to have both www and non-www so they go to the same pages (multiple headers is what it’s called in IIS).

If you don’t have access to your web server then you need to telephone your web hosting company and talk to them. If they can adjust your DNS settings then fine, if not then there is another way around this, you can set up a ‘301 Redirect’. Below are some good articles about 301 Redirects so you can learn how to set one up;
. http://www.tamingthebeast.net.... Read More

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Site Maps Are Important

Friday, July 18th, 2008

From the usability side of things, site maps are very handy in helping your visitors navigate your site and find everything you want them to find. A simple link to your site map on every page will help ensure that your visitors should never get lost.

If you haven’t got one yet then you may want to check this page out at Jakob Nielsen’s site on site map usability - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020106.html

Site map’s are also useful for search engine spiders. It allows them to crawl all, or most of your pages directly from one page.

Search engines are relatively stupid, they only really understand HTML, so make sure your site map uses links within HTML tags, not image maps, JavaScript links, Flash or so they require session ID’s - most search engines won’t follow these links to the other pages on your site. The site map should include links to virtually every page of your site, or at least to every important section.

Design
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Hiding Your Affiliate Links

Friday, July 18th, 2008

When some surfers see an affiliate link they can just open a new browser window and then directly type in the merchants url and go straight to the site, this results in you getting no referral.

To avoid this you can encode your affiliate link within a small piece of JavaScript. This hides the true affiliate url and allows you to display a ‘dummy url’ in its place.
Below is the code;
<a onMouseOver=’window.status=”http://www.merchant-url-goes-here.com”; return true’ onMouseOut=’window.status=”Done”; return true’ href=”http://www.affiliate-url-goes-here.com” target=”_blank”>TEXT GOES HERE</a>

This link will display the http://www.merchant-url-goes-here.com in the status bar at the bottom of your browser, hiding the Read More

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Test and Experiment

Friday, July 18th, 2008

This is to emphasize the importance for affiliates to test, experiment and be flexible with their websites. Not all your links and promotional ideas will work well so it’s important to find out what is working, and what isn’t working.

If you’ve got a banner on your site and you haven’t earned a dime from it, then don’t just sit there cursing the banner and give up. Try creating a new page dedicated to promoting that product. If you’ve done that, then maybe the content needs to change - instead of focusing on one feature, turn your attentions to promoting other features. Maybe you haven’t mentioned anything about customer care or your content may not be encouraging enough for visitors to click through on your links.

A little bit of research can help you create better performing pages. See what the merchant’s competitors are doing, see how other affiliates are promoting the same product, find out how websites targeting the s.... Read More

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