Here’s a list of ten additional design elements that will increase the usability of virtually all sites:

1. Place your name and logo on every page and make the logo a link to the home page (except on the home page itself, where the logo should not be a link: never have a link that points right back to the current page).
2. Provide search if the site has more than 100 pages.
3. Write straightforward and simple headlines and page titles that clearly explain what the page is about and that will make sense when read out-of-context in a search engine results listing.
4. Structure the page to facilitate scanning and help users ignore large chunks of the page in a single glance: for example, use grouping and subheadings to break a long list into several smaller units.
5. Instead of cramming everything about a product or topic into a single, infinite page, use hypertext to structure the content space into a starting page that provides an overview and several secondary pages that each focus on a specific topic. The goal is to allow users to avoid wasting time on those subtopics that don’t concern them.
6. Use product photos, but avoid cluttered and bloated product family pages with lots of photos. Instead have a small photo on each of the individual product pages and link the photo to one or more bigger ones that show as much detail as users need. This varies depending on type of product. Some products may even need zoomable or rotatable photos, but reserve all such advanced features for the secondary pages. The primary product page must be fast and should be limited to a thumbnail shot.
7. Use relevance-enhanced image reduction when preparing small photos and images: instead of simply resizing the original image to a tiny and unreadable thumbnail, zoom in on the most relevant detail and use a combination of cropping and resizing.
8. Use link titles to provide users with a preview of where each link will take them, before they have clicked on it.
9. Ensure that all important pages are accessible for users with disabilities, especially blind users.
10. Do the same as everybody else: if most big websites do something in a certain way, then follow along since users will expect things to work the same on your site. Remember Jakob’s Law of the Web User Experience: users spend most of their time on other sites, so that’s where they form their expectations for how the Web works.

Keywords, perhaps ‘keyword phrases’ is a better term to use, are one of the, if not the, most important attributes you can use for making sure that your business is going to be successful on the Internet. Keyword phrases are what people use when they’re searching the web. You must have done searches yourself and every time you did the search engines went looking for exact matches, if possible, so they can give you a selection of sites that meet your needs.

Although plenty of people do a single word search, generally speaking, it’s a little harder to get good rankings for simple single terms, especially in a competitive niche. Even phrases like credit card throw up 176 million(!) results so they are tough to do well for.

That’s where the keyword phrases come in. Credit card application, for example, has only 3,480,000 results. Still a lot, but much lower than credit card. Apply for credit card has just over 1,000,000 results.

And as long as there are good numbers of people searching for the phrase, the longer phrases are very often much easier to get ranked for. For example, there’s a 3 word phrase one of my sites ranks for and I get #1 in MSN and #5 in Google. Those 2 results bring me in steady traffic and steady revenue.

If your site uses such keywords it can be much easier to get near the top of the search engine results – especially if you know the right way to implement a link-building campaign.

When you’re writing articles you should think about a range of keyword phrases you want your sites to be ranked for. Using some of the keyword phrases in the article is a good start, but in your call to action, your resource box, be sure to use the main keyword phrase you want to rank for. Use it as the anchor text to your site. If you’re not sure what that means, here’s an example for this post:

Learn how to make a good keyword selection

In the example above I used keyword selection as the anchor text. Used in that way it tells the search engines that the website/page it links to is related to that phrase. A single link as I have here probably won’t make me appear very high in the search engines for that phrase, but if I undertook an article writing campaign using that phrase this post would rise up the ranks of the search engines. Any time somebody looked for keyword selection my post would be there.

When you pick your keywords spend some time checking the top 10 results in each search engine to see what your competition is. No point trying to compete with sites that already have thousands of links with that anchort text – it would be too hard to climb the search engines with that much competition.

After you’ve chosen the main keyword phrase to target try to pick several variations. Try to create new articles based around the various keyword phrases, remembering each time to use the main keyword phrase that you’re writing about as your anchor text. That gives you a chance to appear in the search results for a number of keyword phrases, thus ensuring more traffic.

Is there an easy way to do Keyword Research?

Well, it can be time consuming to do the research on keywords and to find out where the competition is. I use a special keyword suggestion tool to do my research. For ploughing through the numbers and giving you the data you need to outflank the competition, this keywords tool is fast and easy to use.

One thing is absolutely certain: if you can do more work in less time, its also true that you can get more of the same results in the same time. So if you find a way to reduce the time it takes to do your research and improve the quality of your research, you’ll get better results – and more of them – in the same time as you now spend.

That’s got to be worth trying, hasn’t it?