New European V.A.T Laws – Are You Prepared?

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

Under a new law that has been passed in the EU from July 1st 2003 any internet based company selling services or goods to customers inside the EU will have to pay the member state of their customer/client the equivalent V.A.T (Value Added Tax) Rate.

This in itself is not a big problem, online business have been paying taxes for many years, the problems start to occur when you take a look at the current state of the V.A.T system in the EU state members on an individual basis.

The following list shows the percentage of V.A.T that you will need to add to your clients bills if they are located inside a member state of the EU:

Austria – 20% VAT
Belgium – 21% VAT
Denmark – 25% VAT
Finland – 22% VAT
France – 19.6% VAT
Germany – 16% VAT
Greece – 18% VAT
Ireland – 21% VAT
Italy – 20% VAT
Luxembourg – 15% VAT
Netherlands – 19% VAT
Portugal – 17% VAT
Spain – 16% VAT
Sweden – 25% VAT
United Kingdom – 17.5% VAT

This will pose several problems for the adult industry namely, how will our billing processors be able to handle transactions from European Union citizens? After all, with so many different VAT rates across the EU their billing systems need to be able to correctly calculate the correct amount of VAT to the surfers final order.

Several accounting firms have set up new divisions to handle this for the mainstream side of the internet industry however, until just recently, the adult internet was unaware this was happening.

It would seem that although the international market place is a wholly viable one for adult webmasters to break into, it brings with it more complications that simply breaking the language barrier.

This new law will be a good test of the adult industry processors to see how they can handle the economic changes of the global market place and, more importantly, how they handle the new frontiers of international marketing on a global scale.

Article written by Lee

Building A Surfer Trap – Stage 5

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

So we hit stage 5 in this surfer trap tutorial.

It was brought to my attention this morning that we never added any ALT tags to our single FPA link so, in a change to the planned tutorial I am going to touch on this stage as, once the search engines get to our surfer traps this is going to be a crucial aspect on how highly we get ranked.

So what’s next?

Ok, now what you have to do is go back to manually editing the FPA’s (All of them!)

What you need to do is this…

Take the Multi-Site FPA first then, on ALL of the links that lead to the single site FPA’s you need to add the ALT tag. Again, in the same way as we did originally however, instead of using this tag on the images we will use this on the actual TEXT of the link so, for example the link which may be:

‘Voyeur Porn’ leading to the FPA you have for the Voyeur niche in the HTML coding will already look like this:

<a href=”mydomain.com”>Voyeur Porn</a>

Will get turned into:

<a href=”mydomain.com” ALT=”More Niche Related Keywords”>Voyeur Porn</a>

The reason we are going back over these links now and not earlier on is because you should hopefully have started to get a small amount of traffic from your counter impressions. These counters are virtually ALWAYS being crawled by the search engines due to the amount of people linking to them so, by optimizing our site at this stage, it makes it less work in getting into the search engines.

One other thing that we can now start to do (as we did a couple of stages back) is to create some more HTML pages with some tables on them, however, these will be HTML pages on their own with no images on them. Again however, you should make them 4 columns across and two rows high.

What you want to add into these tables are NICHE links so for example, taking the TEEN niche we would make eight links like:

Teen Sex
College Girls
Erotic Teens
Teen Porn
Etc
Etc
Etc
Etc…

You should do this for each of the MAIN niches so you would have a table for Teen, Gay, Mature, Asian, Ebony, Fetish and one for General and again, these should link to the NICHE FPA’s that you already have created.

These tables will be used for another console on our surfer trap however, before we implement this console we are going to have some fun with them.

Article written by Lee

So That’s What It Means!

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

Often you will hear other webmaster talking about things such as unique hits, banner exchanges and, AVS systems. The article below is a simplified glossary of those and many other terms that you will begin to hear day in and day out of your working life as an adult webmaster.

AVS (Adult Verification System)
The protection system that was designed to prevent minors from accessing adult sites. AVS services usually also have a large network of sites that adult surfers can access with one password. You can find a list of Age Verification Systems at Adult Sponsor Programs

AVS Site
A site that uses an AVS system.

Banner Exchange
A program that enables an exchange of traffic between a whole variety of adult sites. They provide you with some coding which you put in your HTML in order to get additional visitors to your adult site. You can visit: Porn Client for a highly respected Banner Exchange System.

Blind Links
When you place a misleading link on a site that will encourage the surfer to click on it. They will be sent to a new site that has nothing to do with what they expected to see. For example, if you had a text link saying ‘Free Porn’ and they get sent to a paysite when they click on the link.

Browser
A program that displays and navigates web pages you are using a browser now to view this page.

Chargeback
A chargeback is what happens when a surfer changes their mind or decides they don’t like the site or service they signed up for and tells their credit card company they will not pay the fee for your sponsor or paysite charges. Chargebacks are bad for everyone concerned because do you not only lose income for the sale, penalties are applied and sometimes they are applied to you.

Click-Thru Program
A sponsorship program that pays you an amount of money for each and every single visitor you send to their site. You can also find a list of per click sponsors at Adult Sponsor Programs.

Content Provider
A company that offer adults pictures, video clips for sale or lease. For a complete list of the best content providers head over to http://www.adult-content-providers.com.

Dead Or Broken Link
A link that is no longer valid or isn’t working. When you click on the link you get a page not found error.

E-Zine
An E-Zine is in simplified terms and online magazine.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
You need to upload (FTP) your web pages from your computer on to the web for everyone to see. One of the most well known FTP clients is Cute FTP.

Hits
Number of times your page was viewed over a specific period of time.

Hit Counter
Tool used to track the number of surfers that click onto your adult site. A good hit counter can be found at: http://www.sextracker.com

Hot-Linking
When someone links to an image on your server to display it on their site instead of linking to the image on their own server. You can prevent Hot-Linking by having a .htaccess file on your server.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
This is the language used to write web pages. This page is written in HTML.

ISP
Your internet service provider. AOL is a well known ISP.

Java
A programming language used by programmers to build and create programs. Not to be confused with JavaScript (see below).

JavaScript
A scripting language you can directly insert into HTML documents. They only work with surfers that have Java enabled on their browser.

Legal Content
Adult content for which you have rights to display on your site.

Model Release
Document that a model signs at the time the photographs of them are taken.

Message Board
A message board is a place where you can ask and offer advice about the industry or just generally chat with other adult webmasters for example the message board at: http://www.europeanwebmasters.com.

Newbie
A new adult webmaster.

Partnership, Sponsor or, Affiliate Program
A revenue program that pays you a percentage or fixed price for every member you send to your sponsor’s site.

Pay Site
An adult website where surfers have to pay a fee for access.

Pic Post
A site where you can submit a picture and your ad on a daily basis.

Plug In
A plug in is a ready-made type of web “CONTENT”. Many plug in providers will even host the content on their servers and allow you to change colors, Fonts and, add a logo graphic, so the plug in matches your site. Plug In content is generally more expensive than image content.

Ratio
A ratio like this refers to click throughs and actual sales made from them. When a webmaster says they got a 1:250 ratio, they mean that out of 250 people who clicked on his sponsor banner, one of the surfers paid for memberships.

Signup Ratio
The amount of surfers that paid to view your adult site (See the example above headed RATIO).

Spamming
Promoting a site or service to newsgroups or e-mail addresses that have not given you permission to do so. Spamming can also mean posting your referral codes on message boards constantly inn order to get other webmasters to sign up beneath you.

TGP (Thumbnail Gallery Post)
A site where you can submit your gallery pages. They in return put up your gallery and send you additional traffic.

Thumbnail
A smaller version of an image used to link to a larger version of the same image.

Turnkey Site
An adult site that is already designed and finished with logos, content, billing solutions and, hosting. All you have to do is maintain the site. Newbies often make the mistake of buying a turnkey site before they properly know how to market them.

Traffic
The term used to refer to the amount of visitors to your adult website over a specific period of time.

Uniques
Number of visitors to your site. If 10 surfers visit your site on any given day and 2 of them click onto your site 3 times the same day, it will be referred to as 8 unique visitors for that day.

URL
A web address. Actual address to a page would be a URL. For example: http://www.adultwebmasternewsletter.com is the URL to our Adult Webmaster Newsletter Site.

Warning or Entry Page
The page before a surfer sees the main content of your site.

Web Host
A company that will provide you with a hosting account so that you may upload your website on their server so that surfers may see your site. For a reputable host you might like to try http://www.webair.com.

Article written by Lee

Using Basic Server Side Includes (SSI)

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Server side includes are what their name sounds like.  A way to include the contents of another file into your current web page BEFORE the web page gets sent off to the surfer.  Not only does this include contents of a static file but you can also include the results of a CGI program and on some web servers, you can even have it display the current date and time.

Now, many web hosts do not normally have server side includes turned on. You will have to ask your host if they have SSI turned on and if they do, what is the file name extension for SSI.  By default, SSI files have an .shtml extension.

Sometimes, you can turn SSI on yourself.  If you host doesn’t have SSI turned on for you already, you can try adding the following two lines to your .htaccess file.  Then create a file with the .shtml extension, include a SSI command and see if it works.

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml

When you use SSI commands, you place them exactly in the location within your web page where you want the output of the SSI command to appear when you finally browse the page.  If you have SSI, then you can use the following command to include a file.  When you include a file, you can either give it a path name to the file or you can give a URL to the file. I’ll list both here.

<!–#include file=”/some/path/above/my/web/to/my/header.html” –>

This is an example of how to include a file based on its path name.  Now,
here’s the same file put included with its URL.

<!–#include virtual=”/to/my/header.html” –>

And this is an example of how to use a URL.  With a URL however, it cannot be a complete URL such as http://www.somesite.com/somefile.html.  It has to be within your current website.  You can also use the URL method to run a CGI script!  Here’s an example of that:

<!–#include virtual=”/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi?myfirstarg=1amp;mysecondarg=2″
–>

As you can see, we can even pass arguments to the CGI script just as if you typed it into your browser!  There is also another way of running a CGI script but this is not as widely used any more and you should use the #include virtual method instead.  Here is the same example so that you will know what it means when you see it.

<!-exec cgi=”/cgi-bin/somescript.cgi?myfirstarg=1amp;mysecondarg=2″ –>

As I mentioned earlier, you can use SSI to display the current time and date. Here’s how:

<!-echo “$DATE_LOCAL” –>

This will display the current date and time. SSI is usually used when you  want to have a standard header or footer on each page.  It’s also used for displaying rotating banners or page counters. As you see above, you can also  use it to display the current date and time or the date when the page was  last modified.

SSI has also been used for cloaking and some tracking  software uses SSI to track each incoming hit to the web page.  If you would  like more information about SSI, go to
http://www.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_include.html.  This is the definitive guide on SSI on the Apache web server.

Most other web servers that use SSI also follow these conventions.

Article written by Lee

Networking – Not Just For Computers

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: General, Promotion | Response: 0

Networking – Not Just For Computers.

“Networking” is a buzz word today. Everybody talks about it. Everybody hears about it. Everybody wants to do it more effectively. But why? Why do people network, and what do they hope to accomplish?

Primarily, networking is the process of meeting new people, either through a contact that you initiate, or through an introduction by a third party.

Networking allows you to meet, and establish a relationship with, people who may not have heard of you and your business through any other method.

For most professionals, networking is done to increase revenues. Sometimes new clients are found, sometimes suppliers and, sometimes new ways of doing things that increase your bottom line are found through networking.

When networking you should work towards these common goals:

To exchange business ideas.
To get better service.
To develop your business skills.
To potentially increase your revenues.
To establish long term friendships.

This means that networking is an essential part of building up strong business relationships. We need each other to buy from us, sell to us and, brainstorm with us in order to progress in our fields. In order for us to do these things we must give something back in return, its all about give and take.

we must be willing to hone our relationship building skills. We must be great listeners. We must be willing to give before we receive. We must get into networking mode in our own minds before we ask the same of others. This must be constant.

Through consistent contact with others, you will, instinctively start to put 2 and 2 together. When you begin speaking with someone your mind will automatically start searching the inner most recesses of your brain to remember people, places, even products, that will assist the person you are networking for and, at the same time, you will also be thinking of what they can do for you in return.

This Is Networking.

This is the state of mind you should be in whenever you are talking to someone in your industry, to get your mind in this state takes a while but, once you have focus and determination, you will immediately see how you can help others and, how they can benefit you in return whilst listening to them. this is the first step in getting them to help you.

Networking, as its name would suggest is WORK, hard work, the process is also a learned skill, its not something that we are all born with or, can all do. It can often be frustrating when you have a goal in mind but, your networking functions are not achieving that goal. All in all, networking is the building block of many a business venture, it can make and it can break you. Take some time to consider this fact the next time you are posting on a board or go to one of the tradeshows, you might just come away with more than you hoped for.

Article Written By Lee

Article Writing For Publicity And Credibility

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

If you’re looking for a powerful way to get free publicity and build your credibility at the same time, then writing articles may be your answer.

If you’ve been on the Internet for a while, you’ve probably subscribed to a few ezines including this one, hopefully. Many ezine publishers will include an article written by a guest author. At the end of the article are a few lines of text about the author referred to as bylines or resource box. These lines of text are basically just an advertisement for the writer. They usually contain a couple of lines about the author and a web address.

The writer gives the publisher permission to publish their article, free of charge, in exchange for the publisher including the author’s bylines.

By writing articles and allowing them to be published, your articles will have the potential to be viewed by millions of Internet users. They may be published by several ezines with subscriber bases of a few hundred to several thousand. In addition, they may be displayed in ezine archives or on high traffic websites.

Most ezine publishers prefer short articles between 500 and 750 words. Short “tip” articles of just a couple of paragraphs are also very popular. Articles should be formatted to 65 characters per line or less, including spaces, and written in short paragraph sections.

When you begin writing your article, avoid using your standard word processing programs, as they do not allow for proper formatting. Instead, use a text editor such as Notepad. It should already be installed on your desktop.

When you begin typing your article, use a hard carriage return (hit enter) when your text reaches 65 characters, including spaces, and leave a space between your paragraphs. This will enable publishers to easily copy and paste your article into their publication. By taking the time to properly format your article, you will increase your chance of being published significantly.

Most publishers receive many article submissions each week and only select a few to be published. Here are some basic guidelines to assist you in getting published:

(1) Make sure you follow the publishers’ submission guidelines. Articles submitted to publishers that don’t follow the submission guidelines will most likely be deleted.

(2) Make sure your article is properly formatted.
Publishers won’t take the time to format your article.
They’ll simply delete it and move on to the next article submission.

(3) Keep your bylines down to 6 lines or less.
Publishers will not publish articles that contain excessively long bylines.

(4) Select a descriptive title to intrigue your readers.
Use a powerful headline that demands attention and try to keep it all on one line.

(5) Use proper grammar and spelling.
Publishers will not take the time to edit your article. Make sure you read your article several times and use spell check.

(6) Avoid articles that are nothing more than a sales letter.
Publishers want quality content and will simply delete an article that is written like a sales letter.

(7) Avoid referring readers to an affiliate URL.
Articles containing affiliate links may make your article appear to be biased and untrustworthy.

(8) Write your articles with a sincere desire to teach and inform. Talk to your readers and share your expertise.

Once you’ve written your article, you’ll need to develop a list of publishers that may be interested in publishing it. The best way to accomplish this is to display your articles on your website. Place a subscription box on each of your article pages to enable your visitors to subscribe. This list should be used to send your new articles to your list of publishers.

Of course, you are already in one of the right places to start, we are always looking for industry related articles so, if you been given the motivation by reading this article to give it a try why not submit one to us for publication?

Writing and distributing free articles on the Internet will be one of the best promotional decisions you’ll ever make. Not only will it provide you with free publicity, but if your articles are good, you’ll become a trusted professional in your area of expertise.

Article written by Lee

Sex Toy Affiliate Programs

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Sponsors | Response: 0

For the past year I’ve been playing with sex toys AND I’ve been selling them too!

Over the last couple of articles I have tried to enlighten you on secondary and third level sponsors, to supplement your site income. Another successful addition is sex toys – which are a hit in the gay market. Personally, I sell toys and videos in the secondary spots simply because the payouts are typically lower than most sponsors are – but my motto is money is money!

The basic reaction by most straight webmasters has been, I didn’t realize gay men liked sex toys, too. Well we do.

While there are a number of great toy sponsors out there, not many cater directly to gay men. That’s why I worked a deal on Gay Adult Shopping (http://store.gayadultshopping.com/partners/). I have joined others, but typically, they sell to a straight clientele. When I say market to straight, I’m referring to the packaging of their inventory. This is not a judgment call but a plain fact; I’d rather buy something that has an image of guy on it rather than a woman.

Now mind you, BOTH markets favor many of the products sold. I know if a straight female friend and I went into an adult store, we would look at the same dildo; and, perhaps even buy the same item regardless of the package. But when you’re surfing the net from home, it’s no holds barred. The surfer is no longer locked into the inventory of a shop on the street. He’s going to look for what HE wants. It is all perception. And, knowing that is half the battle.

Ok on to selling! I have taken three approaches in my experimenting – free sites, TGPs and memberships sites. Within a paysite, I typically didn’t SELL the store as much as I told the surfer it is there if he wants it. The real work in selling came with the free sites and galleries.

I’m a text man. I love writing copy and seeing how it works. However with the toys, I used a graphic and embellished it with text. For my free sites, I found direct eye contact shots (Images where the model is “looking out”, presumable at the surfer) were more effective than a pic of a guy playing with toys. Along with the pic, I used text like “My boyfriend and I can not get enough of them…” and “I get off watching him play…” or “The one with the most toys… Gets Off!” Other places on my free sites, I just dropped in the text link. Either worked well. I added both sets of ad links to my basic main pages. The results were good – even though I kept them to a minimum not to out sell my sponsor sites.

My TGP experiment was WORK! After my first try I found out that text alone doesn’t work well. This is definitely an approach that requires imagery. On my first pass, I offered pics and a paragraph that that sold all the things I could think of… dongs, dildos, videos and ejaculating butt plugs -You name I tried to sell it. Out of 2000 hits on that one page, I had 60 clicks into the toy store. Even though I had a sale, it wasn’t going to break the bank. But it SOLD, so I decided to try more. This time I hunted through my content for pics with toys in them and eye contact. I added banners and toned down the text somewhat. Instead of listing an inventory, I stayed in line with the text I mentioned above. I gave an overall feel of what the store had (toys, videos, lube, etc.) Then I ended it with a little tease of what delightful experiences were in store when their package arrived.

This time, it worked! On that first day, out of the 2000 hits it received, 500 clicks went into the store. I have never had that kind of click ratio off of a TGP. I was amazed. Most of the sales were for smaller priced items ($10-$20), but I had two orders that totaled over $200 dollars each. Was this a fluke? I wasn’t sure, so I tried it again. With the next few submissions the click rates were smaller, and I don’t know why. It could be that I used the same ads or something too similar to the first. BUT the click to sales ratio was about the same as my first attempt. Needless to say this has now become part of my weekly regiment.

So what did this prove? Sex toys DO sell well in the gay market even under the hard to convert traffic scenarios. I guess we like our toys just as much as anyone else =)

Selling adult products, whether on a free site, a TGP or a pay site, will bring in a few extra dollars that many webmasters didn’t even know was out there.

Article written by Gary-Alan

Mirroring Adult Sites – Stage Four

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Promotion, Tutorials | Response: 0

We are now going to take our basic template and start to make some pages for the link lists for this you will need to open up your original warning page. Once you have this page open you need to visit a couple of the link lists that you use. Go to the submissions page of the link list and download their reciprocal buttons.

In the same way that we did with the TGP pages we created you now need to edit the warning page you have open and insert the recip links on your warning page, ideally and, as most link lists will require this, the recip links should be placed above the enter and exit links.

Once you have done this, you now need to save your newly edited page as linklist1.html in the /FreeSite/LinkList/ folder, do this for as many of the link lists that you wish to submit to, each time saving the new page in the /FreeSite/LinkList/ folder.

Also at this stage, we should add a console to our link list page, ideally a blur console with links going to your surfer trap FPA’s. You can find the Java coding to create a blur console on the tutorial about building a surfer trap.

Once we have done this, we now have some more sites created. However, this time, the page/s we have just created are designed to build the traffic we have to our site/s.

Once you have these pages saved you now need to re-open your original warning page once more.

This time, we are going to optimize the page for the search engines, again, in the same way we added our ALT tags on the surfer trap we are going to add them to the warning page however, we are also going to optimize our keywords, description and, site title.

Once we have optimized our original warning page we should now save this as se1.html in the /FreeSite/Engine/ folder we created at the start of this tutorial. Once one SE page has been created, you need to create a selection of others making sure that you swap around the meta tags to ensure they are all different to each other, I would suggest making three variations of these SE pages each time saving them in the /FreeSite/Engine/ folder.

The next thing we are going to do is to ‘dirty’ these SE pages up some more, pretty much in the same manner as we did with the surfer trap tutorial. What we need to do is add a small pop up console to the three SE pages along with a blur console, these consoles can be the same ones that we used for our surfer trap or, we can create new ones however, I think the smart thing to do would be if we used the ones we currently have online. So once we have added these consoles we need to save the pages.

Also, to these SE pages we should add our Banner exchange code, as these will be going into the search engines there are no rules as to what we can and can not do on these SE pages so we should make sure that even if they just get one hit, we get additional traffic from them. By adding a banner exchange code as we did on the surfer tutorial we can drive additional traffic either to our sites or to our surfer trap, where you send this traffic is your choice. If you want to sign up for our new banner exchange you can find it at http://www.pornclient.com.

Now we have the completed site template built. We need to submit the pages and sites we have just completed to the TGP’s, AVS’s, Link Lists and, the Search Engines.

Once we have submitted these sites all that we need to do to create a new set of sites is to find another set of 50 images, rename the images as we did at the start of this tutorial, pic1.jpg, thumb1.jpg etc and simply upload the site to our server without the full size images and the thumbnails. Once the HTML pages are online, we now have to upload the full size images and the thumbnails and we have a set of sites using different content to our original one built in less than 5 minutes.

The best thing with these sites is that if a any time we want to alter the layout, all we need to do is edit the HTML of the version we have saved on our HD and we have a new template ready to use.

I hope you have found some use out of this tutorial and, I am sure you can think of other ways in which we can use templates of this style, this tutorial was just detailing some of the basics however, we can make the template as simple or as complicated as we like. Our only limits are what we make for ourselves.

Article written by Lee

Using Email Auto Responders To Build Traffic And Sales

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Opt-in Mail | Response: 0

Auto responder programs are just that, they are set up to respond automatically with a pre determined email when a blank email is sent to a specific email address.

For example, have you ever seen something along the lines of:

‘For A Free Guide To ** Whatever** send a blank email to somename@somedomain.com’

The email address in that address belongs to an auto responder script and when someone sends an email to the script, they receive a pre written email back within seconds that has information pertaining to a specific topic or selection of topics.

Basically, autoresponder programs are email on demand scripts which makes any information you want available to your surfers 24/7 and, furthermore, not only can they drastically increase your traffic but, they WILL also benefit your sales income.

Email Auto Responders are extremely important tools when you need to automate your marketing. You can easily manage in excess of 10k email requests on a daily basis without ANY effort on your part at all.

Auto responders are used primarily for three main purposes these are:

Sales Letters.

Suppose you post to a selection of forums and newsgroups on a daily basis, you could offer free information about a specific topic and, in the same email, you can also promote your site and, better still, you didn’t have to do a thing.

Customer Support.

The use of auto responders for customer support is beneficial to sites that have a lot of queries from its visitors, autoresponders allow you to set up predefined answers to the most likely questions and, this can cut your service requirements by upto 50% in some cases. For example, most hosts will have some form of autoresponder set up to answer your basic questions or tell you about a support issue you have mailed them about even if its just to let you know that your email arrived and has been placed in the queue for completion. This saves the host a lot of time enabling them to work on things that actually need to be done and not spend countless hours each day sending emails to hundreds / thousands of webmasters on a personal basis.

Email Gathering.

This is by far the best feature of an autoresponder, everyone who sends you an email to the auto respond address will have their email address stored in a database, which, in turn, will enable you to follow up with the interest they have in your site and, some auto responders can even be configured to send out emails on a weekly basis to the email addresses in this database from again, pre determined messages that you have already set up.

Autoresponders are truly amazing programs, not only will they enable you to be more productive with your time but, they will assist you in helping your site visitors and, furthermore should increase both your sites traffic and sales figures.

Article written by Lee

How To Use ALT Tags On Your Sites

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

One simple technique can improve your search engine rank, make site navigation easier, and increase the accessibility of your site to disabled visitors. Yet, as many as 78% of sites don’t use it! Boost your site’s profile with human visitors and search engine spiders with the <ALT> tag.

Inserting ALT Text

Adding <ALT> descriptions to your <IMG> tags is quick and easy. You don’t have to do any complex HTML coding. If you can describe your image or link, then you can add ALT tags to your code.

We’ve used some examples below:

<img src="thumbnails/porn.jpg" 
  width="100" height="78" ALT="Explicit Teenage Sex Pictures">

You can also include an ALT tag when your image is a link:

<a href="porn.html"> 
<img src="thumbnails/porn.jpg" 
width="100" height="78" ALT="Explicit Teenage Sex Pictures"></a>

Ideally, your ALT text descriptions should be complete sentences, rather than a list of keywords or obscure phrase like “company logo small 2.” Remember that all visitors are likely to see (or hear) some version of your ALT text so be sure that it’s meaningful.

Optimize ALT Descriptions For Search Engines

Besides helping human visitors, ALT descriptions help you rank higher in some search engines. AltaVista and Google are two of the search engines that use ALT descriptive text when they rank Web sites. The growth of search engine/directory partnerships means that a high rank in one engine can often translate into an improved rank on its partner sites.

Search engine algorithms calculate the number of times keywords are repeated and give higher rank to pages that use them often. Keywords in the ALT descriptive text help you increase their frequency on the page. Search engines assume the terms are more relevant and important if they’re used in the page content, not just listed in the META tag.

For instance, the descriptive text in the example code uses keywords and keyword phrases from the META keyword tag: Explicit Teenage Sex Pictures. Since these are relevant to the site’s content, they’re easy to include as descriptive text.

If you’re having problems choosing relevant, targeted keywords, refer to this article, How To Pick Your Keywords. It provides helpful tips about selecting keywords and using them to improve your search engine ranking.

Make Your Web Site Sticky

ALT tags help you promote your site in another way too: they help make it “sticky.” Sticky means that visitors stay at your site longer so they see your advertising and purchase your memberships. Visitors who feel comfortable at a site will stay longer – and hopefully return more often to make further purchases.

Disabled visitors who use text-only or spoken word browsers rely on the ALT text for clues about the image’s content and function. This can be a lucrative audience: they represent a worldwide audience of 750 million and spend twice as much time online as the average user. But it isn’t just a disability issue: ALT tags make your site more accessible to everyone.

Visitors see your ALT text while the images are downloading or when they mouse over images. The descriptive text helps them decide if they want to wait for an image to download or move on to a different page. If your image is also a link, then visitors can read the explanatory text and quickly jump to the section they want.

Site navigation is easier, so impatient visitors are less likely to leave the site.

Don’t Follow The Crowd

ALT tags are a small addition to your HTML code that can make a big impact on your site. Since many of your competitors don’t use them, give your site and edge and include them on all images.

Article Written By Lee