The Internet is what it is because of connections, bridging one computer to a host of others. Because of this we are able to access information at a click of a button.

The things we click are called links, and they can be likened to the synapses of a brain - connecting the user from one document to another.

One of the main tenets of website design is that a page must be able to link to another page. Failure to do so renders the page dead - and is a lot like crashing into a brick wall as you speed down the information highway.

That said, website designers, both pro and amateur, make it a point to include links into every single page they design. But it is simply more than just slapping on links anywhere. Links are as vital to a web page as the content on it for without it, a visitor will be hard pressed to connect to other documents on the Internet.

In any website, there are different kinds of links. There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to laying out links on a web page. But over time, certain conventions have emerged that seem to have become an unspoken standard in design. Deviations certainly will not depreciate a website’s over-all impact, but it may require some amount of time for the visitor to get oriented.

Whether you tend to follow conventions or not, it is best to be acquainted first with the rules, so that you will know what to break and how to break them.

But first of all, for the sake of clarification, imagine a website to be like a book. Of course, you know that a book holds several pages. In the case of a website, the pages are called web pages.

A web page basically has two kinds of links: Internal and External.

Internal links are what connect pages of the same website to each other. Going back to our book analogy, an internal link connects a page to another from the same book. So a visitor can access the contact page of a website from the home (or index) page via an internal link.

An external link, on the other hand, connects a web page to another web page from a different website. So an external link is something like a connection between two pages from two separate books.

Layout Conventions
Over the years, as more and more users and websites are added to the Internet, certain conventions or assumptions about the location of links have been formed.

The most common of which are the internal links on either the top or left margin of a page. Seeing that these two areas are the ones first noticed by a user, designers felt it was natural to place internal links that would connect the pages of the same website together. Because of the nature of its location, links on these sides of the page are prominent and graphic designs on them.

Another area where internal links are located is at the bottom of the page, usually where the copyright information is placed. However, unlike the top and left margin areas, the links at the bottom are discreet and usually rendered in small fonts (like the copyright info). This is done primarily to avoid redundancies in design, while still providing alternate sources of links should the others fail.

External links are usually found in the body of the text or in the right hand margins of the page. No specific rule exists for this, and the conventions arise merely out of common usage.

However, some designers have surmised that the tendency to place external links within the body of the text is done because references to information outside the website should be described or explained, whereas internal links need little to no explanation at all.

Another theory is that the right side feels like the outer part of page. This assumption is built on the observation that reading is done from the left to the right. So the right part of the page indicates the end of a page, thus references outside the website find themselves allocated to this area.

For some reason as more and more text advertisements (such as Google AdSense) proliferate, the location for such external links are designated at the center or the right side of a web page.

And yet, as mentioned before, these are merely conventions and NOT rules set in stone. Designers have all the freedom to layout information and links however they want. Deviations from such standard practices simply make the surfing experience for these websites slightly more interesting than the rest.

The important thing is that connections are made and everyone can continue to cruise and surf the Web one link to one page at a time.

There are approximately 68 million .COM domains registered. That’s a lot of domain names out on the Internet that are either already taken or just parked in some obsolete spot gathering dust and all kinds of age.

There are 900 possible combinations for two letter sequences. If you’re looking for “ET” then you just won’t find it! Even allowing for digits, again every single web address is taken. Of course, that’s ignoring the fact that .COM registrars now mandate a 3-character minimum length, so it wouldn’t be an option.

Many of the three-letter sequences are taken. Adding digits to a domain name creates a number of garbage domain entries. If you’re dying to acquire great domains and unique domain names, they’ll free up sometimes only to be auctioned off through unique name sales.

The longer the name that you choose, the more that the possibilities are that it could be available presuming that you’re willing to accept an arbitrary sequence of letters and/or digits. For example, most organizations have 4 letter acronyms so you may have a chance using over 4 letters to get the name that you want in acronym style!

Of course many of the registered domains are ever, visited, with a huge percentage having nothing more than a “parked page” (users pay domain registrars to put up ads for themselves on these type of parked pages). There are so many combinations and back door tricks to name cataloging and classification until the possibilities are endless.

The rule is to obtain a name that closely resembles who you are about which gives you and identity and brand on the internet.

Use common sense when choosing a name because your domain name, or URL, can have an impact in both the online and offline marketing of your web-site. Long or difficult to spell domain names can make people ignore your web site and it has to be pretty good for them to stick with it. Short names register better with people’s memory and are easy to remember.

Obtain a name that will help you in your marketing niche and strategy. Like I stated before, you can use your business name as your URL. If your business name is already taken by someone else then get a URL name close to what you are doing. Purchasing a business name isn’t the only way to go, and when a keyword name could do just fine.

If you plan on using the .net extension, you may want to wait on deciding your name until after you have found an available name that is suitable to your type of business. If you follow the steps below, you should be okay in identifying your name brand to the internet community.

Structure Your Brand Name - Put your domain name on your letterhead, business card, printed materials; put it on your phone recording, the side of your car; don’t forget to include it with your email.

Keep it Short & Memorable - Don’t get a URL that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet.

Secure a .com URL - I strongly recommend purchasing a .com domain name as opposed to a .net, .info, .biz or anything else. If your chosen domain name is not available in a .com, keep looking until you find one that isn’t taken. There is nothing wrong with the other extensions but when you have a .com extension, it sounds like you’ve been on the net a long time.

Remember, your domain name is an extension of your business and your brand of product or service.

The Internet is home to various artists, web artists, and designers both professional and amateur. It can afford to provide individuals with opportunities to freely explore their artistic capabilities and publish content to a borderless audience.

However, unluckily, alongside this freedom of expression afforded to everyone is the capacity to offend sensibilities. Some website provide great utility and aesthetic pleasure others are bound to get annoying.

There are ways and means in order to avoid getting annoying, and its best to start by knowing when web design of a website does get annoying.

Using colors that just do not work

Colors in good and sensible does are a good means in order to attract attention and communicate ideas and emotions to an audience. They can help add interest to a dull site full of text, and even introduce and maintain a certain mood (as in scary websites using black as a background).

However, there is a fine line between too much and just about right. What gets annoying when it comes to colors is when readability is compromised, and combinations are too loud for comfort. When readability is compromised, it can pose great discomfort to the site’s visitors when they try to decipher the text that they want to have access to. Using too many colors and colors that do not complement each other tend to make the website look goofy and awkward, and can make the website lose whatever credibility it can possibly gain.

Too many clicks to get to the end of the road

At the end of the day, people who visit websites do so in order to access information and content in a website. Some websites tend to re-route visitors through too many clicks before they get to the content they want to get to assuming that the content is indeed somewhere in the multiple pages they are made to access. Obviously, that gets annoying. Rule of thumb says that a maximum of three clicks (but preferably less) should be enough in order for someone surfing a site to get to the information they want to get to.

Excessive graphics that take too long to load

Graphics and pictures, when relevant and are the primary content meant for the website, are a welcome part of a website. However, when they just serve the purpose of aesthetic enhancement, graphics and pictures that take too long to load and inevitably, slow the process of accessing primary content become a major reason for discontent and displeasure among visitors.

It is also helpful to note that not all visitors of the website are equipped with optimal download or Internet surfing speeds; excessive graphics that are too large and thus, take too long to load are not only unwelcome but also a great inconvenience to a great number of people.
Navigation that’s over-the-top and difficult to follow

Overcomplicating the navigation of the website can greatly hamper the efficacy of the website to communicate its content, and can hurt the accessibility of many pages to its visitors. At any point during their visit to a site, it is important to assure that the visitors have some way in order to trace back their steps and return to content they previously accessed, as well as carry on with accessing other content.

For simplicity’s sake, many websites solve this problem by having a constant button present on all pages for visitors to return to their main menu page, or their cover page.

Fonts that simply do not work

Depending on the browser and fonts installed by the users on their computers, extremely decorative and highly uncommon fonts may not be displayed the way the web designer intended them to appear and may oftentimes even compromise the readability of the text per se.

In order to avoid this from happening, many web designers opt to stay within the bounds of major font families (Helvetica, verdana, and the like). That way, they are assured that most (if not all) of their visitors will be viewing the site as designed, and thus have greater control of the way the page will be displayed in the end.

There is never a “perfect” template for design as it is open to the subjectivity and artistic limitations of designers. However, understanding the behavior of site visitors can only help make shape design innovation and utility move towards greater heights.

Internet marketing is surrounded by facts that every aspiring online entrepreneur should know. Although you have heard several success stories about individuals who succeeded and earned thousands to millions of dollars through Internet marketing, they are also bounded by these facts existing around the industry.

First, just like the typical business investment, you cannot make a fortune overnight on Internet marketing. Successful Internet marketers have spent several years to perfect their marketing strategies.

They have started from studying the “ins and outs” of the business opportunity, applied existing strategies, formulated their own marketing strategies, and test their new strategies to their marketing business.

Although Internet marketing offers a lucrative business opportunity for everyone, it takes some time before you could earn millions of dollars through Internet marketing. You will start from several hundreds and after several months or years, you will be able to earn thousands of dollars on Internet marketing revenues.

Second, your competitors will always be your competitors. There are instances wherein they will use you for their advantage. Of course, we do not want to ruin friendships here, but it is a fact that you must be careful of.

You can work hand in hand with other Internet marketers, but you must ensure that you are not working with “hungry predators” or those who will not use your generosity for their advantage of earning more money.

Lastly, getting potential clients is the hardest part of your Internet marketing career. Remember that the success of your Internet marketing business will depend on how you will attract potential clients coming from the majority of traffic around the Internet.

Even if you have a well-designed website with useful facilities such as information catalogs and shopping cart services, once you failed to attract large web traffic towards your site, your Internet marketing business will be of total failure.

Among the aforementioned facts, the last one is what you need think of most. As previously mentioned, the success of your Internet marketing career depends on how you build your clientele base. Such clientele base will serve as your “bloodline” that will keep your marketing career alive. Without them, the Internet marketing industry will remain to be a dream for individuals who want to earn more money.

If you want to attract potential clients and convert them into loyal product evangelizers, you must learn the whereabouts of Internet marketing promotion and advertising.

Promoting and advertising your Internet marketing is crucial to your website and to your career as well. Through these strategies, you will be able to attract motivated people who are willing to purchase whatever you are offering. Taking time to create some buzz about your website will keep them coming back and create an intriguing impression to those individuals who haven’t got a try of your products or services.

Promotion and advertising will help you get the targeted traffic that you want in the early run of your Internet marketing career. In fact, the cost of promoting and advertising your site on the Internet is not as expensive as advertising your products and services through conventional methods such as billboards and classified ads of different newspapers. Even if you do not have that large marketing budget, you can still promote and advertise your site using various alternative and low-cost promotional methods.

So what are the characteristics of a good Internet marketing promotion and advertising? Take a look on the following items and make sure that your promotion and advertising tools possess these characteristics:

- It must have a long-lasting effect. Do not just use an advertising medium once and discard it. Find ways on how you will be able to use it for several times. You may use a similar approach on each advertising tool and create customer familiarity with the advertising tool as well as the product or service you are advertising. Think of several successful promotions and advertisement such as for Energizer batteries and others.

-An effective Internet marketing promotion and advertising have variations. Do not just stick with a single ad format. Change the color, text, and the message of your advertisements but do not alter its feature character. The alterations must be done in the consideration of a long-lasting ad effect.

Do not be afraid to explore new options. If you think these new ideas will help you promote and advertise your Internet marketing business effectively, then do it. The more you broaden your promotion and advertising efforts, you will be able to succeed in your Internet marketing business career.

In Internet marketing, as for traffic generation techniques, it is worth to catalogue the basic principles enforced to increase website traffic and search engine rankings. This will make your site more prominent in the online world and therefore will earn your company more recognition.

Here are the 14 tips that you have to take note of:

1. Create a site with valuable content, products or services.

2. Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document.

3. Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers.

4. Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc.

5. Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.

6. Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service.

7. Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.

8. Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.

9. Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.

10. Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.

11. Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.

12. When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.

13. When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.

14. Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.

These tips are to be taken seriously for your sites. Implement these techniques yourself or get a traffic generation expert to do it for you. These strategies will get your site a profit making machine in no time.