Xeneco

http://projects.web20design.co.uk/samples/3-col-css/

I have developed a fairly simple 3 column web page using CSS for layout logic.

This is a generic template I usually start with when putting together a new site.

I have put a link to it here and you’re free to copy and use it for your own needs - but please follow the copyright notices contained within the comments of the files provided

The numbers in [square] brackets denote the source order of the elements displayed, the H1 is first, the H2 is second, and so on

The page is basic and is intended to be a starting point. If you do choose to use it then you will probably want to extend the CSS, add your own colour scheme and images - as well as your content.

The width is fixed, as are the widths of the columns. When changing these widths be sure that the column widths add up to no more than the page width. If you want to use relative widths (per centages) then the same concept applies.

The layout is also fairly SEO friendly

In a traditional business model there are usually two distinct parties - the company and company’s customers. The customer ‘pays’ the company for products or services the customer is unable, or unwilling, to undertake it’s self. In order for the company to offer it’s products or services they must draw on, and process, ‘raw’ materials.

If you’re running AdSense (or any other pay per click programme) as a business model, then who are your customers? What are your raw materials, and where do they come from?

These are very important questions and the answers may surprise some of you.

If you’re using AdSense then your customer is Google - Google are paying you to advertise on their behalf.

Your ‘raw’ materials include your domain name, your web-hosting package and your web site, but this is only your first step. And it is a step, for without your site you cannot get the more important material - site visitors.

Now you can start showing your site visitors your web site, and this is your product. Yes, your product is a web site which has visitors - and you sell this product to your customer (the pay per click agency - Google, Yahoo, etc.). Your customer then compensates you based on your performance.

With this model in mind it’s obvious that to increase your revenue you need to increase your performance - this is no different from any other business model. Product research, product improvement and improved selling techniques are all needed.

So, how can you improve your product? More visitors to your site is step, but it’s not necessarily the next one, you actually need more ‘targeted’ visitors - this will improve your click-through rate. Even better than targeted visitors are site visitors who are ready to buy the product being advertised. This is because the company selling the product that is being advertised on your site doesn’t just want a visitor themselves, they want a sale and their pay per click advertising price will be based on their own web site conversion rate. If you send web traffic to a site, and these visitors don’t buy, then the price being paid by the advertiser will fall. This directly affects you.

Improved selling techniques - why should the AdSense scheme pay you more than someone else, on a per click basis? Simple, either the sale of product advertised on your site is worth more to the seller than it is to someone else, or the visitor who clicks on the advert is valued.

This gives you two lines of research for your AdSense Site:
1 - highly valued products
2 - highly valued visitors

You can then build your site in a number of ways; you can target highly priced products (mortgages, life insurance, real estate, cars, holidays, etc.) or you can target highly valued customers. What is a highly valued customer? These are likely to be people who are going to be repeat buyers or buying subscription services. An example of a repeat buyer is someone who buys their printer cartridges from the same supplier each time they need a replacement or use the same car insurance company each year. A subscription service may include mobile phone and other service contracts.

Can a site target highly valued customers and highly valued products? Yes. How? This is where the research comes in. A site could target ‘mortgages’ - we think there are lot of people who are interested in mortgages, and there are certainly a lot of people building advertising sites to try to catch those who are interested. The term ‘mortgages’ is highly competitive and unlikely to yield a final sale - you won’t get traffic for the term and you won’t get much compensation for the click.

‘Mortgages’ is therefore a bad example, but what about the phrase ‘first time buyer mortgage UK’? Here the phrase targets three types of visitors - first time buyers, buyers in the UK, and more importantly the common subset of the phrase it’s self. This is a highly valued product which will have highly targeted visitors; who are likely to be highly valued customers if the sale goes through.

This is known as keyword research and if you plan to run an AdSense / pay per click site then you will need to know how to do it right. The example above is sometimes referred to as ‘low hanging fruit’ - terms that are profitable, targeted with lots of traffic and have minimal competition.

So to run AdSense as a successful business model you will need to understand what your product is. You will need to understand and know who your customer is. You need a better product than your competition, and know why it’s better.

I love SEO and I love AJAX.

If you don’t know what ajax is - where have you been? It’s basically a way to update parts of a webpage using javascript to grab server-side content. The advantages are that the entire page doesn’t need reloading, thus reducing bandwidth, quickening up the site and giving a smoother interaction between user and web site.

So, what’s this go to do with SEO?

Simply put, search engines have so far chosen not to parse and execute javascript found on the pages they spider. It is also widely believed that serach engines need some good content on the pages they find, and they find pages by following links - therefore good, old-fashion HTML has always been key as javascript/ajax heavy sites tend not to give this content:link spider food the SEs love.

How can AJAX be SEO friendly?

The answer to this lies in the planning stage of a site or page - deciding which parts of the page can be dyamically updated with the javascript (or ‘AJAXed In’).

Imagine you are selling a number of products on your website. You may have a list of products, and when someone clicks on “more details” they get taken to a page about that product. The chances are that the raw html behind both list and details pages is quite similar - especially if the site uses a common template.

By designing in an information box next to the product list you can add some SEO friendly ajax into the mix. The concept is that javascript captures the “more details” link, grabs the relevant content from the server, updates the info box and returns false to stop the browser jumping to a new page.

Now, this may sound complicated - but it isn’t.

Most of my javascript scripting is done using jquery. Jquery allows for CSS and xpath style selectors and have some lovely lightweight wrappers for the xmlHttpRequest object. Imagine we have a set up similar to this:

<div id="left">
<ul id="product-list">
	<li><a href="/Product/Details/forProduct/1">Product 1</a></li>
	<li><a href="/Product/Details/forProduct/2">Product 2</a></li>
	<li><a href="/Product/Details/forProduct/3">Product 3</a></li>
	<li><a href="/Product/Details/forProduct/4">Product 4</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

Now let’s look at the javascript that will be used, assuming the jQuery library has been included:

$(function() {
	$("ul#product-list li a").click(function() {
		var productURL = $(this).attr('href');
		$("div#product-info").empty().load(productURL+"?ajax=true")'
		return false;
	});
});

There are some things to note about this small snippet:

• It returns false - this means that the default action of clicking a link doesn’t happen
• It appends a variable to send to the server

This variable is very important in terms of SEO - The server side script sends different quantity of content based on this variable. If ajax is false (or null, empty etc), like the orginal html, then a full page is returned. If ajax is true then the server sends back just the relevant content to update.

To conclude: When the search engines spider the page, following the product links and ignoring the javascript, then they are given a full page of content to eat up. the user, however, gets ajax functionality with seemless integration.

Yes, here is yet another blog (YAB?). Yes, it’s on Wordpress and, although it’s a bit bloatware, it’s just too easy to install.

I’ve been fairly active on a couple of internet marketing forums (namely Site Reference) and have been asked to write and comment on many things. So much so that I’ve even started to use the forums for my own reference, but trying to track down my old posts has become a little tiresome. So, here is my blog - a place where I can expand on my thoughts, and update them as my theories, knowledge and ideals evolve.