11 tips to improve your search engine ranking

They say there are over 100 factors that affect a website’s search engine ranking.  Unfortunately, of those 100 items, there are only a few that webmasters can actually control.  This article looks at 11 of the most controllable search engine ranking tips.

eight seconds to catch their eye

You only have around eight seconds to grab the attention of people visiting your website, says a NZ Herald article.

This is because there is a trend towards ‘light touch’ media consumption, the article says. Light touch is described as people consuming many types of media in short periods each day, a contrast to the traditional tendency for consumers to be loyal to particular media.

free online file conversion

Now this really is useful: a free, online file conversion service. Simply load your file into the website, select the type of file you want to convert it to and back comes the new file. Converts .docx (Microsoft 2007) to .doc, .jpg to .tiff and .xls to .csv, along with many, many other conversions.

copyright, privacy, disclaimer, terms and conditions

The legal stuff – what do you tell people about their rights to use your website and how you will use any information they enter on it? This British government site has a good range of templates for wording for copyright, privacy, disclaimer and usage terms and conditions. But don’t take our word for it: if in doubt, see a lawyer!

colour my world, palette generator

Looking for the perfect colour combo for your website? With this tool you load in an image and get a list of colour specifications back that match it. It’s useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.  Pretty clever, huh … a colour palette at the click of a button.

picture in a hurry

Here’s a useful site for online images. It’s a search engine for free photos. It finds them from many sources and many are free to use as you want. Each photos states its licence requirements. More than 4.3 million to choose from!