Early warnings of a difficult

Choosing a domain name can be daunting. Research the subject (after all, you're the type of marketer who researches, right?) and you'll be hit with a landslide of opinions, most contradictory. There are, however, two points that everyone agrees on: Pick your domain before you launch your busi...

The recent shakeup in Google's search results, which set the SEO (search engine optimization) community buzzing and saw tens of thousands of webmasters watch their site ranking plummet, was in many ways inevitable. Almost all SEO companies and most savvy webmasters had a fairly good handle on wh...

I suppose the real reason for a local small business to have a website at all is to provide information for the local market, generate leads from local shoppers. Up until now too many small businesses have created websites more like monuments to their company name. If someone knew the name of the co...

Any new website venture online will include a domain name. Sometimes the domain is purchased from a domain broker - someone who specializes in reselling domain names. The majority of the time, however, it will be registered through a domain registrar. No matter how it is purchased, in all cases,...

The effective design is this one, which is maximum simplified, conformable to your users because they are your main purpose. This one, simply and clearly announcing what is your website about. This one, quickly offering the users exactly what they are expecting to see on your pages without bein...

UNDERSTANDING THE WWW. I came to the web with an itch to build content, and I needed to understand the technology utilized to build the Internet. Early on, I confronted the question about whether it was necessary to use the www. in my website URL. It really began to be a concern to me when ...

Ever since Google began placing importance on its Page Rank system, website owners have been scrambling to get incoming links to their websites, usually through the means of trading links. Incoming links are important in the Page Rank system, because they are seen as "votes" for your site, and t...

What is crontab? Crontab is a unix program that acts as a task scheduler. It serves one purpose and only one. It runs programs at the times or dates that you tell it to. A lot of people seem to get confused whenever the word crontab is mentioned. While the usage may seem somewhat difficult,...

What makes a good domain name? Well, it's a subjective issue, of course, but here are ten tips to point you in the right direction. 1. Good domain names are easily memorable and easily typed. Generally this means keeping them short. 2. Hyphens should be avoided if possible. When I chose ...

Building a successful web site is a process that works best when done in a deliberate, logical step-by-step manner. The first step is to build a top quality web site that is packed with interesting and useful content. Next, you need to submit your site to the major directories and begin a ...

Submitting your web site to the search engine directories will give you a great boost in traffic. A listing in a large search engine directory like ODP (Open Directory Project) enables your web site to get indexed for free by the major search engines such as AskJeeves, AOLSearch, Google, and Lyc...

Writing for your web site is not the same as offline writing. The fonts used for print media are different than web fonts. This is because it's harder to read text on a computer screen and visitors tend to scan your web pages rather than read them word for word. When deciding on what web font to...

You know the scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren’t getting more clicks, and you find out that you’re ranked in the 30's, 50's, or heaven forbid, the 300's. “Great”, you think, “I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it’s a wor...

Over 31 million domain names have been registered worldwide, with 10,000 names reportedly being registered each day. Out of all this competition, how do you make sure that your web site is one of the successful ones? The good news is if you're building or running a business on the Internet to...

There are 5 elements that every page of every Web site must have. They are standard, and expected by Web users. When one of them is missing, it screams to a viewer that it's an amateur site. If a few or all of them are missing, don't expect anyone to linger for very long. These 5 elements mak...

To link or not to link? That is the question we face when we receive e-mail from people asking us to make a link to their website, or when we are looking for link partners ourselves and find a prospective site. How can we decide if it is worthwhile to take the effort to make a link for such site...

I suppose it's a form of flattery. After all, they're admitting that we are better than them. Better writers, better thinkers and better communicators. Of course, we don't really need them to admit it, we're quite aware we're better than them. So it's small consolation for those of us who sla...

In part1 of this article I covered defining the purpose of your website and planning it on paper. In this second part I will cover designing the page elements of your site. The look and feel of a site is very important, and it must convey what your site is about. A site for an artist would ...

During the month of November many website entrepreneurs were shaken when Google made its infamous "Florida" update, wiping out search positions for several high-ranking websites, which disappeared from the "top 100" overnight. While all the details behind the Google changes are still not known, ...

Advantages to Working with the Pay Engines The pay engines offer many advantages to Web site owners, including: 1. If you have a brand new site with little or no visibility and no link popularity, the pay engines are certainly a way to get started fast while you wait for your standard searc...