TOOLS

Useful Tools for
Web Design & Web Site Marketing

All of the tools listed on this page are free, unless there is a price clearly noted. We're not really trying to push you to buy anything on this page--it is meant as a resource for you.

If you do HTML coding by hand, as we do, then you may already be using NoteTab Pro, available from www.notetab.com. If you would like to try it, there's a FREE "lite" version you can download and try, which is perfectly functional and will do a good job. And there's a professional version for about $20.00. Around the shop here, we prefer NoteTab Pro to any other program for writing HTML, and we've tried a bunch of them.

We do not use and cannot recommend any WYSIWYG HTML editors, (like FrontPage or DreamWeaver) because, in our experience, all of them have quirks and problems and create the kind of bloated HTML code that we frequently have to fix when re-designing a website. With NoteTab Pro, you can edit, save, and flip back and forth instantly to Internet Explorer or Firefox to see what you are doing and how it looks.

One other tool worth downloading is the Thornsoft program called ClipMate. It lives in your system tray and keeps a selectable, instantly accessible copy of whatever items you copy. Every time you press CTRL+C, it puts whatever you copied into an entry in ClipMate. Up to 100 snippets can be copied, sorted, stored and are instantly available for copying in where you need them. It even has a long-term storage capacity for stuff you use all the time. If you do a ton of cut-and-paste work (which is to say if you do any HTML coding) this little program can save you a lot of work and time. It is nag-ware, meaning that you can download and use it for free, but really you should buy it. I paid $20 for this program and it has paid for itself many times over in hours of work saved in finding and copying bits and pieces of things.

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Search Engine Optimization

I like and use this Internet Business Promotion Tool from Axandra.com. It helps you figure out how to optimize your website based on the way the top 10 sites are optimized for particular keywords that you specify. The comparison is brilliant. It doesn't have every angle covered but it has had a lot of thought put into it and I use it to help with the analysis of what needs to be done to get to #1 on any particular search term. It's a very smart and useful program. They have a free version that will help you some, but I bought and use the $300 version that is incredibly detailed. I consider the money very well spent! (Disclaimer: We have an affiliate relationship with them -- If you buy IBP through this link, we make a commission.)

We're using an SEO tool called SEO Elite Review (previously called LinkProctor) a linking analysis software tool. It helps to find out who is linking to the top ranked sites at various search engines, so you can ask for links from those same places. This software is very helpful with analysis of factors outside of your site that help with ranking well, such as your page rank and your in-bound links. It can help you carefully review exactly what your competition is doing (so you can do it better). (Disclaimer: We have an affiliate relationship with them -- If you buy SEOElite through this link, we make a commission.)

There is a useful suite of nine SEO software tools called SEO Administrator. Those of you in the optimization business might find that it takes more set-up time than you would like getting all your projects entered into all nine modules as they don't interrelate with one another (however many projects you have, multiply by nine and you'll get the set up time involved in entering URLs, keywords, etc). When set-up is over, we find the program quite useful in areas such as link popularity, page rank, search placement and keyword suggestion. It remembers your settings, retains histories where needed and can often run useful, exportable reports. Some modules are duplicative of pre-existing free tools but make it easier for you to have one central place to work with all such information from all those free sources. For those of you who want to keep careful track of your progress, the SEO Administrator will be quite helpful. We feel that the real star of this suite and the primary reason for buying it is the search placement tool, called "The Ranking Monitor". It is quite good at cutting down the time it takes to check search placement, works faster and more accurately than others we've tried, and searches deeper. This can be a real time-saver, especially if there are numerous keywords, sites and search engines involved. It also lets you know whether that placement is better or worse than the last time you ran it. We believe that this tool alone is worth the cost of the program. You can get a 20% discount on the Expert version of SEO Administrator through this link.
Disclaimer: If you purchase with the discount through this link, we will receive a commission.

Here is a free page rank tool that lets you check any URL's page rank across all the Google data centers.

Here is a great new page rank fraud detection tool from SEO Logs.

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Search Engine Registration

Right here on Words in a Row's website, we offer a free tool for doing Search Engine Registration by hand. It's a very long page with links directly to the submissions pages of the various search engines and directories, and has lots of advice about what to do and not to do when registering by hand. The advice is based on eight year's of experience doing search engine registrations by hand for websites.

INeedHits.com offers a FREE service which will register your site to 27 search engines, and do it fairly painlessly, one at a time. You won't want to register with some of them because they are specialty search engines which would just reject your site out of hand. But it's a good way to get more exposure and it is fairly simple if you keep your wits about you and just register with the search engines that you should. They are very aggressive when it comes to trying to sell you their software for even more search engine registration. We can't recommend anything but their free service, which seems to be a good one and will take you to some of the search engines we have listed on our Free Search Engine Registration page and some other smaller search engines.

For the most complete information on search engines anywhere, go to the site Danny Sullivan founded, www.SearchEngineWatch.com and subscribe to their newsletter. Danny is regarded by many as the foremost expert alive today on the doings of the search engines and directories. Danny goes to all the search engine conferences and pins down the people working on the search engines and gets answers from them about what they are doing and why, and then writes it up in his newsletter and puts the information on his website. Well worth studying if you are trying to get good rankings in the search engines and directories. Dany left Search Engine Watch a couple of years ago, but it is still a very valuable resource and the site is in capable hands.

A couple of tools worth getting if you need to track the results of your search engine registrations:

Search Engine Commando -- $179.00 -- worth it if you have to track and report the standings of a website for a search term across many search engines. You can download a free trial version.

Web Position -- $250 -- Previously known as Web Position Gold. It's not a program I use, but many people swear by it and use it regularly. You can download a free trial version. We have no affiliation with this company.

We also have some tools, listed on our PPC click fraud page that cover prevention of click-fraud, and how to handle it once it happens.

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Keyword Tools

GoodKeywords.com also offers a free downloadable tool that will help you to select the right key words for your website.

Agent WebRanking is another product that can help you monitor your web rankings. They have a free "light" version and a pro version that is licensed at $500 per year. They asked to be included on this page - I've never used this product so do not know how well it works. But it can't hurt to download and try their light version - it's a free tool. This product uses your browser to do the checking so it produces more reliable results--at least that's what it says it does.

MarketLeap has a free link popularity tool where you can check how many sites are known to link to yours from 3 places: Google / AOL (same search engine), MSN / Windows Live, and Yahoo. It will give you a pretty good yardstick by which to tell if your site has a lot of links TO it from other websites.

Keyword Density Analyzer - a useful tool for figuring out how many times you are using key words - enough, not enough? This will help.

A keyword analysis tool called WordTracker has developed a following. It runs at around $250.00 per year and up in cost, depending on what kind of subscription you choose. There is even a Keyword Research Guide put out by WordTracker, which helps lay out the basics and give you some good insight into choosing your keywords. Some of that advice is useful even if you don't have their program.

Here's another: Actual Keywords research tool, offering some free info (it's a paid tool).

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Opt-In Email Lists

We provide a free online directory of the companies we have been able to find which will rent you opt-in email lists of various kinds. There are about 50 such companies currently listed, and the information about them includes websites, contact information, and what we know about the lists they are selling. If you are looking for a particular email list so you can promote your site to people who are interested in your product or service, this is the place to go. (Of course the opt-in email lists themselves are not free.)

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Shopping Carts

Paypal has a free shopping cart that is worth checking out. Several of my clients use it--the nice thing about it is you don't have to have a merchant account to be able to take cards through the PayPal shopping cart. This can save you the $100 per year for a security certificate for your site, and several hundred more in lease payments on credit card processing equipment, and several hundred more for a good shopping cart. Quite a deal when you add it all up. The downside is that PayPal has both a great reputation and a terrible reputation, depending on to whom you talk. PayPal is the preferred form of payment on eBay (in fact, eBay recently bought PayPal, which is a very good thing for PayPal) but some merchants have complained about fraudulent purchases made through PayPal. Whether those same purchases would have happened using any other credit card processing company is a matter of opinion. It may be that PayPal has a problem with security. Personally, in the nine plus years I've used PayPal I have never had a problem it either as a payor or payee. Since eBay bought PayPal, I'd say that their problems will disappear. eBay knows how to do things right!

Paypal,through its free shopping cart, offers credit card processing. There are no sign-up fees. They charge a small percentage on each purchase, as would any other credit card company. That percentage varies depending on how much volume you have. Sign up for a PayPal premium account and the free shopping cart, and you can find out all about it. It's not free at $30/mo for their Virtual Terminal, but it works, and there's no shame in using PayPal! It's what I use on this site, and I have many clients using it because it works well. (Note that the PayPal Virtual Terminal charges $30/month to be able to run credit cards through PayPal--other credit card processing services, such as the one offered by QuickBooks, do not charge as much per month.)

xCart; this is the shopping cart we usually use for our clients. It is not expensive, works well, and has many features, modules and add-ons, and is the one we use for clients who need search engine-friendly page names and the ability to assign their keywords in the shopping cart pages' meta tags and headings. xCart is an all-around workhorse shopping cart, and highly recommended by us. (Note we make no commission on any sales of xCart.)

The following shopping carts have been recommended to us; we list them as a public service. Check them out thoroughly and make sure you understand how many types of products the cart will have to handle and the variables relating to them (scent, size, color, etc.), and the shipping and tax requirements for the website you are designing. This can all get very complex very quickly. Does your client sell T-shirts and hats? Then you've got various colors, sizes, and weights for shipping. And the various options for shipping (overnight, 2-day, ground, US Mail, Priority Mail, etc.) With ANY shopping cart, figuring out the shipping options is usually the biggest headache. Also, do certain customers get discounts? What about gift certificates? Do you want to offer wholesale prices through the cart? Make sure the cart you buy can securely handle everything you need it to handle.

Note: None of these shopping cart services are free. Also note that we no longer recommend Dansie Cart after a long battle with them trying to get tech support for several shopping carts we bought from them. I've rarely experienced such an unwillingness to provide tech support on a clearly broken software product.

• 1-Shopping-Cart-Ecommerce-Solution.com
• 2CheckOut (2CO)
• Able Commerce - works on ASP .net (Windows-based) servers, not Linux.
• Absolute Internet's Online Store Builder - note: Google has graybarred this website, which is not a good sign.
• Akopia Interchange Developers - Perl-based (cgi scripts).
• CCNow
• Extropia's WebStore
• ProStores from eBay (previously called Kurant Storesense)
• Mal's e-commerce has glowing reviews. Cheap and easy to set up.
• Mercantec SoftCart
• Miva Merchant
• PDG
• Sell It On The Web - has info about how to select a shopping cart that's right for you.
• VirtualCart - shopping cart services for small business.
• Yahoo! Stores - some people do really well with a Yahoo Store - but I have had many people with Yahoo stores call me for advice on how to move to a better solution for them.

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Credit Card Processing Companies

Paypal, through its free shopping cart, offers credit card processing through its "Virtual Terminal" for $30/month. As stated above: There are no sign-up fees. They charge a small percentage on each purchase, as would any other credit card company. That percentage varies. Sign up for a PayPal premium account and the free shopping cart, and you can find out all about it. Credit card processing is not free (it costs $30/month), but it works well. It's what I use on this site, and I have many clients using it because it works very well, even in high-volume situations. Not good for situations where there will be complex shipping or complex color, size, or other user selections, but good for your more basic ecommerce.

Merchant Account Forum provides extensive free information and resources on how to accept credit cards for ecommerce - including sections on international merchants. Their most popular area is their merchant account fee calculator which allows visitors to compare the costs of different merchant accounts. A discussion forum exists for visitors to the site.

None of the following are free -- but they are all credit card processing companies that will work in conjunction with most shopping carts:

• Authorize Net (listing of resellers. Call some of their distributors listed at that link and get a price. Authorize.net is relatively easy to set up to work with many shopping carts.
• Bank of America offers a credit card processing service - fill in your state and find out what they offer in your area.
• Buyer Zone Get a quote for a credit card processor here.
• 1st American Card Service says this: "We have been establishing bank based merchant accounts since 1986 at guaranteed lowest prices. We will beat any price including warehouse prices. As the leading independent provider with a decade long, spotless record at the Better Business Bureau. We save you hundreds of dollars because you are not dealing with middle men we only offer bank direct Merchant Accounts."
• Sage Payment Solutions says this: "Sage is a leading supplier of electronic payment processing services and merchant accounts for retail, mail/telephone order and Internet businesses. Sage products and services have been designed to offer 'one stop solutions' that improve our customer's operating efficiencies and save them money. We provide secure payment options through advanced technology and diligent anti-fraud procedures. Year founded: 1989 "
• CardAccept (previously SecurePay) says this: "Cardaccept.com provides a great alternative to traditional credit card machines as it requires NO startup fees & NO Equipment to Purchase! Merchants can take credit cards over the phone using a Web Terminal or through their Web site. We Guarantee that we'll beat any contract that you can produce...so find what you think is your best offer and we'll make it even better! Year founded: 1993"
• Source One Payment Solutions says this: "Source One is registered with Chase Merchant Services, the #1 merchant acquirer. Source One promises honest and aggressive pricing and a focus on customer service. Our 'small offfice approach' gives merchants the best of both worlds the comfort of knowing they are processing with Chase while having a service office where someone will treat them with the importance and courtesy they deserve. Year founded: 2002"
• CardService International (previously known as iCAT) -- Call them at 1-888-222-8032 to get a price. Warning: We don't recommend CardService as they have (in years past) had exceptionally bad service for us personally, and once you are signed up with them, their contract states you could only stop their service by sending them notice six months before the contract ran out, and within a certain window. If you missed that window, the fine print says you were automatically signed up for another year; we could not get out of it as they debited the funds from our bank account. I would classify their tactics as underhanded and deceptive.
• Control Devices. To get their pricing information you have to fill in a form on their site and have them contact you.
• GOMSG Merchant Account Accept credit card purchases for your business and expand your opportunities by setting up a merchant account with GOMSG. Call 866-317-9156.
• GoRealTime -- Call 1-800-803-1669 to get a price.
• InfoDial. Fill out their online request form for more information, or call 1-888-821-1076 to get pricing information.
• Internet Secure. -- they have no pricing info on their website. Call 1-800-297-9482 to get a price.
• iTransact -- $44.95 a month over a 24 month lease ($1078.80 total over two years). Or pay $295.00 on signup and $24.95 a month after that ($893.80 over two years). The lease is the cheapest way to get started -- but is more expensive in the long run.
• PsiGate - Payment Services Interactive Gateway
• QuickBooks Pro offers a merchant account that works very smoothly with your QuickBooks software. I have several clients using this successfully -- setup fees are low, it costs $20/month, and their fees per transaction are low. This is our top recommendation for credit card processing services after PayPal.
• RBS Lynk Systems -- contact Deborah Harvey. It costs $195 to sign up for an online merchant account, then $19.95 a month after that, plus a small percentage of each credit card transaction.
• Total Merchant Services charges 1.59% for cards you swipe through their card-swipe machine, or 2.29% for keyed purchases (no card present). They have several online interfaces for shopping carts so you can set up real-time processing on your site.
• USA Merchant Account -- it provides merchant accounts to high risk industries such as MLM, telemarketing, or travel services.
• WorldPay for UK -- Call them at 0870-366-1290.
• 2CheckOut can serve as your entire shopping cart or work with an existing cart as a credit card processor.
• CardBridge - Credit Card processing and merchant accounts.
• CCNow offers both a credit card processor and a shopping cart service.
• ClickBank
• International Merchant Services. 1-800-664-3997. They are an agent for First National Bank of Omaha. They claim that there is no start-up fee, that supplies are free, that there is free installation, there's a free lifetime warranty, and that their rates per transaction are low. Worth checking out, anyway.
• MoneyBookers
• ProPay costs from $34.95 to $299.95 a month depending on the level of service you sign up for.
• ShareIt allows software vendors to process credit cards. This is a service offered by Digital River -- if you've bought much software online you've probably paid through Digital River.

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Miscellaneous Tools

PGP --(Pretty Good Privacy) -- is an excellent FREE encryption tool for sending emails you don't want Big Brother or your local hacker to read. It's a little tricky to set up on the server (and that's an understatement!) but when you're done, emails sent via PGP encryption are for all practical purposes uncrackable.

ActivePerl is an open source, binary distribution of Perl5 available for Windows, Linux x86 and Solaris. You can download it and get extensive help.

PerlAccess - Many Perl tutorials.

Bravenet - Has a bunch of free tools for webmasters, such as polls, redirects, and a meta tag generator. It won't figure out what should go in your meta tags (you have to do that) but if HTML baffles you it will help you write the code once you figure out what should go in your meta tags.

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Books

See our Books page, which contains many of the books we use when writing code to design or re-design websites. These are tools worth knowing about, buying and reading. They are not free but are worth every penny if you are in the business of designing websites.

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Website Marketing 101

Marketing a Commercial Website

To "Market" something means: "To offer it for sale".

"Marketing", for our purpose here, means to offer one's product (or service) for sale in the particular marketplace called the World Wide Web. Marketing on the web has its own rules, procedures and methods.

Make the distinction that you aren't actually marketing your WEBSITE, you are marketing your PRODUCTS or SERVICES, using your website and other online avenues to do so.

For a more in-depth introduction to this subject, click here.

In the course of marketing products and services since 1996 for our clients, through their websites and other online methods, we have learned what works and what doesn't work in "marketing a website". This is what we do for (and teach) our clients; these are our recommendations for marketing products or services through any commercial website:

Wring Every Sale from
Your Existing Traffic

In our analysis of websites that come to us to help them get more traffic, the first thing we look at is how the website actually handles the people that do make it to the site. Does the website drive away the traffic it is currently getting?

After all, what good will it do to drive more traffic to the site if those people don't buy anything either?

• Look at your website as if it were a continual advertisement for your service or product. Because that is what it IS! How effective is your website as an advertisement?
  
  
• How easy is it to buy what you're selling on your website?
  
  
• Take a look at the five points customers want to see before they'll buy. Does your site cover these five points well?
  
  
• Take a look at the other points involved in how to design a commercial website so that it actually sells.
  

All this analysis is essential to establish a foundation for further marketing of your products or services online. What you discover from doing these analyses will almost certainly suggest some re-design of the site so that it maximizes sales from the traffic it currently gets. In our experience, you can usually improve almost ANY website so it sells to a higher percentage of the visitors resulting in some immediate income from those extra sales.

For a fee, we will provide that analysis and perform the re-design of your website, or you are welcome to do it yourself using the information provided on our website. Here's how to contact us.

Here is an article about writing copy that sells from Site-Reference.com.

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Search Engine Optimizing

The most basic step to take in actually bringing your website to the market that is the World Wide Web is to capitalize on the extra traffic you will get by being able to be found in the search engines. Statistically speaking, that's where people go to do their searching when they are trying to find what you sell. Surveys have determined with certainty that people arrive at websites primarily after finding them in the search engines. Which means that you can get an astounding increase in traffic just from being easily found in the search engines and directories. That's how things are found on the web. There isn't any other magic way to find things on the web.

Optimizing your site for the search engines is the online equivalent to the basic steps of taking out an advertisement in the Yellow Pages and putting a big sign outside your shop, letting people know what you do or what you are selling. If you fail to do this step, you won't be able to be found because you won't show up properly in the search engines.

Although Search Engine Optimizing can be considered a passive activity--because customers have to be looking for whatever you provide before they will find you--it can still be very effective because there are so many people looking for things on the web. Monthly searches from unique visitors at Yahoo! alone are about 65,000,000. Some of those people are looking for exactly what you sell.

Simply put, the people who are looking for your product or service are EXACTLY the people you want to find your website! So help them find you by optimizing your site.

We have created a Search Engine Optimizing page that lists the many things that need to be done to a website to optimize it for the search engines. We give you plenty of instruction so you can do these things yourself, or you can contact us and we can do the Search Engine Optimizing for you--it's our specialty in website re-design and has been our niche for several years.

Search Engine Registration

Search engine registration is not terribly difficult but is often done very poorly or simply skipped. In our experience with clients, we have seen many professionally designed websites whose owners thought that their website had been registered with the search engines because someone told them that it was registered, or because someone bought a software program for $49.95 that says it registers your website with 5,000 search engines. (Reality check: There aren't that many. There are only about 50 that need your submission.)

The acid test is to take ten minutes and go do a search, yourself, at some of the top major search engines and directories, and look for the product or service you are selling. Try:

Google

Windows Live (previously MSN)

Yahoo!

and Ask.com

These search engines make the results pages behind the vast majority of the search queries currently done on the internet, even at search sites that are not theirs like AOL, About.com, Altavista, Hotbot and iWon.

If your website sells Western Saddles and Tack, do a search for "western saddles". Do another one for "tack". Does your site come up on the first page or two of the search results on all of them? If it does, good for you! You've been doing things right.

If your site doesn't come up near the top of the search results you get when looking for your products at the major search engines, you'll know that people can't find your website, even though they are looking for what you are selling. In which case it should be obvious that your website needs to be optimized for the search engines and it may need to be re-submitted to the search engines and directories. Even if they have come through your site and indexed it, they don't "like" what they've found and don't consider it relevant to your main key words.

For more practical advice on what you can do to register your site yourself, and how we might help you, click here.

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E-zines and Newsgroups

E-zines and Newsgroups are both areas where it can be worthwhile to market your website.

For practical advice in how to market in both areas, click here.

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Advertisements in E-Zines

One of the most cost-effective means of advertising on the internet is sponsoring an E-zine. Ads in E-zines usually cost less than $100, sometimes as little as $10. They are often unbelievably cheap when you consider the highly targeted nature of the E-zine subscribers. Top E-zine Ads is a resource for finding ezines to advertise in. We are not affiliated with them in any way.

Wherever possible, we recommend that the website owner do this research because the knowledge gained this way can be incredibly valuable in marketing the average commercial website. Be certain you don't try to advertise in anything that is actually unsolicited email, as it can backfire on you in the long term.

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Opt-In Email Mailings

There are basically two valid sources for opt-in email addresses:

1. Your own list. These are the email addresses you gather on your own website by letting people opt-in to your own mailing list. For practical advice on how to gather these names and what to do with them, click here.

2. The opt-in email lists you can rent from the companies that provide opt-in email lists (like YesMail). For more information and advice on how to go about finding and renting these lists, click here.

Click this link for a listing of about 50 companies from which you can rent opt-in email lists. Please make sure you do not rent anything except opt-in email lists - anything else is SPAM.

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Article Marketing

We've been using for the last year the services of an article marketing service to get articles written and sent out to various places online that will publish them. This has proven very successful for our clients. Note: that's an affiliate link above -- I used them for a year before becoming an affiliate and would recommend them even if they didn't offer an affiliate program.

You can also write articles about your area of expertise (mentioning, of course, your website or your company) for publication in targeted E-zines and elsewhere is one of the most effective ways to market a site online. A mention of your website in an article in a popular newsletter can cause a huge jump in visitors to the site. Just getting a mention of your site in Randy Casingham's "This is True" newsletter or the Windows Secrets newsletter can cause a huge jump in traffic - in fact it has been known to crash the servers due to the huge increase in traffic.

Being mentioned in an article in a printed magazine is very helpful, too, and there are Public Relations (PR) companies, such as PowerPR who specialize in getting articles about your company written and published.

For example: a site selling skin care products retains a dermatologist who endorses their products. Ask the doctor to write an article about a particular skin ailment, mentioning the website and the product. Don't make this a blatant sales pitch, just note that the product helps prevent or handle a particular skin ailment. People who are interested will find the article, come to the site and buy the product.

If you own a Western Saddle and Tack shop -- write an article about the care and maintenance of old saddles, or about the benefits and liabilities of different kinds of girth straps for saddles, and mention your website.

If you can't write, find someone who can, and talk to them about what you want. Get it ghost-written by someone who CAN write. There are a million writers out there struggling to make ends meet. Pay one of them to help you. You can even hire Words in a Row's premiere writing services.

Where you get these articles published is a matter of research, communication, persistence and luck.

Here's an example, an article from Mark Daoust with tips about "Writing for Traffic - Getting Published" -- his advice is to soften your article so it doesn't come across as a blatant sales pitch; he advises you to mention your website at the end of the article. Those who are interested will visit your site. My advice will always be to be more direct and to let people know who you are and why you are an expert in the field you are writing about, either in the article or in an accompanying blurb about you and your service or product. Don't hide your connections and don't be afraid to ask people to do something in your article. Why? Because after reading Mark's article, I couldn't tell you why he is supposed to be an expert in the area he wrote about, and I have no idea what his website affiliations are. Whatever his reason for writing the article, it didn't pull me to his website or brand his product or service for me.

Here is an article by Jason DeVelvis with advice about what to do with your article once written and how to get it out there.

This article about PR Articles sums up the possibilities open to those who can write and get articles distributed online. It can be an excellent method for promoting your website.

You can find and post articles on these websites to name a few:

• MakingProfit.com

• Article Announcer

• Idea Marketers.com

• Zongoo

Subscribe to these email lists to submit or request articles:

• Publish In Yours

• Article Announce

• Free-Content

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Press Releases

Press releases can be very effective. They can also be a complete waste of time. If a newsworthy event occurs, by all means send out a press release. If you are trying to make something quite ordinary sound like news in a press release, re-think it and come up with something that IS news, or you're probably just wasting your time and the time of those who will receive it.

There are software packages like Media Magnet Pro which can automate the whole process for you. Media Magnet has a list of 12,000 people who have signed up to get press releases, broken down into categories. If you need to send out press releases, use this program or one like it to cut way down on your investment of time.

Another good resource for press releases is this one: Virtual Press Room.

Just be aware that what seems like news to you may not be of any interest to the people who get these press releases -- and the vast majority of press releases they receive will be trashed. Be very selective in the categories to which you send the press release.

News can be created. Did your company just sign a contract with the US Government to put diagnostic software into every one of their PCs? What newsworthy problem did this solve? What problems does it create? What controversy is involved? (Newsmen are taught to like controversy.) It does not hurt to point out that a press release is a great opportunity for your highly creative marketing person to BE highly creative.

Do a search at a search engine that specializes in sentence-structured queries Ask.com or Subjex for "How do I write a press release?" and you will get plenty more instruction on how to write press releases.

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Get Good Links to Your Site

We had so much information about links that we moved it to it's own page. So, here is a our advice about link resources and how to get links.

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Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are basically an arrangement with other websites that refer people to your site, in exchange for a commission on any sales those people make at your site.

For practical advice on setting up an affiliate program to increase sales on your site, click here.

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Banner Ads

You see banner ads everywhere you go on the web. Nowadays most of them are displayed as part of an Affiliate Program.

As with any advertisement -- if it is displayed in the right place and says the right things, you can make a bunch of sales from it. (Yet another reason to read David Ogilvy's books!) But if it costs too much money to display your banner ad where it will do the most good, even if does make you a bunch of sales -- you can still lose money.

The effectiveness of Banner Ads has been dropping steadily over the last three or four years. When they first came on the scene they were incredibly effective, but the newness has worn off long ago and the average click-through rate on banner ads is way, way down. Way less than one percent of the people who view them actually click on them. One clickthrough per thousand impressions would be a very good clickthrough rate. We have all taught ourselves not to look at them -- to ignore them. So they are for the most part ignored.

Will banner ads work to drive people to your website? It depends on what your offer is, what you say about it, and where you place the banner ads. Banner ads were once one of the best of the tried-and-true internet marketing techniques to get traffic to visit your site, but they aren't what they used to be.

You have to decide if you can cram a message that will actually drive people to your website into a tiny box that they will probably ignore, which they will see someplace they don't expect it. And then you need to locate that place to put that ad and pay only enough to make it worth your while. You can buy advertising space at Yahoo! -- but the last time I checked their minimum advertising purchase was $5000 for so many impressions, with no guarantee that it will put any paying customers onto your website.

Banner ads are best used as part of an affiliate program but if you want to pay for instant exposure somewhere that makes sense - contact the owner of the website where you want to display the banner ad and find out what it will cost, for how long, and how many impressions it will receive.

Don't bet the family farm on banner ads. But if you can get a great deal on advertising space somewhere, on a busy website whose visitors might be interested in your product or service, go ahead and try out a banner ad.

We have designed, created and placed banner ads for clients. If you need help on this, contact us.

To have an expert at making the actual banner ads themselves create one for you, contact Sailcat Graphics.

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Blogs

Blogging is practically a lifestyle for many. There are lots of other places where you can get polished up marketing babble about blogs - we dig into them a bit more for technical data, how you can tweak your code, and data that we couldn't easily find elsewhere about "Why?" and "How?". We have a lot to say about this recent addition to your marketing arsenal. So much that we moved the blog information to its own pages.

We answer the questions:

• What is a blog?

• How do I (SEO) optimize a blog?

• How do I register my blog with the search engines?

Commercial blogs are commonly used to display pay-per-click ads or affiliate links. They can then generate extra money for their owners in addition to their own marketing value - but only if your blog is updated often enough and remains fresh and interesting enough to continue to draw visitors.

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Viral Marketing

"Viral marketing" is a term coined for spreading news about a website by word of mouth, through the web. If you have something really "cool" or "outrageous", and a few people tell a few friends about it, and those friends tell more friends -- you've hooked into the phenomenon known as viral marketing. It works the same way as a cold virus -- you catch it (hear about it) from your friends and relatives.

An example of this, not too long ago, was a parody of the Elian Gonzales video showing the SWAT team breaking into Elian's home and carting him away, in which everyone involved was saying "Whazzup?". It was so outrageous that millions of people tried to download that video on the first day it was posted on the web--crashing the servers of the website that put it up.

More practically for your purposes, you can ASK people to tell a friend about your website. You can provide incentives for doing so. What you should not do is ask them to give you email addresses so you can send out an email (which would be spam if it came from you, unsolicited, to their friends). Instead ask them to tell their friends about your site. Put up a form allowing them to do that. Or ask them to put up a link to your website from theirs. Make it easy to do that by putting the code and any image necessary on a page so they can just cut and paste it. Or give something away to those who send you a certain quantity of visitors.

<We interrupt this page to bring you a special message!>

Following our own advice -- feel free to tell a friend about our website with all these tips you are reading. Here's our URL:

http://www.wordsinarow.com/marketing.html

Cut and paste it into your email. There must be someone you know who ought to be told about the valuable information you have found here!

<End of commercial message.>

You can set up a program on your site so someone can win something of value for referring a friend to your site. We've seen websites where you can earn a version of "online bucks" for referring a friend to the site, or for doing something else that they would like you to do (fill out a survey or whatever). That "online cash", of course, is only redeemable at that one website, which requires the people who get the "online cash" to come back there in order to buy anything with it.

The original success of hotmail as a way to get a free email address is entirely due to the viral marketing effect created by a link at the bottom of every email sent through HotMail, saying "click here to set up your own free HotMail account." That's another form of viral marketing. According to them, it was an unintended effect. They were swamped with requests and had a major problem keeping up with demand.

Google used a completely closed viral marketing plan to start up gmail, Google's free email service. It would not let you in unless you were invited by another gmail user - viral marketing. This was very successful for gmail. Viral marketing works well if used correctly.

A good viral marketing campaign requires some cleverness--some real thought. Look at the service or product you are selling and come up with a way to get people to tell their friends about it, and you will be on your way to starting a viral marketing campaign for your website.

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Offline Marketing

Having a website does NOT mean you can drop out of real world marketing. A good yellow pages ad is still going to be an important marketing tool for most small companies. Have you been sending out letters? Placing ads in the right magazines? Would a cheap radio commercial work for you? Those can be had fairly inexpensively, and can flood the phones with incoming calls.

While offline marketing is beyond the scope of this website, I can tell you that I routinely advise my marketing clients to send out postcards, and refer them to this site for info on how to do it right: Bob Leduc's Build your Business with Postcard Marketing is terrific and worth studying and applying; if you want to use old-school techniques in real world marketing then study and learn from this master of postcard marketing. I've been doing postcard marketing since about 1970, and I thought I knew it all, but Bob's info was really eye-opening. The first barrier to learning is thinking you know it all already; don't fall into that trap. Even old dogs (like me!) can learn new tricks.

Postcards can get website sales going, or pop them into a new range. Don't turn up your nose at postcards just because they are old fashioned.

The best places we know of to get post cards printed are Post Card Mania, Uprinting, Post Card Superstore and EMS Marketing.

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Things Not to Do

Don't send out spam.

Don't do "nothing". "Nothing" is almost always the wrong thing to do.

Every little bit you do to market your website helps. It can be a struggle to make a website sell and it can seem impossible, especially at first, to get people to visit your website and buy what you're selling.

Be smart, realize it will take some time, relax and have fun at this. Don't bet the farm on making money from your website from the day it goes online. Keep at it, doing a little bit every day. Like life, marketing your website is a game you can win. And aren't games supposed to be fun?

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SEO How To

Search Engine Optimization Tutorial

Search Engine Optimization -- the process of making a site "search engine-friendly" — is probably the most important aspect of website design. Many, many commercial websites are designed and set up by people who know little or nothing about search engine optimization — how to give the search engines what they want to see when they index your site. This long page contains the information (or links to it) that they SHOULD know about optimizing a website for the search engines.

The most important thing to know about search engines is that SEARCH ENGINES ONLY INDEX TEXT. Make that your mantra while designing and optimizing your website. They don't index images, and they don't index Flash well. Although there are some exceptions to that rule, as search engines are becoming more intelligent and more able to index files such as PDFs and the captions of graphic files, and some of the text in a Flash file — for all practical purposes just remember that rule: Search engines only index text and you won't go too far wrong in search engine optimization. (To see what the search engines can index in your Flash file, go here: search engine indexing of flash files.) For a technical "how to" on optimizing Flash files, see this page from J E Hochman. (Note that we use these same techniques when optimizing Flash sites.)

There are a lot of small things you can do when designing or re-designing a site to get better treatment in the search engines — and every little bit helps in the end result. There is no one magic thing you can do to get top placement at a search engine for your website. But you can do a bunch of small things that will add up to excellent placement in the search engines for the key words you select.

You can and should optimize more than one page of your website for the search engines; it's not something you do on just one page and skip doing on the rest of the site. You can optimize your home page for your single most important keyword phrase and other pages for different key word phrases. If you sell different products on different pages, each page can be optimized for that particular product. That's a good way to organize it. We recommend search engine optimization on at least a dozen main pages of your site, for the best effect. Don't bother optimizing pages on which you do not have public content, or pages such as a "contact us" or "privacy policy" or "copyright info" pages. (No one will be searching for your copyright info.) The pages you want to optimize are the pages you want people to find — those pages with content about your service or product--whatever you are selling.

Note: If you have a database-driven website, there are special concerns. Click here for more info on how to optimize a database-driven site for the search engines.

Also Note: If you have a website that is designed using <frames>, there are special concerns. Click here for more info on optimizing a frames-built website for the search engines.

If you are designing a site from scratch, see also especially this page: SEO Techniques in Web Design.

Search Engine Optimization – Let's get started!

To get a good feel for what is required in optimizing a normal commercial website for the search engines, let's pretend we're creating a website which sells after-market accessories for the "Alfa Romeo Alfetta", a 70's 4-door sports car that provides a snap-your-head-back kind of driving experience. (It is a car with a small but fanatical base of fans.) Our site will sell floor mats, hood ornaments, key chains, steering wheels, and so on -- all for the Alfa Romeo Alfetta.

Alfa Romeo Alfetta

Pick a Good Domain Name

This step is not very important - but every little bit helps. For the perfect domain name matchup in a search engine so that a page of our "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" website comes up #1 in the search results, the website itself would be best named:

http://www.alfa-romeo-alfetta.com

For more info on picking a good domain name for optimum search engine placement, and what you can do if you already have a domain name that isn't very good in this respect, click here. Don't sweat it if you haven't got a great domain name, you can skip this step. This aspect of search engine optimization doesn't count for much, just a little.

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Pick a Good Web Hosting Company

What type of website hosting company do you have? This can be very important to the search engines. Free website hosting is usually bad for search engine rankings, for several reasons. For a detailed article about how your website hosting company can affect your rankings in the search engines by Larisa Thomason (Senior Web Analyst for NetMechanic), click here.

The most important factor is that your website should have its own "static" IP address. In other words, its numeric IP address should be stable, and not be different every time someone types in your URL--that's called a "dynamic" IP Address and is typical of Windows NT Hosting. Big hosting companies typically use "dynamically assigned" IP addresses which work this way: when someone types in your URL into his browser, the HTTP request is presented to your hosting company's server, which quickly assigns an IP address to your website files on its server and connects the visitor to your files. Some search engines don't like this, for various technical reasons.

But more importantly, if your web hosting company has some "bad hats" (spammers or pornographers or whatever) who have been banned from search engines for good reason, your site could also be banned "by association" because, to the Search Engine your site's IP address looks to be that of the bad hats. In the eyes of the search engines it has an identical numeric IP address -- the one that belongs to your web hosting company.

If you are serious about getting good search engine rankings for your site, you need to have a static IP address of your own. If you don't know whether you do or not, call or email your web hosting company and find out whether your IP address for your site is static or dynamic. If it a static IP address, they should be able to tell you exactly what your static numeric IP address is. Find out what that is. For example, the static numeric IP address for Words in a Row is: 65.38.173.39. You should be able to substitute your numeric IP address after the "http://______", type that into your browser and go directly to your website.

There's another way to find out if you have a dynamic or static IP address, and that is to use this tool provided free by Bruce Clay:

Put Your URL to Check in this box:

it will tell you exactly what the numeric IP address of your site is, and a bunch of other info about it. Did your site pass the test? If not, contact me and I will try to advise you what to do to fix the problem.

You can also "ping" a website to find out the IP address being used. For example, if you open a DOS command window on your Windows PC, you can type the following:

ping:www.wordsinarow.com

and it will return the IP address of 65.38.173.39. You can ping any website, get its IP address, and try to reach it through HTTP:// at that IP address. If it has a static, dedicated IP address, you'll get to the website. If not (and that's usually the case) you'll either get a different website, or a generic message from the server saying that there's no website configured at that address.

Now take the numeric IP address from that report and type it in your browser after typing "http://" *mdash; don't put in "www" — just type the four numbers after the "http://" — if it returns a "page not found" or some site other than yours! -- you have a dynamic IP address. If your site shows up in your browser, then that four-part number is your static IP address. (Many thanks to Bruce Clay for providing this tool!)

We like the website hosting from Data393 for many reasons - one of them is that they will set up hosted websites on their server with static IP addresses. If your hosting company does not offer static IP addresses, my advice is that you should change web hosting companies. Data393 is a good choice but not your only choice -- you could also use Verio or many others. In 2007, even Godaddy.com offers cheap hosting with a dedicated static IP address for an extra $3.00/month. WebWizards.net also offers inexpensive hosting and a dedicated static IP address. Words in a Row also offers hosting, but only to our marketing or web design clients.

Unless you are locked into a proprietary shopping cart or content management system, it is not usually very difficult or expensive to move your site from one hosting company to another. Just make sure your new hosting company gives you a static IP address and that your site passes through the Bruce Clay analysis tool (the form above) without any problems.

In our experience, with all other factors being equal, the site with its own static IP address will rise to the top at the search engines over those with dynamic IP addresses. This is something your hosting company may dispute--especially if they don't provide static IP addresses. Approximately 97% of all IP addresses on the web are dynamically assigned, so do not be surprised if your site has a dynamic IP address when you check it.

Here's a blog post from BruceClay.com about their tests of static vs. dynamic IP addresses to see if they really make a difference in search engine rankings.

Here's an article from Michael Banks Valentine of About.com, about "Playing Hide and Seek with Search Engines". It explains in detail some of the ways your server setup can make your site a problem in the search engines.

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Figure Out Your Key Word Phrases

Your next step should be to do some homework and figure out what your key word phrases should be for your website pages. You need to make a short list of 1 or 2 key word phrases for each page of the site you want to optimize. Each phrase should be no more than three or four words. It is okay if the same words are in more than one key word phrase, and it is okay if some of the pages overlap their keyword phrases.

For each page you should wind up with a list of no more than two key word phrases, each less than three or four words long. Longer phrases are less effective. Single words are often useless. The word "Software" for example, is ignored by many search engines - it is what they call a "stop" word, like "the" or "a" - they just ignore it when you search for it, unless you put it inside quotation marks or otherwise make it clear it is part of your search.

For more info about picking the right key word phrases for your website, click here. There are several tools that will help you pick the right keywords.

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Set up your Meta Tags

There are several "tags" that go into the HTML code for a page of a website. These tags are placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD>. These are invisible to the average person browsing the site but are used by the search engines when they come crawling through your site and index the pages--a process called "spidering". These tags should be present on every page of the website. The most important tags are:

• The <title> tag
  
• and the "description" <meta> tag.

The "keyword" <meta> tag used to be important but is basically useless now.

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Set up your <Title> Tag

Our site would contain a <title> tag like this:

<title>Alfa Romeo Alfetta Accessories</title>

What we put in here is based on the key word phrases we figured out above. It should contain our main key word phrase, "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" at least once. It shouldn't contain more than 60 characters. In fact, if you can make it seven words or less (discounting words like "and" and "for", which the search engines ignore anyway) you're better off.

The <title> tag must contain the main keyword phrase for which you are optimizing that page. Google in particular places heavy emphasis on what is in your page's <title> tag. So does MSN.

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Set up your Meta Keyword Tag

The <meta> keyword tag will contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:

<meta name="keywords" content="Alfa Romeo Alfetta, automobile accessories, aftermarket, hood ornaments, floor mats, auto parts, blah, blah, blah">

Don't make this more than about 250 characters long. Don't use the same key word more than three times in it. Vary the capitalization. Don't use all capital letters unless the word is an acronym, like "SEO", which is short for Search Engine Optimization.

Note: Don't obsess about the keywords tag. It is mostly disregarded nowadays due to abuse by people stuffing keywords that didn't belong into it. You can almost skip it entirely.

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Set up your Meta Description Tag

The <meta> description tag is a description of the page. It should contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:

<meta name="description" content="Alfa Romeo Alfetta accessories, blah, blah, blah">

This tag should describe the specific page it is on, not the whole website. This is the description of the page that shows up at the search engine when someone is lucky enough to find this page in his search. Don't make the description more than about 200 characters long. Make it descriptive, and make sure it contains your key word phrases!

We won't repeat individual key words more than twice in any one meta tag because that can get a site banned from a search engines for something called "spamdexing", which is "spamming" the index of a search engine. For more info on how to avoid spamming the search engines, click here.

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Put Key Words in Headings

Back to our Alfa Romeo Alfetta site: It will have "headings" like the one at the top of this section. It was created using heading tags that look like this: <H4>Put Key Words in Headings</H4>.

These "headings" make your browser display the text larger and set it aside from the rest of the text, on its own line. Search engines will look for and index our headings when they index the pages on our site, so our headings should ALSO contain the main key word phrases for our site, like this:

• <h1>Alfa Romeo Alfetta</h1>
  
  
• <h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Hood Ornaments</h2>
  
  
• <h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Maintenance Manuals</h2>
  
  
• <h2>Alfa Romeo Alfetta - Floor Mats</h2>
  
  
• and so on through as many headings (in this case our products for sale) as we can think of that we want to include on that page.

Headings like that are weighted heavily in the search engines -- many of them use a formula that LIKES the key words in headings more than elsewhere in the site. Don't neglect these. Use them to set off areas of text, in the same way this page you are reading is divided up by headings.

Note: Some people detest using headings because they tend to be big clunky elements in web designs, and they can add a lot of space down the page. You can easily bypass this using a simple inline style command, like this:

<H1 style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 12px;">This will make a small heading with no space after it!</H1>

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Use Key Words in Your Text

Our optimized page would contain TEXT of at least 250 words, with the key word phrase "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" occurring several times near the beginning of the text. If a page doesn't contain at least 250 words, some search engines won't bother to index it. It's preferable to have 500 words or more if possible, on a page. You'll get better results from the search engines if you have more text.

It also seems to help to put the key word phrase near the end of the text, too. Search engines use a factor called "key word density" to determine how relevant that key word you're using is to the page. If it shows up a few times in the text, it is more "dense". Key word density is a good thing, up to a certain point. The main thing is to make sure you have some text that describes what you do or what you're selling - that makes your page a resource worth indexing.

In the HTML code for the page, the text should be as close to the beginning of the page as possible, because there is a limit to how far down into a page a search engine spider will go to try to find text. It is generally agreed that this is 3kb. That's only about 80-100 lines of code! So make sure your text comes before some really long JavaScript menu in the code for the page, or else the search engine won't make it far enough into the page to index the text. They'll never see the text if it is buried way down at the end of the code.

There's a trick of the <table> one can use to keep your menu bar on the left side of the page (where most people put a navigation menu) and still have the text of the page come first in the code. Normally to display to the left, the nav bar has to come first in the code. But not if you use this table trick.

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Put Key Words in Alt Tags

Pictures on a website can and should contain a little text description that only shows up when you move your mouse over the picture. That little description is called an "ALT tag" ("ALT" is short for "alternate"). Hold your mouse over the picture on the right for a couple of seconds and your browser will display the ALT tag for the picture in most browsers.

Some search engines index those ALT tags, so we will make sure we label every picture with an ALT tag--every last picture. Wherever it is possible and appropriate, each ALT tag will contain our main key word phrase — "Alfa Romeo Alfetta".

Note: Some people surf with "pictures" turned off, to speed up their browsing. The visually handicapped also use the ALT tags to "see" what's on a picture--there is special software for the blind which reads aloud to the person what's on the page. If there are no alt tags, the pictures are invisible to them, so it is worthwhile to put an alt tag on every picture. If you can appropriately place some key words in those alt tags, so much the better.

This article by Robin Nobles quotes SEO researcher Jerry West's research showing that the alt tag is not used by the main search engines at all. My own research tells me that alt tags are only a small part of what the search engines do look at. Even so, I still recommend that you put alt tags on all images (because that is one thing needed to make your HTML code "valid", and that you put keywords in the alt tags of any images that you use as links where using keywords would be appropriate in helping to describe the image to someone who cannot view the image (i.e., someone who is visually impaired or who is using a text only browser). My research shows that some search engines do use those alt tags describing the image used as a link to determine what the page they point to is about.

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Put Key Words in Anchor Tags

Hypertext links on your site usually look something like this:

<a href="floor-mats.html">. Those are called "anchor tags" — that's what the "a" stands for. You can put some other information in there, which will show up when one mouses over the link. It would look like this:

Sample Anchor Tag:

<a href="blah.html" title="Alfa Romeo Alfetta floor mats"> Alfa Romeo Floor Mats </a>

-- if the link points to the floor mats page. When someone mouses over the link, they will see what you put in the title. These "titles" for the anchor tags get indexed by the search engines. Every little bit helps! Make sure the words that you wrap the anchor tag around are keywords, too, whenever possible.

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Is a Robots Tag Necessary?

In our experience, a Robots meta tag with instructions to index and follow the links on the page is simply ignored by the search engines. You can safely omit the robots tag if that's all you have been using it for. In the old days of the net (a few years ago) you would have put this tag in the head of your document:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

It might have done some good a few years back - in today's world it can safely be omitted.

The robots meta tag is more useful for pages you do not want indexed. If you don't want a page to be indexed -- such as a test page, or a page you put up for your own use, then put this robots tag in the head of your document:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

That will keep the page out of the search engines that recognize and follow these tags. Of course, to actually prevent the page from being indexed by the search engines, you need to add the page name to the robots.txt file as one of the disallowed files. A robots meta tag is not enough to prevent the page from being indexed by some of the search engines that ignore them completely.

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Use a robots.txt file

Make an empty file. Name it "robots.txt". Put it in the root directory of your server; usually this is the same directory where your index.html file is kept. (But not always - sometimes your index.html file is in a sub-directory. In which case, make sure you have a copy of the robots.txt file in the root directory - usually the root directory is as high as you can go in the directory tree on your server.

While it is possible to set up a "robots.txt" file to exclude some or all of the search engine robots, what you probably want it to do is to allow every robot that comes along to index your site. If you do want to exclude specific robots from indexing certain directories or certain files, you will have to put some commands into the robots.txt file. For more info than you probably want about the use of the "robots.txt" file, go here. If you want every robot to be able to index your site, just leave the robots.txt file completely empty — but make sure it is there!

Experience has taught me that on some servers, it is wisest to put something in that robots.txt file and put it in both the root directory and in the directory where your index.html file is located. This text works inside the robots.txt file, to allow robots to access everything except what is noted:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/

That example lets the robots coming to your site index everything except what is in your cgi-bin directory, your tmp directory, and your private directory.

Here is an article called "Search Engine Spiders lost without Guidance" by Mike Banks Valentine, which covers in detail many aspects of creating a robots.txt file.

You can validate your existing robots.txt file using this robots.txt validator tool from searchengineworld.com.

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Validate your HTML code.

Everybody knows that robots, in general, are not too smart. The search engine robots which gather information from your site can really only do two things: 1. Read text. 2. Follow links. That's all.

These days, modern browsers are much, much smarter than robots. So while you may be able to look at a page using the latest version of Netscape or Internet Explorer, the search engine robots are too dumb to see anything at all if there is a big error in your HTML code. If you have an unclosed HTML tag - for example if you have complicated nested tables, any of which aren't closed -- then that may be the point where the search engine robot gives up trying to read your site. To validate your site, use this link: http://validator.w3.org/. This will tell you where your HTML code is "busted" and needs to be fixed so you don't confuse the search engine spiders. There's plenty of advice there on how to make your HTML code validate. If you or your webmaster can't figure out how to make your HTML code valid, we can help with that. (Note: this page you're looking at right now validates. Click this link to validate now!)

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Register by Hand with the Search Engines and Directories.

As soon as the website is finished and up on the web, it should be submitted to (registered with) the search engines (like Google and MSN) and directories (like Yahoo! and the ODP). Most of these are free -- some of them charge up to $300 for submitting your website. Don't scrimp here. If people can't find your site it is doomed.

There are several programs that can automate this process for you -- but we don't recommend them because, in our experience, they do not get as good of results as you get when you register your website by hand.

We've set up a page to make it easy to register with the search engines and directories by hand, here.

Here's a website that offers a service to get your site listed in 300 small directories, for $450. It's a fair amount of work to get all these inbound links. You can do it yourself, but your site will definitely need links to do well in the search engines.

Then it will take some time (expect it to take several months) for the search engines to actually index and begin listing our site. Some of them only take a day or two, others take months. We have to be patient. But eventually we would be highly placed in a search for "Alfa Romeo Alfetta", on the first page of the search results in most of the search engines. We could expect to be the first result on some of them for our keyword search for our keywords, "Alfa Romeo Alfetta"!

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Don't Neglect The Little Things

What are the three most often neglected opportunities for getting better rankings in the search engines? Click here to find out.

Get Links Pointing To Your Site

After our website is created and put up on a server and registered with the search engines, we would then go out and find as many other websites as possible that might have an interest in linking from their site to ours, contact them and convince them to set up such links. We might have to offer reciprocal links back to their sites in order to convince them. There's no harm in that, you WANT lots of links from your site to other sites--that's one easily-provided free service you can give away.

Here's some good advice from About.com on the subject of "How to Request Links".

Don't bother with the Free For All Links pages. FFA links pages don't work, and no one actually uses them. You want websites that are similar to yours, or which provide related services, or which contain specialty listings or directories of your type of business.

The rule is: The more links there are to our site, the more relevance it will have in some search engine results and the better placement it will get. A lone website with no links to it is a sad thing. It has no friends. Get plenty of links to your site. Ten links to your site is a good start. A thousand wouldn't be too many.

To see which sites are currently linked to your site, go to Google and type in your domain name like this:

mydomainnamehere.com

Of course, you'd substitute your actual domain name instead of mydomainnamehere.com.

Then click on the link to "Find web pages that contain the term 'mydomainnamehere.com'." That will give a list of websites that Google shows linking to yours. [Note that the Google toolbar's "backlinks" function is broken and has been for a few years — it gives incorrect results.]

MarketLeap's link analysis tool lets you put in your URL and find out the number of links to your site that are being reported by Google, Hotbot, Yahoo, AOL and MSN all at once.

We list several places to get inbound links on our page covering how to get links.

Here is a helpful article on how to get worthwhile in-bound links, SEO One-way Web Links: 5 Strategies, by Joel Walsh.

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Page Rank and Links

Page rank is Google's way of measuring your rank in terms of links to your site from other sites, based on both quantity and quality. Google page rank varies from 0 (terrible) to 10 (ideal). If you have lots of links from sites with low page ranks, they will mean very little to your page rank, whereas even a few links from other sites with good page ranks can make a difference. That doesn't mean you should cancel existing links -- they still have value.

Your page rank is a good indicator of how your link campaign is going. You want to be at 5 or above. Here is a link to a free page rank tool that tells you any URL's page rank across all the Google data centers.

Having a good page rank at Google is great, as it will help you place above similar sites at Google (page rank is likely a strong part of the algorithm that decides placement when other factors are equal). However, we recommend you track it primarily because the factors that Google tracks as part of your page rank are universal. Improving your page rank will improve your entire web presence, in addition to your placement at Google.

As of October 2005, underhanded sites can now fake their page rank. So, if a site with a page rank equal to or higher than yours contacts you about trading links, we recommend checking their page rank as part of your standard actions. Use this page rank fraud detection tool from SEO Logs. The tool works by telling you the correct page rank for the site that you input, so whatever it displays is the real page rank, regardless of what displays when you browse to that site.

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer: While SEO is very important in order to get visitors coming to your site from the search engines, it is not the only thing you should be doing to get traffic to your site. Here's an excellent article about some of the other important avenues to use to get visitors to your site.

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Summary

In a perfect world, no other site could receive higher placement in a search for "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" unless the designer of it did exactly as we have done above, only more of it! In THIS not-too-perfect world, our website might get dropped out of a search engine for no good reason because of human error or a glitch in a program somewhere. Murphy's Laws can't be avoided, even on the web. Or another site that should get kicked out of the search engine for "spamdexing" might not get kicked out. (You've seen this kind of thing when you do a search and the same site comes up 50 times in the first 60 results, obscuring all the other relevant sites.)

For help in optimizing your website for the search engines, contact us. It's our specialty and a niche we fell into because too many website designers have not studied up on how the search engines work.

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"Yeah, But Does It Work?"

By now you might be thinking, "Does all this stuff really help, in the long run?" or "Is all this really necessary?"

Using only a few of these techniques we have gotten top placement at Google for our client, Art Express, for the highly competitive keywords "motivational art". We didn't design this site -- it's one of our marketing clients -- all we could get the designer to do was to put in accurate meta tags and titles on every page. It should have ALT tags on all the pictures, more text, and headings. It would do even better on the other search engines if we did.

To give you an example of the relevance of headings containing keywords, on the Chandler's Natural Soaps website (which we designed from the ground up) there is a glossary in which each ingredient of the soaps is defined within a specially created <h2> heading tag.

The Chandler's Soaps site routinely gets visitors looking for a specific ingredient, even though that ingredient may be mentioned only a few times in the whole website. Putting key words into headings brings in traffic to the site.

The way this works is that a person searching through Yahoo! (or any search engine) for a particular ingredient (like the herb "chamomile") sees our page come up in the search results and sees that our page is in a website featuring natural handmade soaps. She may not be looking for soap at all, but if she is curious or it sparks her interest, she'll visit the site anyway and maybe buy something. It's a form of impulse shopping via the web. It's human nature to get distracted during a search for something specific by something related that looks appealing. (Witness the success of all the shopping malls out there with stores feeding off of each other's customers.)

Read our search engine optimization client testimonials for more info about how Search Engine Optimization might help you.

So -- Yes, all this stuff works! And yes, it is necessary to use as much of it as possible. These are the guidelines we use when designing a website to optimize it for the search engines. And no, despite the length of this page, this is NOT a complete listing of all the factors that go into optimizing a website for the search engines, only the most important ones.

To make it even more confusing, all of the search engines do things a little differently, one to another.

Thanks for reading all this. We hope that it will help you design (or re-design) your website to optimize it for the search engines. If you need help doing that, you can contact us here. It is our specialty.

Those of our competitors who read this information and are savvy enough to apply it are welcome to it! Good luck!

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Cara setting dan konfigurasi Domain ke Blogspot

Konfigurasi Domain untuk blogspot.com.

Cara kerja, pengunjung mengetikan www.namadomainanda.com, secara otomatis blogs anda akan tampil.
URL yang ditampilkan akan sesuai dengan nama domain anda, tidak lagi menampilkan http://yourblogs.blogspot.com
Konfigurasi ini hanya untuk blogs di blogspot.com, blogs yang ada di wordpress.com, multiply.com dll tidak bisa menggunakan konfigurasi ini. Gunakan Domain forward spt konfigurasi cara pertama.

Untuk langkah ini sebaiknya anda mengirimkan email terlebih dahulu untuk request pendambahan DNS server untuk domain anda di blogspot.

gunakan menu Contact

Dengan Subject email :www 14400 IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
www A 72.14.235.121

Ikuti langkah berikut stlh domain dikonfigurasikan di DNS server plasahosting.

1. Login terlebih dahulu ke blogspot.com
2. Klik pada pilihan Pengaturan (Settings)

3. Klik pada menu Publikasikan (Publishing)

4. Klik pada Berpindah ke : Domain Kustom (Switch to: custom Domain)

5. Klik pada Beralihlah ke pengaturan lanjut. (Switch to advanced settings)

6. Ketik Nama Domain anda lengkap dengan subdomain
contoh: www.namadomainanda.com

klik simpan pengaturan.

aktipkan Redirect namadomainanda.com to www.namadomainanda.com

klik lagi simpan pengaturan.

7. Selanjutnya ganti DNS dari domain anda dari menu Domain Manager ke :
ns1.plasahosting.com
ns2.plasahosting.com
ns3.plasahosting.com
ns4.plasahosting.com

Selesai sudah, tinggal anda request ke support plasahosting via email atau gunakan menu Contact untuk menambahkan Domain anda di DNS server kami.

Cara Upload joomla dari lokal komputer ke server hosting

Langkah-langkah upload joomla ke server dapat diikuti 2 tahapan, pertama upload database dan kedua upload file-file joomla, sbb :

UPLOAD mysql Database :

Untuk upload mysql database dapat mengikuti langkah pada artikel berikut :

http://blogs.plasahosting.com/cara-upload-mysql-database-dengan-phpmyadmin/

Catat nama database, user mysql dan passwor mysql pada langkah diatas.

Nama Database dan user mysql selalu diawali user cpanel dan diikuti nama database atau user mysql yang dibuat :

format mysql database di cpanel :  usercpanel_database

misalkan user cpanel anda hosting dan nama database yang dimasukan di cpanel adalah joomla, database yang terbentuk menjadi hosting_joomla

format user mysql di cpanel :  usercpanel_userbaru

misalkan user cpanel anda hosting dan user mysql yang dimasukan di cpanel adalah plasa, user mysql yang terbentuk menjadi hosting_plasa

Hasil diatas perlu anda catat untuk dikonfigurasikan di server joomla anda nantinya.

UPLOAD file-file Joomla :

1. Buatkan folder public_html di C: atau D:

2. Copy semua files joomla ke folder baru ini.

3. Klik kanan pada folder public_html dan pilih Add to public_html.zip (Winzip harus sudah terinstall di komputer)

4. Selanjutnya upload dengan FTP atau file manager ke home directory, bukan kedalam folder public_html di server.

Instruksi cara upload Bisa dikunjungi :

http://blogs.plasahosting.com/tips-upload-file-cepat-ke-server-dengan-cpanel/

http://blogs.plasahosting.com/cara-upload-file-dengan-software-ftp-ke-server-hosting/

5. Di Cpanel file manager, Ekstract file public_html.zip

6. Di Cpanel file manager Buka file configuration.php yang ada di folder public_html

7.  Cari dan edit konfigurasi berikut :

$mosConfig_host = 'localhost';
$mosConfig_live_site = 'http://[nama web anda]";
$mosConfig_db = '[USERCPANEL]_[NAMA_DATABASE_JOOMLA]';
$mosConfig_absolute_path = '/home/[USERCPANEL]/public_html';
$mosConfig_cachepath = '/home/[USERCPANEL]/public_html/cache';
$mosConfig_password = '[PASSWORD_DATABASE_JOOMLA]';
$mosConfig_user = '[USERCPANEL]_[NAMA_USER_JOOMLA]';

contoh hasil edit diatas :

$mosConfig_host = 'localhost';
$mosConfig_live_site = 'http://www.plasahosting.com';
$mosConfig_db = 'hosting_joomla';
$mosConfig_absolute_path = '/home/hosting/public_html';
$mosConfig_cachepath = '/home/hosting/public_html/cache';
$mosConfig_password = 'passwordjoomla';
$mosConfig_user = 'hosting_plasa';

Sampai disini bila tidak ada masalah, websites anda dengan joomla sudah aktip

Related posts:

1. Joomla 1.5.5 Bugs. segera upgrade! Joomla 1.5.x Bugs. segera upgrade ke versi 1.5.6. Celah security...

Fantastico De Luxe 2.10.4 r27 (LATEST and STABLE releases)

Updates:
- Coppermine Photo Gallery: 1.4.19 -> 1.4.20
- Moodle: 1.9.3 -> 1.9.4
- Noahs Classifieds: V8 (2.4.1) -> V8 (3.2.0)
- PHPlist: 2.10.8 -> 2.10.9
- WordPress: 2.7 -> 2.7.1

Related posts:

1. Fantastico De Luxe 2.10.4 r26 (LATEST and STABLE releases) Updates: - Drupal: 6.6 -> 6.9 - Joomla 1.5: 1.5.8...
2. Fantastico De Luxe 2.10.4 r25 (LATEST and STABLE releases) Updates: - b2evolution: 2.4.2 -> 2.4.5 - WordPress: 2.6.5 ->...

Parkir Domain dengan Google Adsense untuk Domain anda

Web Hosting murah Indonesia

Parkir Domain dengan Google Adsense untuk Domain anda akan membantu Domain anda diarahkan ke google andsense tanpa memerlukan pembelian hosting.

Langkah yang perlu dilakukan :
1. Ganti DNS anda ke :
ns1.plasahosting.com
ns2.plasahosting.com
ns3.plasahosting.com
ns4.plasahosting.com

2. request penambahan dns, gunakan links berikut :
http://www.plasahosting.com/contact.php

isi keterangan berikut :

subject : www 14400 IN pub-xxxxxxxxx.afd.ghs.google.com.
body :
Permintaan DNS utk Google Adsense untuk domain : namadomainanda.com
kode google adsense : pub-xxxxxxxxx.afd.ghs.google.com.

xxxxxxxxx merupakan kode yang didapatkan dari google apps

3. Konfigurasikan di google andsense

Setelah permintaan anda disetujui dari plasahosting, selanjutnya anda login ke google adsense dan lakukan konfigurasinya.
Ikuti petunjuk pada links berikut :

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100301&topic=14746