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Global Economic slowdown? Good! Why do we we want everything to be so fast anyway? Everyone’s running round as mad as lorries as it is! Slowing everything down a bit can only help. Housing market crash, pension time bombs, recession, credit crunch, blah blah blah. Forget about it. It’s self-perpetuating media hyped bullshit anyway. Focus on what’s important. What are you having for breakfast this morning? Will you enjoy it?
Over the last few years, search engine optimization (SEO) has been needed and used more and more, although it has been around for much longer than most people think. With new development tools being used to create websites that are heavy on Java, Flash and images, it’s important to have something that the search engines can read. If the content can’t be read by search engines then they can’t index it, and if your site doesn’t get indexed then it won’t be found when people search for it on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else. This short tutorial will outline what SEO is, how it works, and some unethical SEO methods that you should avoid.
What is SEO?
SEO is a way of analyzing your site and modifying it to allow search engines to read and index it more easily. SEO is all about maintaining and building websites that get ranked highly on the major search engines.
You see, when people use a search engine, they generally don’t look beyond the top 20 or so results. If you want to make any money from your website, you need to get ranked in the top 20 out of potentially hundreds of websites.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines maintain a huge database containing information from individual websites. Most of the information search engines collect isn’t listed on their results pages, but it is taken into consideration when it comes to deciding those results’ rankings.
It is very important that you encourage the search engines to rank your website in a high position, and you can do this through the keywords that you use on your website, as well as when you submit it. If the keywords you use in your submission tool don’t match the ones on your site then you could harm your rankings - be sure to have all the keywords you want to use on the website itself before you submit it.
Most websites don’t focus on their topic well, and so keyword lists containing 50 or more phrases per page are recommended. By focusing some of the pages of your site on keywords, you will score higher with the search engines.
Free Search Engines.
The major search engines on the Internet are still free, and it’s not hard to take advantage of this free advertising - you can do it in as little as an hour.
If you have just put up a website, you probably all ready have heard words like: keywords, Google Adwords, Google Adsense, SEO. Adwords, Adsense, SEO have one thing in common - Keywords. How important are keywords? Very Important. Google Adwords
Adwords, be it through Google, Miva, or any pay-per-click search engines, you need keywords. With Adwords, you create a three-line ad - 25 word title, with two 35 word lines of ad copy - then you create your keywords. To get the hits, you have to brainstorm for different keywords, that are different but relevant to your target audience. Sound easy? It’s not. It takes time, patience, constant tweaking, and hoping that the product you are selling is not already saturated — to much competition, makes it a little more difficult for the novice to make a profit.
Google Adsense
Google Adsense is an advertising program created by Google, and which is beginning to be explored by other search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN - that allows you to put targeted ads on your website. If someone clicks on the ad, you earn a small amount of money. These ads are keyword driven and are relevant to your webpage or website.
Sounds simple? Well, not really. There is more too it than just putting an ad on your website and expecting someone to click on it. What’s involved? Let’s see - color, position, style, to name just a few.
SEO
Search engine optimization - this for me has been a time-consuming process - since I am still learning. SEO is keyword driven - the search engines pull the keywords from your web copy - not, to my surprise, from the meta keywords tag. Granted, I still use the meta keywords tag, but maybe in the near future, I will slowly eliminate the tag from my webpages… The search engines do, however, pull information from Meta Description, Meta Title, and the content of your webpages. Thus, content does reign supreme.
Since content reigns supreme, each page should contain useful content and most importantly, your most relevant keywords that you want to emphasize. Secondly, it is best to try and base your keywords around a central theme. I have found that when the keywords diverts away from the main theme - that sends a red flag to search engines. So, if you want to look at your keywords and the density of the keywords on your webpage or webpages.
To conclude, keywords is one of the main ingredients that leads people to your website, product, service and/or ad. …AND, keywords based around your quality content will help with your positioning on your website.
There’s a technology which has been on the horizon for a while now. Something I’ve been very interested in. location based services. In a nutshell, your mobile phone signal can be triangulated to identify your actual location. This concept can seem slightly disturbing to some. It might have overtones of Orwellian big brother about it, but imagine this….
Emergency Number Service – say you’re in an accident and you call the Emergency services. Wouldn’t it be easier for them to find you and get help to you if they could read your exact location straight from your phone call?
Or in business. With the massive growth in delivery services due to shopping online, wouldn’t it be great to be able to monitor the location of all your delivery drivers and be able to redirect them to your customers more efficiently?
There are so many uses for this, it’s difficult to imagine that it won’t become one of the most important new technologies of the decade.
My dad doesn’t have much luck with computers. He’s always breaking them and loosing all his software and photos etc. He asked me what to do about it, so I did a little research and decided on the PC Magazine editors choice award winning Ibackup. It does everything he needs to back up his home PC, even though it’s really aimed at small businesses.
It’s an Online Backup service which supports open file backups, which is perfect for backing up things like Microsoft outlook and other ‘in use’ data. It’s the best of it’s kind I found, and at only $10 per month for 5GB of backup it’s a great solution for my own small business too.
I have seen some great developments in the credit card industry recently which I would lie to share. Firstly pre-paid credit cards. Often times you can’t use cash anymore, but not everyone can have a credit card. Especially useful for your kids as an emergency measure, these pre-paid credit cards are going to open up a whole new market.
Here are some useful links for you if you’d like to read about the subject further
credit cards - http://www.cardguide.co.uk/
compare credit cards - http://www.cardguide.co.uk/best_buys.html
Of course, the traditional credit card market is still incredibly strong. It’s an easy way to borrow. It can be expensive in terms of paying back interest, but that’s not how credit cards should really be used. The best thing to do is to use the credit and clear your balance every month.
Operating a business which is considered by the merchant account providers as ‘risky’; ie adult entertainment, online shopping, internet dating, travel agencies, legal gaming or online pharmacies, it can help to use an offshore international merchant account.
One of the leading companies that can help you with investigating the offshore processing option is Ms Merchant
Discount Click are an affordable option for SMEs to increase the natural Search traffic to their business. For monthly fees as low as $50 a month, discount click offer you search engine marketing and promotion services which will help you achieve higher rankings in Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, Inktomi and more.
Although you can expect it to take several months to achieve top 10 rankings for most search engines, you should start to see increase in rankings and traffic performance within 2-4 weeks.
Have a look at discount click - it could be the best marketing spend you make this month.
I’m starting to feel more and more exposed on the internet. It’s not the technology that’s changing, just that there are more and more people out there who are one step ahead of us regular folks. One of the main things to worry about is broadcasting your IP address. ANYONE can send an official request for your private details straight to your Internet service provider, and your identity is wide open.
This problem can be addressed by using an IP hiding service. I had a look around for some software to help me out, and found there are many options. One of the best sites I found however, was “www.hide-my-ip-address.com”. With good advice, and sound, solid, well priced software you can surf the internet safely, and more importantly, anonymously.
Weblink: hide IP address
I love to play backgammon, and playing online is a way to find excellent playing partners quickly and easily. Backgammon is a board game that relies heavily on both skill and luck. The game is in essence a race between two players with each player aiming to bring his own pieces into the home board and then to take them off before the other player does. BackgammonMasters is the best software I’ve found for playing in a lively community.
Why is BackgammonMasters different? Because it is the only free software which offers every one of it’s games in a single download form a single site. You can download the games in 10 Languages, Including Arabic and Hebrew amongst others.
BackgammonMasters has added Blackjack to the family of games included in it’s family of community games. It offers a multiplayer table allowing up to 5 players to play at the same time. You can even sit in on an existing game and watch the action before joining in.
To celebrate the launch, the company are offering some special free tournaments, so if you’ve ever played blackjack and would like to try a multiplayer community version, get over to BackgammonMasters.com to find out more details.
