Archive for June, 2007

Internet Marketing

Internet marketing experts will promote your website on popular search engines and look at making your website more user friendly to search engines and users. Once the design and navigation of your website has been perfected and enhanced, your chosen internet marketing company will start their internet marketing solutions to direct and attract more quality online users and customers to your website.

Internet marketing involves the use of various channels and techniques to promote a favorable company or brand to online users; this is achieved through various tactics under the broad term of SEO (search engine optimization). Internet marketing tactics will involve research of your target market, analyzing your direct competition and then identifying keywords or terms that will lead to your website achieving higher ranking results on search engines.

Internet marketers have found that 80-90% of online users will find their way to desired products and services by using popular search engines, such as Google, MSN and Yahoo. Now consumers with detailed use of key terms and key words are further refining online searches. This means that when people use the internet to find certain products and services, they usually start their search using search engines, and often only visit the first page and top few search results. So, it has been proven that to have a successful business online, it is imperative for your company’s details, products, services and information to be ranked high on search engine listings.

Internet marketing also involves creating a favorable online experience for consumers where they can purchase products and services, find services and products, interact, view multimedia, subscribe to newsletters, get online quotes and download free applications, files, and more. Internet marketing can also include PPC advertising (pay per click), SEO, banner advertising, interactive advertising, blogging, forum marketing, article marketing, PR, e-marketing, online planning and more.

So, if you have the desire to create an effective and profitable online business through your website, find a reputable internet marketing company to harness the marketing power of the internet and promote your website through the worldwide web. Get your website working for you, if you have already spent some time and money in the development of your website, get an experienced online marketing company to deliver top search engine marketing and search engine optimization tactics.
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Quick Hit SEO to Do List

Many potential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) clients come to me stating they don’t have the financial resources to contract my firm for services yet they’d like to get started with the promotion of their site within the search engine sphere. Below I’ve attempted to outline the first steps I might take if I had a new website to promote from the ground up.

Submit Your Site to Directories
Directory submissions are an integral part of basic SEO, and directory listings help to form a foundation of links pointing to your site that generally won’t go anywhere unless the directory disappears or is shutdown for some reason. Many directories such as DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory feed search engine results and carry a lot of “weight” with major search engines such as Google, MSN/Live, and Yahoo!

There are hundreds of free directories out there, and my recommendation is to subcontract this service out to an inexpensive submission service (do a search for “directory submission service”). For as little as $30, you can have your website submitted to hundreds of directories in little time. Manually doing this could take countless hours, and it’s very tedious work. One note of caution: directories don’t get indexed overnight. It will take some time for your site to get “credit” for being listed in a lot of the online directories.

Write and Submit Articles about Your Business or Industry
Promoting your business via articles about your industry or the business itself are a great way to build awareness without being over the top or in someone’s face. The more articles you write and submit to online e-zines or article directories, the more your name circulates. Think about it, when you read an informative article that helps you solve a problem, perform a task better, or recaps an event, your guard isn’t as high as it is when you come across an all out advertisement is it?

Be sure to include a byline at the end containing a link to your site along with brief information about you and your company. This will not only generate awareness, it will also help your search engine optimization campaign by building “natural” links back to your website as the article circulates the online community.

Engage in a Free PR Campaign
While print media isn’t as popular as it once was, people still read newspapers, trade journals, and magazines. Local newspapers are always looking for interesting stories on local people to write about in order to increase their readership. Magazines are a bit different in that your story needs to be very compelling and unique in some fashion, but your website and business can get a big jolt if you can land a story in a print publication of some sort. One word of caution: don’t go shooting for the New York Times or Inc. Magazine right out of the chute unless you’re truly prepared to handle a huge influx of site visits, e-mails, phone calls, and unrelated requests about your business.

Involve Yourself in the Blogosphere
Blogs are a great way to show a more human side to a company, and their popularity continues to increase. My advice is to start a blog about your company, industry, or niche that is a sub-domain off of your main website. A sub-domain may look like this: subdomain.domain.com to where your blog may utilize a scheme similar to blog.yourdomain.com. This is a great way to build unique content for your domain while also helping your customers or clients get to know the human side of your business. There are several free blog generators out there that will even host your blog for free, and two of the more popular ones can be found at blogger.com or wordpress.com.

If starting your own blog is too tall a task, visit others’ blogs related to your industry and join in the conversation by posting comments and interacting with the blog owner. Many blog comments are indexed by the name you enter in the name field of the comment form so you can build links to your site this way. One note of caution: there is a lot of debate whether no-follow links such as the ones on most blogs provide any search optimization value, and I have found that they do provided the blog itself ranks well and has a large following.

Promote Your Site Everywhere
Offline optimization is just as important as it is online as you’re simply trying to generate interest in your business or website, right? Consider promoting your website offline just as you would your business. Nobody will know about your site unless you tell them, but you don’t want to be a hound about it either so be subtle. The traffic you generate may result in a huge sale that puts your business on the map.

Basic SEO isn’t that difficult if you think about it in a common sense manner. Promoting your site online is very similar to how you’d promote your business offline—it’s all about positive exposure. Being heavily involved online as well as off is a solid strategy to building awareness for your business and its website.
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Various Aspects to Domain Management

Domain registration is generally very easy. In fact you can simply contact your local domain registrar and give your details like name, address, contact info and of course the name of the domain you want registered and your domain gets registered. Alternatively you can simply go online to your domain registrar’s website and if the facility is provided just fill out a simply online registration form with your name and other details and submit to register your domain. It’s as simple as that.

The problem arrives generally for most of us after the domain has been registered. We keep hearing all these words like name servers, domain pointing and forwarding, domain locking and other things which make it all a nightmare. But it is not as bad as you think. Domain management, once you understand the various aspects to it, is actually a very simply task. We look at some of the aspects in domain registration and management which you might have to go through while setting up your website.

Name Servers
Name servers are probably the most common words used after you have registered a domain. Your hosting company will tell you to change your domain name servers to their address in order for your web hosting service to function properly. So what are name servers?

To put it in simple language, name servers are the name of your server. It basically tells a domain where your website files are located so every time someone types your domain name in their browsers, the domain exactly knows where to go to show your website files – your homepage etc.

Name Servers generally look like this:

Assuming you are hosting with xyz hosting company then your name servers should generally be:

NS1.XYZ.COM
NS2.XYZ.COM

Note the NS could be followed by 3 or 4 depending on your hosting company. Your hosting company will generally provide their name servers to you when you register with them.

Domain Forwarding / Domain Redirect
Domain forwarding or also know as Domain redirect means if you have multiple domains registered and you want one of your domains to quite simply point to another domain that you have as an active website.

This technique allows you to have a single website be available under multiple domains. For example you can register your domain in both .com and .net format and then make the .net domain address forward to your .com website. That way you don’t have to spend on having two different websites hosted for each of your domain extensions.

Domain Locking
This is quite new to the world of domains but is a very important one and you should always be aware of your domain’s status – i.e. whether it is locked or unlocked.

Now, how does domain locking make a difference to you? Firstly if your domain is not locked, then malicious software or hackers have the ability to shift the domain in to their name or shift the domain’s name servers on to their web site which could cause lot of embarrassment to you. Not just that in some cases, hackers can pull the domain from your domain registrar to theirs, giving them full control of your domain.

In general you should always make sure your domain is in locked status. Of course when you need to change the domain’s name servers etc for your own use then you can unlock a domain. But always make sure moment your work is done and the name servers or any other information you are trying to change has been completed, immediately lock your domain. If you can’t lock or unlock your domain, please contact your domain registrar regarding this.
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What Is Virtual Web Hosting

Web Hosting FAQ - Part 3

What is full-service web hosting?

For companies whom choose to offer the so called “Full-service” it generally meant that they made available to their customers the whole or full range of services ranging from offering of additional web spaces, bandwidths, emails for a web site, etc. Other additional services may include web design services, web site content maintenance services and 24/7 toll free phone support,

What is shared (virtual) web hosting?

With virtual web hosting, basically, a web hosting subscriber will have his or her own IP address with the virtual hosting. The final website displayed on the web will not be any different from any other websites.In the case of shared hosting, this is how almost 98% of websites are currently hosted.

Basically, the web hosting provider will have more than one servers (super fast computers constantly connected to the web that run on server based OS applications such as Apache or IIS) that will run multiple websites belonging to many different webmaster. (they all shared one server)

Unless the website is very popular with very high bandwidth requirement or that the number of web hit to the site is exceptionly high, it usually is the best way to host due primarily to the cost of hosting compared to dedicated hosting, co-location or DIY hosting.

What are PHP, SQL, Java, IP, etc.?

These are very commonly used web hosting acronyms referring to the various features such as database (SQL), programming scripts (PHP, Java),service providers address (IP), etc.

All these terms will usually be reflected within the technical specification of a web hosting plan, deciding their respective value and provision within a particular offered hosting plan.

What do the numbers listed under “space” and “transfer” means ?

Space, as the definition goes, means how much data you can “stored”. It is just like you are given a room of different sizes and each different size rooms will have different storage capacity. The technical terms for space is usually listed in megabytes (MB, millions of bytes).

A single letter takes up one byte. HTML files are usually small (about 25,000 bytes) but pictures and programs can get quite big. Your scripts, emails and stats will also take up space on your host.

Transfer on the other hand generally meant the amount of “data” visitors to a site can download before reaching the initially set monthly limit.(based on the type of hosting plan you purchased). The main unit symbol for transfer is usually listed in gigabytes (billions of bytes).

Once the transfer limit is reached for the month, a hosting subscriber will immediately be informed by the hosting provider on the need to pay extra for additional transfer at higher rates.

An example, if an average visitor to your site views 3 HTML pages of 20 KB (thousands of bytes) each and 8 small embedded pictures of 10 KB each, and you get 500 visitors per day, you will require at least (3 * 20 + 8 * 10) * 500 * 30 = 2,100,000 KB = 2.1 GB of transfer per month.
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Hosting Service Plans - Money Saving Tips

A web hosting plan usually comes with a fixed price tag attached to it that often appears hefty to the buyer; seldom do they realize that taking a few steps can help minimize costs. While some of these steps require some effort on the buyer’s part, others are simply a matter of common sense and deductive logic.

General Introduction:

Even the most active people find themselves turning lazy when it comes to choosing the right web hosting plan; as a result, they land up paying more than what they are supposed to. Of course, most web hosting plans deliver more features (and some of them are absolutely not required), but staying a little conscious on a few aspects of any web hosting plan may help in saving further.

Tips for saving money while availing a hosting service plan:

* Step 1: Instead of pouncing upon the web hosting plan that appears first, it is always better to shop around to find out whether the same is available with another company providing similar services. Comparison-shopping saves money, and online searches are probably the best way for finding the best web hosting plan.

* Step 2: Often people tend to pay more as service fees if they are not computer savvy, the reason being the setup issues. Certain companies offer a free setup service; therefore, instead of paying a great bottom line price and an enormous fee up front to establish the service, a free setup sounds logical.

* Step 3: Set up and monthly maintenance fees are pretty straightforward; what create the trouble are the hidden costs that these so-called cheap inexpensive web hosting service companies belt-out later. A careful consideration of the options in a web-hosting package reduces the costs, and in case services are required in addition to web hosting, there are companies that are capable of combining all possible Internet services that a person may require.

* Step 4: When all the points have been verified, it’s time to know the company that offers the most competitive price and a plan that fits most the needs. Some of these companies qualify for everything apart from server down time, which means less revenue for the owner of the website. Thus, if one truly wants to minimize costs with a web-hosting package, saving a few dollars is probably not worth the reputation of the business.
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