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Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The Essential 2007 Code Optimization Tutorial for SEO

Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

Do you want to get the traffic you deserve flooding into your
website? Code optimization is an essential component of the
search engine optimization process and if you aren't technically
minded then it can be difficult to get your head round. This
guide is meant for beginners and more advanced webmasters alike.

A shallow knowledge of HTML coding is useful, however, it is not
necessary. Optimizing your code can be done by simply opening
your html document in a text editor and changing different parts
as shown below. Follow these steps carefully and your code will
become 100% search engine optimized and ready for promotion and
link-building campaigns.


The steps below assume you have chosen the keywords which you
want to optimize the page code for. If you have not done that,
go and do that now and return to this guide later.

HTML Code Optimization

The optimization of your HTML code for search engines is vital.
It is the base of your SEO campaign. It must be optimized in a
number of ways in order to improve the relevance of a chosen
keyword. Follow the advice below as closely as possible. The
closer the better and the higher your rank will be.

Remember: Keywords are the words people will use in search
engines. Including a keyword in your site content (and
optimizing your site) will cause your site to be returned as
a search result. You can choose to optimize your page for a
keyword or a keyphrase (a number of related words, eg: 'free red
hats'). Using a keyphrase is more advantageous (as discussed
later) but for simplicity, I will refer to keywords AND
keyphrases as just keywords.

TIP: Try to optimize each page for just one keyword. This
will stop each keyword competing against each other for
weightings and you will rank higher for the chosen keyword.

The TITLE Tag

Location: just below the tag

Web Promotion, Affiliate Marketing, SEO' for example

1. The title tag should not contain any of the words Google
disregards. These are words like 'and', 'not', 'a', 'the',
'about' etc which are too common for Google to take any notice
of. Using these words will dilute the importance that your
keyword is given in your title (if you put it in your title).
These words are known as 'stop' words.

2. Include your keyword in the title of your page. Including
other words in your title that are not your chosen keyword/s
will be detrimental to your ranking. This is because it makes
your keyword seem less relevant to the title of the page. This
relevance is known as 'weight'. The more weight your keyword has
in a certain criteria the better.

3. Don't include the name of your website in the title of
your page: for example 'Share The Wealth – affiliate marketing'.
This is because it will dilute the prominence of your keyword
(in this example 'affiliate marketing'). It is tempting to
include your site's name as it may look better, however it is
not that important as people don't pay much attention to the
title.

The Meta tags

Location: just below the title tag.

Meta data appears as follows:

meta name="Description" content="Free articles and guides on affiliate marketing and SEO"

meta name="Keywords" content="Affiliate Marketing,SEO"

1. This is where you specify your keywords:
meta name="Keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3"
Also, weight is given to how near your keyword is to the
beginning of your keywords list. So you should try to have
your most important keyword in the place of 'keyword1' in the
above example.

meta name="Description" content="Free articles and guides on affiliate marketing and SEO"

1. The above line is where the description, shown in google
results, is written. It goes after content=". Do not worry about
keyword weighting in here as search engines do not take this into
consideration anymore.

The BODY of your HTML

Once you have written the content of your page, you can begin
SEO on it. Complete the page ready for publishing and then apply
the following rules to it to ensure its optimized 100% for the
top search engines.

1. Your keyword should appear in bold at least once on your
page. This will show the search engines that the word, your
keyword, is important to the subject of your page and so must
be relevant to the keyword search performed by the search
engine user.

2. Your keyword should have a weight of 2% on your page. This is
the ideal percentage as if it is too high a search engine may
penalize your page for spamming. Spamming is a term used to
describe the action of webmasters that trick search engine page
ranking systems (SEPRS) into thinking they are relevant in order
to get a high ranking. These pages will not usually be relevant
at all and simply "cash in" selling advertising space with the
high traffic they receive. Spamming is increasingly becoming a
thing of the past as the search engine page ranking algorithms
become more sophisticated. To work out the percentage weight
your keyword has, visit www.live-keyword-analysis.com .

3. Use heading tags (

heading

etc) and put your keyword
into the heading. Again the usual weighting rules exist. Have
your keyword as close to the beginning of the heading and have
as few other words in the heading as possible. Position this
heading as close to the top of your page as you can for increased
relevance.

4. Put your keyword in up to three of the alt attributes for
images and include it in one of the first three alt image
attributes in your code. Alt image attributes are the alt tags
given to images in your code which can be seen if the image
fails to load. These are great for hosting your keyword as users
cannot usually see them. Don't spam though, stick to three alt
tags. Alt tags are used as follows:

img src="http://www2.blogger.com/imagename.gif" alt="alt-text-here" height="image-height" width="image-width" /

5. Keep your page content between 100 and 1400 words. This is
for a number of reasons, including the size of Google's page
cache (amount of data from a page Google stores). If you have
too much content, you could try splitting the page into two
separate pages and perhaps having a 'page 2' link at the bottom
of the content.

6. Your keyword should appear at the beginning of your content
and at the end (The first and last 50 words)

Code Optimization Checklist

* No stop words in your title tag

* Keyword included in title

* Website name not included in title

* Keyword in meta keywords list

* Keyword placed as close to the beginning of the meta
keywords list as possible

* Keyword appears in bold at least once in the content

* Keyword has a 2% weight

* Keyword is in the first heading tag and is at the top
of the page content

* Keyword is in the first 50 words and last 50 words of
the page

* Page content is between 100 and 1400 words

* Keyword is in one of the first three alt image
attributes and is in three of them in total

Tips and Advice

• Try to optimize each page for just one keyword. This will
stop each keyword competing against each other for
weightings and prominence and you will rank higher for the
chosen keyword.

• Not every page of your site will be able to be optimized
for every criterion. Don't worry; just try to hit each
criteria as best you can. Sometimes you won't be able to
achieve a content size of above 100 words: on a contacts
page for example. Issues like this are of little importance
as not every page will have a particular need for perfect
optimization, because surfers will find contact information
from a link shown on the home page.

• Constantly check your competition. You may not feel it is
possible to get onto the first page on Google for a certain
keyword/phrase. Choose a less contested keyword.
================================================================
Article by James Kinsley search engine optimization
(http://www.sharethewealth.co.uk/) expert and web promotion
(http://www.sharethewealth.co.uk/) specialist.
================================================================


Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.

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Monday, March 26, 2007

Double podium glory for Fiat Yamaha Team in Jerez

RACE REPORT - 25/03/2007

Valentino Rossi returned to the top step of the podium today after leading for all 27-laps of the Grand Prix of Spain, taking his first victory since Sepang last year and his 46th win of the four-stroke MotoGP era. Rossi's 26th win for Yamaha also makes him the most successful rider at Jerez in the premier class, with five wins at the Spanish track. He was joined for the podium celebrations by his team-mate Colin Edwards, who rode a strong race from fourth on the grid to stay in contention behind Dani Pedrosa, eventually finishing third and taking his seventh MotoGP podium in front of a record crowd of 138,000.

Both Yamahas got a good start off the line, Edwards riding around the outside of Carlos Checa to take third at turn two and Rossi passing pole-sitter Pedrosa to take the lead shortly after. By the fourth lap the leading trio had begun to pull away from Nicky Hayden and John Hopkins and Rossi had started to stretch his lead on Pedrosa, setting the fastest lap of the race on lap five. Despite a strong showing from the Spaniard in front of his home crowd, Rossi's lead never looked in jeopardy and he eventually crossed the line 1.246 seconds in front. Edwards meanwhile never stopped pushing in third place, spurred on by the looming Honda of Toni Elias in the latter stages. Tyre worries for the pair proved unfounded as their Michelins worked well to the flag and Rossi and Edwards now take first and fourth in the Championship after two rounds of the eighteen-race season.

Valentino Rossi Position: 1st Time: 45'53.340

"After the situation at this race last year, this is much, much better! Our first priority today was to get points and I knew that to win I would have to ride at the maximum, but today my Yamaha really flew and I was able to do a great race. It feels like a long time since I last won and this is a great emotion and a very special victory for me, especially in Jerez in front of this great crowd. Qatar was good but to taste victory again is a wonderful feeling. We had some problems on Friday and again yesterday and then after this morning's warm-up we made some more small modifications; I have to thank my team, from Jeremy Burgess to all my mechanics and engineers. They did a fantastic job for me this weekend and they all deserve this win. My tyre worked very well today and Michelin have done a good job too in difficult conditions, so thank you to them. I got a great start, didn't make any mistakes and had a good battle with Pedrosa, who we knew would be the danger today. I'm really happy for Colin too and to have both Yamahas on the podium shows that we're in good shape for what's going to be a long season. Now we have two race tracks which might be difficult for us so it's very important to leave here leading the championship."

Colin Edwards Position: 3rd Time: +2.701

"On Friday morning you wouldn't have thought we would end up on the podium, but here we are and it was a good race for me. I've got to say an enormous thank you to all my guys because they worked non-stop all weekend and came up with some pretty good solutions to the problems we had. Michelin also had something up their sleeve for us and seemed to know what would work and they were proved right - they've done a good job for us this weekend. I got a good start and my best move was getting past Checa so quickly; I knew I had to find some clear air and try to hang onto the back of Valentino and Pedrosa. I made a couple of small mistakes and they were able to pull away from me a bit which was a pity, but my bike was working well so I was able to keep a pretty good pace throughout. Towards the end I could see Elias had appeared behind me and I didn't like the idea of him getting spurred on by his home fans and trying to snatch a podium, so I really had to keep hammering away! The last few laps were a little hairy at times as I started to slide but anyway we managed to make it and it feels great to be up here on the podium again."

Davide Brivio - Team Director

"It's great to be back with both riders on the podium and especially here in Jerez where we struggled so much in last year's race. It's a really positive sign and shows what a good job our Yamaha engineers have done with our new bike. Everyone has worked very hard over this weekend and the entire team deserves congratulations. The new tyre regulations mean we have to manage what we have very carefully and this is a great result for us. It's also a very important result because we now have two tricky circuits and it's good to be going into this stage of the season in front. Thanks again to all the team and everyone involved, we're very happy today!"
More championship points for Dunlop Yamaha Tech3 Team

There were smiles aplenty in the Spanish sunshine for the Dunlop Yamaha Tech 3 Team when both riders, Sylvain Guintoli and Makoto Tamada finished in the points at the Spanish Grand Prix, held in front of over 131,000 screaming fans at the technically demanding Jerez circuit.
It wasn't only the points that made the team happy as both riders on the new smaller capacity 800cc machines completed the race in a faster time than 2006 confirming the constant improvement of the Dunlop tyres.
Both riders became embroiled in their own duel that lasted until the flag as they both exchanged places a number of times, Makoto pipping Sylvain for 14th position by just 0.091 of a second after 27 gruelling laps of the 4.423km track.

In his rookie year of MotoGP, Guintoli, 24-year-old Frenchman, improved his performance every time he left the pit box replicating his efforts of the previous race in Qatar confirming that it will be a season that produces every improving results.

His Japanese team mate is now moving in the same direction as he becomes attuned to his return to Dunlop tyres and with this confidence producing result both riders expect to be closer to the leading battles with the championship now moving to Istanbul for the Grand Prix of Turkey on April 22.

Makoto Tamada Position: 14th Time: +36.653

"Although it wasn't perfect I am happy with the result as I was held up by another rider during the early laps. He was faster in some spots and I was faster in others which caused me to lose a little bit of time but when I got past him I could get away quickly and come back to where Sylvain was so we fought out the rest of the race together which was very good. I was very happy with the bike setting as we used a new front tyre that I hadn't used before. I had a very good feeling with it although the rear spun a little but even at this early stage of the season I know that this will improve as well. Saying that, it was very consistent during the entire race. We have a gap of just three tenths of a second each lap compared to the mid pack so it was only a small gap in comparison to the last race. Being three seconds faster than my race time last year made me happy as well. The fight with the field this year is a lot more than last year and I know my team are happy with me because I kept fighting until the end. This will help everyone because it is important to fight until the very end so we can give the information to Dunlop so they can continue to improve."

Sylvain Guintoli
Position: 15th Time: +36.744

"We had had a pretty good weekend and to score another point scoring place is very encouraging. In reality, we have done a much better job here because we are only 36 seconds from the win and six seconds quicker than the time Checa did last year considering the race was four seconds quicker as well.
For me it is a big improvement because Jerez is a place I have never done very well at as I've had many troubles here in the past. The entire weekend was a big improvement tyre-wise and I am getting more used to the bike as well. I had a bad first lap but then I caught the group in front of me that were fighting for 10th but I just couldn't manage to stay with them. I had a good fight towards the end with my teammate Makoto which was a lot of fun.
I had a very good front tyre which gave me the confidence to push hard throughout the race. The rear was excellent for the early laps which allowed me to catch the group in front and do low 42's. Then like everyone else the grip level dropped off slightly but I could still maintain a rhythm in the high 42's. I am confident of continuing the improvement at the next Grand Prix in Turkey."

Herve Poncharal - Dunlop Yamaha Tech 3 Team Manager

"I'm very happy today as I think both our riders had a very good and consistent race. Sylvain had a great start and pushed really hard but Makoto was a bit more cautious. By mid race they were both together and had a very good battle between them so that was great to see. With both riders in the points it's a very good result for us as there was only one crash during the race - that says a lot for the progress we are making. Also more importantly the group in front of us with Capirossi, Barros and De Puniet was very, very close and with just 0.3 second a lap quicker we would've been with them so that's very encouraging - and don't forget Capirossi won here last year.
We have made a big step forward especially compared to the previous race, so we are happy. We know the points aren't easy to come by this year considering how close the lap times are, so with both our guys in the points this is a good result and a good boost to our confidence.
I am also happy with the lap times throughout the race because they are very consistent doing mid to high 1'42's which is very close to the pack, so I think if we can achieve a better grid position and have a bit more speed in the first five or six laps we will have better results. We are staying here to test for the next couple of days. Unfortunately the weather forecast is for rain, but Dunlop have a big wet test program for us anyway."


Race 1 - 27 Laps

Pos., Rider, Manu., Nat., Total Time

1, Valentino Rossi, Yamaha, ITA, 45'53.430
2, Daniel Pedrosa, Honda, ESP, 0'1.246
3, Colin Edwards, Yamaha, USA, 0'2.701
4, Toni Elias, Honda, ESP, 0'4.351
5, Casey Stoner, Ducati, AUS, 0'4.993
6, Carlos Checa, Honda, ESP, 0'10.000
7, Nicky Hayden, Honda, USA, 0'14.146
8, Marco Melandri, Honda, ITA, 0'19.969
9, Chris Vermeulen, Suzuki, AUS, 0'24.786
10, Shinya Nakano, Honda, JPN, 0'24.955
11, Alex Barros, Ducati, BRA, 0'25.008
12, Loris Capirossi, Ducati, ITA, 0'25.852
13, Randy De Puniet, Kawasaki, FRA, 0'26.445
14, Makoto Tamada, Yamaha, JPN, 0'36.653
15, Sylvain Guintoli, Yamaha, FRA, 0'36.744
16, Kenny Roberts, KR212V, USA, 0'48.911
17, Kousuke Akiyoshi, Suzuki, JPN, 0'50.784
18, Olivier Jacque, Kawasaki, FRA, 1'0.901
19, John Hopkins, Suzuki, USA, 1'3.371

Best Lap

Rider, Manu., Nat., Total Time

Valentino Rossi, Yamaha, ITA, 1'40.905


Rider Standings 25/03/2007

Pos., Rider, Manu., Nat., Points

1, Valentino Rossi, Yamaha, ITA, 45
2, Casey Stoner, Ducati, AUS, 36
3, Daniel Pedrosa, Honda, ESP, 36
4, Colin Edwards, Yamaha, USA, 26
5, Marco Melandri, Honda, ITA, 19
6, Nicky Hayden, Honda, USA, 17
7, Chris Vermeulen, Suzuki, AUS, 16
8, Toni Elias, Honda, ESP, 15
9, John Hopkins, Suzuki, USA, 13
10, Alex Barros, Ducati, BRA, 12
11, Shinya Nakano, Honda, JPN, 12
12, Carlos Checa, Honda, ESP, 10
13, Alex Hofmann, Ducati, GER, 5
14, Loris Capirossi, Ducati, ITA, 4
15, Olivier Jacque, Kawasaki, FRA, 4
18, Makoto Tamada, Yamaha, JPN, 2
19, Sylvain Guintoli, Yamaha, FRA, 2


Team Standings 25/03/2007

Pos., Team, Points

1, FIAT Yamaha Team, 71
2, Repsol Honda Team, 53
3, Ducati Marlboro Team, 40
4, Honda Gresini, 34
5, Rizla Suzuki, 29
6, Pramac D'Antin, 17
7, Konica Minolta Honda, 12
8, Honda LCR, 10
9, Kawasaki Racing Team, 7
10, Tech3 Yamaha, 4
11, Team Roberts, 3


Manufacturer Standings 25/03/2007

Pos., Manufacturer, Points

1, Yamaha, 45
2, Ducati, 36
3, Honda, 36
4, Suzuki, 20
5, Kawasaki, 7
6, KR212V, 3

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Thursday, March 22, 2007

Gear Up Your Site For Social Media Marketing

Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.

You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interactions on more and more sites and they may have an expectation of the same from your site also.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus this year should be on the social aspects of your site.

Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.

The central theme of these sites is user generated content used for sharing among the end-users. The social aspects of these sites are to allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests.

You don't have to change your site completely within a month or so to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally throughout the year and you will be on your way to meet these new challenges.

The first step is to declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don't like to deal with unknowns. Create an About Us page and list your achievements and skills.

Create a MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/) page and link your bio in the About Us page to the MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of these new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.

Install free blog software and start publishing at least one article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/). This is done by providing an action button for each article on your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.

Also, provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg.Digg (http://www.digg.com/) is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to your site.

Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don't delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker (http://www.boardtracker.com/) is a forum search engine.

If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your contents. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers draw their attention.

Publish all your feeds at Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com). Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services.

Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) and Google video (http://video.google.com/). Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site url. Post these videos using catchy titles, teasing descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them discoverable.

Provide embedded links to your posted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites.

Besides videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.

Provide a Send to Friend feature for all products and services you offer. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.

For starters, Yahoo provides a service called Action Buttons (http://publisher.yahoo.com/social_media_tools/) that add links to your website for users to share, save, and blog about your website. The Yahoo action buttons use del.icio.us for social bookmarking and the Yahoo blog site for blogging. It also has a print feature.

Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in profound changes to web surfers' experiences. It is the right time for implementing features that will make your site social media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffic to your site.
================================================================
Dr. Deepak Dutta is the creator of http://www.semanticbay.com - an interactive social network website based on user shared text and picture contents on any topics. His other website http://www.classifiedsforfree.com - is one of the oldest online classifieds sites where users can post ads in more than 600 US cities and 60 countries.
================================================================

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.




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Tuesday, March 20, 2007

How to Create Your First Blog

I've been blogging now for about 2 years, and I'm amazed at
the amount of traffic that I get from my blog and the
number of people who tell me that they first heard about me
from my blog instead of my website. The word blog is
derived from the term "web log", or an online diary or
journal. If the HBO series "Sex and the City" were being
filmed today, Carrie Bradshaw would be a blogger as well as
a columnist, I think. Why? As she experiences her
revelations about life, love, and relationships, she could
post them to her blog for the world to see and comment upon.

Blogging has opened website creation to almost everyone, as
it takes very little know-how to get a blog up and running.
In fact, many service business owners are using a blog
platform as their primary website, with some of them
creating static pages as you would find on a traditional
website, while others are using the platform as a blog and
are posting updates regularly.

There are several advantages to using blogs instead of
ezines or traditional websites:

1. Search engines love blogs. The strategy that seems to
be attractive to search engines today is regularly updated
content. I can log-in to my blog at the beginning of a day
and submit a post. Within 24 hours I'll get a notification
from my Google alerts account that Google has indexed that
post.

2. Content can be distributed quickly. If you instruct
your visitors to subscribe to your blog via updating
services like Bloglines or Feedblitz, they'll be notified
within hours of any new posts on your blog.

3. Little web programming knowledge is required. Once
your blog is set up, it's simply a matter of logging into
your account, typing the info for your post, adding graphics
or photos as needed, and publishing your post to your blog.

4. Reader feedback. Your readers can give you comments
and feedback about your posts almost immediately after you
log an entry. Blogs are a great way to engage your
audience.

Are ezines and traditional websites dead? No, because
people consume information differently. Some are auditory
learners and prefer to hear the info (great audience for
podcasting, an audio form of blogging), some prefer to
receive updates as they are published (blog readers), while
others like a stable, stationary medium to which they can
refer when they're ready (readers who archive ezines or
bookmark web pages).

How do you begin to blog? Here are 10 simple steps you can
follow:

1. Blogging platform. The easiest way to get started is to
use the free service found at Blogger.com or Wordpress.com.
The ability to customize your blog is limited with the
free services, so I urge my clients to subscribe to
Typepad.com, which will host your blog for you on their
servers, or purchase a hosting account where WordPress can
be installed. The downloadable version of WordPress is
located at Wordpress.org and is free of charge if you need
to install Wordpress yourself on your hosting account. I
use Typepad for my blog, so many of my examples will relate
exclusively to blogs hosted on that platform.

2. Name. What do you want to call your blog? Blog names
tend to be attention-getting and off-beat. However, for
service businesses, I encourage my clients to use keywords
important to their business when naming their blog. You
will also want to acquire the .com version of your blog's
name or your blog's name with the word "blog" attached as
your blog URL. After you have set up your blog, your blog
provider can give you more info about how to map your
domain to your blog. (Note: You don't want to simply
forward your blog to your domain name, as that impacts the
URLs of your individual blog pages).

3. Look and Layout. How many columns do you want to
display? Do you want links to static pages? What colors
do you want to use? How about a signup box for a free
giveaway? Should you use one of the templates provided or
have something custom designed? Do you want your blog
archives displayed? Do you want to be the only author or
do you want to permit others to make posts, as well? There
are many questions you'll be asked in the startup phase
about the look of your blog. A Typepad blog permits you to
change your mind about your layout at a later date. The
best way to determine the look of your blog is to look at
the layout of other blogs and determine what appeals to you.

4. Widgets. There are a number of widgets, or add-on
programs, that you can incorporate into your blog. Check
your blog software's site for more info about what features
you'd like add to your blog. At a minimum you'll want to
give visitors a couple of ways in which they can receive
blog updates through various updaters, or feeder services,
as mentioned earlier.

5. Comments. The newest sp*am making its rounds online is
comment sp*am. Don't these guys have anything better to
do? Set your comments to moderated, which means that you
have to approve any comments to your blog before the post
goes live. You'll save yourself a great many headaches and
time by choosing to moderate the comments.

Once you've gotten this far, you should have a basic blog
established and are ready to begin to blog.

6. Blog content. The time has arrived -- your blog is
ready to accept posts. What do you write about? You can
post content rich articles of interest to your target
market, comment on a current event, answer questions from
your visitors, present a before and after case study
outlining how your business helped someone, etc. Keep your
eyes and ears open for information relevant to your
audience. I use my blog to bring forth info that doesn't
fit well into my newsletter format or something that arises
between newsletter issues. I post my ezine content to my
blog, as well.

7. Posting frequency. Blogs are just like gardens -- they
need watering regularly and require some care and
attention. For maximum effectiveness, you need to post
several times a week to your blog. I try and post 4 times
per week in my blog -- 2 posts are items I run across or
comment upon as noteworthy in the moment, and the latter 2
are the contents of my ezine posted over 2 days. And,
respond to reader's comments when they arrive -- blogs
provide a great forum for ongoing discussions.

8. Blog traffic. In the same way that you publicize your
website URL on everything that you do, you can similarly
publicize your blog. Submitting your blogs to blog
directories is another way to get traffic. A very
comprehensive list of blog directories, RSS Top 55
(http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/) has been
compiled by Robin Good. Searching out blogs that appeal
to your target market and making comments to those posts
will also drive traffic to your blog. Another trick is
to post your blog on social bookmarking sites like Reddit,
Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us.

9. Measure the results. Some blog programs, like Typepad,
have built-in statistics so you can view details of your
blog traffic. Some of the feed/updater programs have
built-in statistics as well, or you can install a metrics
program as an add-on to your blog. Review your statistics
regularly to determine how much traffic your blog generates.

10. Rinse and repeat. Don't let the novelty of blogging
wear off. Blogging is effective only if you continue your
blogging efforts regularly over a long period of time. I
know of several individuals who have gotten book deals from
their blog and radio and TV interviews as well. Just
think -- your blog might be your ticket to fame!

Every service business can benefit from blog technology.
Few other marketing strategies provide the quick immediacy
that blogging provides.
===========================================================
Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business
Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed service
professionals learn how to automate their businesses,
leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more
clients online. To sign up for more FREE tips like these
and claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing
Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.GetMoreClientsOnline.com
===========================================================

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.

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How to Reduce the Pain of Switching Domains

Transferring traffic and popularity to a new domain is a
painstaking process that no one on the web appears to be immune
to, or so Topix.net has realized. Topix.net is a leading news
aggregation resource that has been in the news lately because
they are planning to move their site from Topix.net to Topix.com
after purchasing the .com for a cool million from a Canadian
animation company.

The Wall Street Journal wrote this article
(http://online.wsj.com/public/article/
SB117375265591935029-IKQUyS_3o8u4cUtPCqiCO2oV5OE_20080311.html)
explaining how damaging a seemingly simple process of switching
from .net to .com could be for Topix LLC. The author goes on to
explain such a switch is usually fraught with ranking drops
while the major search engines notice and respond to the
changeover. The fact that switching addresses will cause
problems is not news in the SEO world; however, I thought
Topix.net's situation was a great opportunity to review what
one might expect when switching domains.

Switching Shingles

Switching a domain is tantamount to changing physical locations
and it should be treated just as seriously. The following are
the steps to take and consider when switching domains:

1. You must install a site wide 301 (permanent redirect) on
your old domain to forward all human traffic to the new
domain and inform search engine spiders that your website
has permanently moved to a new location. For information
on how to implement a 301 redirect here is a great tutorial
(http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm).

2. Google is the biggest player and likely the most
significant driver of traffic to your website. Keeping that
in mind you will want to notify Google of your switchover
as soon as possible by registering the new website within
Google Webmaster Central and then submitting a fresh XML
sitemap. Google representatives are very clear the only way
to minimize the impact of a domain changeover is to give
Google's automated system as much warning as possible to
limit downtime.

3. Find the most significant inbound links that point to
the old domain and selectively contact the site owners
requesting a link update to the new domain.
TIP: Discovering which sites to contact first can be done
using a combination of top referrer statistics, and search
engine backlink reports. I don't recommend taking this
step unless you find a few sites that stand out as massive
traffic drivers as this process can be frustrating due to
lack of response; after all, changing a backlink to your
site is likely low on a webmaster's priority list.

4. Send out a press release far and wide explaining the move
to the new domain. Feature the domain prominently in the
release to begin the task of re-branding.

5. All email addresses will need to be forwarded to their
respective addresses on the new domain. Ensure that anyone
emailing the old address is forwarded to the new one BUT
they should also receive an automated notice to change
their contact records to reflect the new email. Leave these
email forwards active for a short time to catch the most
important emails and then turn them off and delete the old
address accounts to avoid encouraging spammers.

6. On the new domain don't forget to implement a 301 redirect
for the "non-www" traffic so they get forwarded to the
preferred "www" version of the domain. For more information
and background on this topic please visit the following
tutorial "301 Redirect of Non-WWW to WWW URLs
(http://www.stepforth.com/faq/non-www-redirect.htm)".

7. If you expect a severe drop in traffic you can expect a
drop in sales. In this regard you may want to ramp up or
start pay per click marketing to minimize the damage to
your bottom line.

How Long Does a Domain Transition Take?

Generally a popular website will experience the least amount of
downtime because Google will take notice faster due to the many
entry points (inbound links from news articles, etc.) this type
of site usually has. It is also more to Google's benefit to
ensure that a credible and well-trafficked website is kept high
in Google's results to ensure users receive the best results
possible. Using a popular website such as Topix.Net as an
example, I would expect a 2-week to 1-month turn around at which
time traffic would be back to approximately 85% of what it was.

Sites that are less popular will really need to do their
homework and ensure they have informed Google in every way
possible of the transition. The transition back to normal
traffic for sites that carefully transition their website should
be in the realm of 2 to 6 months.

"What If?" The Worst Case Scenario

What should you do if your traffic drops dramatically and after
a few weeks or months it still has not measurably restored
itself? Google actually recommends you post your issue on their
online user support forum (http://groups.google.com/group/
Google_Webmaster_Help). Apparently Google engineers
occasionally take pity and help out; maybe you will get lucky.
I also recommend visiting the more authoritative search engine
forums (such as Search Engine Watch
(http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/), iHelpYou
(http://www.ihelpyou.com/forums/), etc.) and requesting help.
There are a lot of incredibly talented SEOs on these forums that
are happy to provide assistance.

WARNING!

If you must conduct a domain transition be sure to plan it
during a historically slow time of year to minimize damages. For
example, it would be a mistake for a B2C to switch domains
before the Holiday Season rush.

In Conclusion

Do not switch your domain unless you have no other choice
because no matter how popular your website is domain switchovers
are far from enjoyable. After all, even losing a single week of
significant traffic for a popular site could cost many thousands
or even millions of dollars. On the flip side of the coin, less
trafficked websites (i.e. Mom and Pop sites, small B2C websites,
etc.) usually experience a longer wait time so they experience a
different type of pain. Fortunately, you now know there are ways
to mitigate the potential harm to your bottom line, just don't
forget to follow the rules and your switchover will be a lot
more effective and ultimately less painful.
================================================================
Ross Dunn is the founder and CEO of StepForth Search Engine
Placement Inc. (http://www.stepforth.com/) Based in Victoria,
BC, Canada, StepForth has provided professional search engine
placement and management services since 1997. Ross is a search
engine optimization and placement expert with over 9 years of
marketing experience and is a Certified Internet Marketing and
Business Strategist (CIMBS). Blending his experience in the art
of web design and search engine optimization, Ross offers a
unique and informed perspective on obtaining top search engine
placements. Ross can be reached at ross@stepforth.com
================================================================

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.

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Thursday, March 15, 2007

2007 FIA Formula One World Championship









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