Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, the Tools of the SEO and Sem Trade

The Internet provides a great resource for a wide variety of web marketing and search engine optimization tools for website designers, webmasters and website marketers. SEO and SEM tools provide important and relevant information regarding your website’s performance, keywords and keyword placement, link popularity and search engine rankings in major engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Keyword analysis tools can read web pages you specify and generate reports on what words where used and the number of times these words where placed on each web page or pages.

Link count checker tools are used to allow webmasters and SEM experts to view the number of websites that link to particular URLs. These tools can measure the website’s link popularity by making queries to the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN which in turn would display the results of the query.

Backlink checker tools are used by search engines to measure the importance of websites relative to one another. Reciprocal Linking is a way for websites to get these backlinks by trading links with each other. This type of tool is used to check that reciprocal linking is done properly.

Keyword density checker tools are used to check how many times (percentage) a keyword was placed on a web page. A keyword density of 2% or 3% is considered pretty good by the search engines. Higher percentages of keywords on a web page might be considered spamming by search engines. Prime locations for keywords are in Title Tags, Keyword Meta Tags, Description Meta Tags, Alt Tags for images and Header Tags.

Keyword traffic checkers is a SEO Tool that is used by webmasters to estimate some site traffic numbers that their website’s keywords may generate. An educated guess.

Meta tags generator tools makes it easy for webmasters to generate the Title Tag information, Description Tag information and the right Keywords to use for a given URL page or pages. Search engines use this Meta Tag information, which is a description of a web pages overall topic, to index the website’s pages.

A sitemap builder tool is critical for complete indexing of a website in search engines. A Sitemap is a MUST! This type of tool can create a ROR Sitemap for your website which should contain links to all web pages.

Link building tools can make a website’s ranking in search engines sky rocket. Quality links and related links meaning links that are similar to the business or category that the website represents. This type of tool will help webmasters find potential link partners.

Title tag checker tools can retrieve title tags from competitors’ external and internal links which then you can use to optimize your website pages to rank better on search engines.

By using these SEO and SEM tools you will be able to see a dramatic improvement in your website rankings.

Free Affiliate tools

As an affiliate and a new to home based business you will go left to right and right to left to find some free good tools, internet marketing tools, to help you market and manage your business.
We all hate to spend money on internet business before we see the profit from this business.
When people talk about investment and the ROI (Return Of Investment) we ran a way. We are building an internet business so we can build a free business that can give as a huge income, there is some thing wrong with that concept and we know it. So what kind of tools we need for Internet business.
1. You need to monitor your website, its performance, how your website advance in ranking. And for that I suggest you have an account with google, and using it’s free webmasters tools.
2. Internet base E-mail, like yahoo and gmail. I know most of you have a domain name and pop mail account in your hosting. But still I recommend using the web based e-mail accounts. Also redirect your pop e-mail to this free account. It is safer and you can access from everywhere.
3. Marketing tools. The free internet marketing strategies you are using, request software to automate them and make them faster. The most powerful marketing strategies are: article marketing and videos. And for both you need software to make the work faster, easier and efficient.
You can find your wanted tools for free on the net, but does the free version of the software really helps, does it do exactly what we need it to do. Why do you think the owner of the software gives you a free version? He loves helping others? He has too much money and don’t want any more? No comments..

If you really want to make money from your website, don’t be afraid from investing in some tools to help you up. Yes I always recommend downloading a free trail downloads only to check out the performance of the software, the features and to see if it is what I need. When I pay for a product I need to see it first, and be sure it is what I need, not want, need. People love to buy what they want, but in business you want to buy what you need.

In the arabian-affiliate website I have put to you some of the best free downloads and tools “Free-downloads” section and “affiliate-products” section. I have also arranged lists of website directories and article directories. To help you market your website. I also did not do that only to help you, but also to have a valuable website that is worth visit and see the offers I have in it.

I want to end this article with these words written by RickBeneteau

“It takes many inches to make a mile. We can only move by inches, one inch at a time. It’s when we look miles ahead and wonder “how are we going to get so far?” that we fail to move forward at all. We can choose to live life fully focused on the moment at hand and live happily, making great progress, moving by inches. Or, we can keep staring “in the rear view mirror”, stuck with thoughts of what could have been, instead of what can now be. Most important, we must always keep in mind that anytime we suffer a setback while moving forward, it will always be just a matter of inches, never miles..”

jossef salman
http://www.arabian-affiliate.com

Web Design & SEO resources: Link exchanges done right – Does the link have value?

There are very different ways to manipulate search engine spidering and this will cover some of the basic checks when completing a link exchange.
Web Design & SEO resources: Link exchanges done right – The Values of a Link.
An important factor when exchanging links is that the link page itself is spiderable by Search Engines, which leads to indexing. To determine the value of a link read the previously published article. If the page is not indexed, than it is invisible to Search Engines and has no way of passing a vote to your website. Sometimes you have to watch the link exchanges, since webmaster will intentially design web pages that are not linked in and provide absolutely no value to you. Two main factors to pay attention to is on the:

1. Is the web page spiderable?
2. Is the link spiderable?

——————————————————————————————————–

Is the web page spiderable?
To determine this you should determine if the page has been indexed in the Search Engines database. Take the full URL and enter it into Googles Search box.

Yes – If Google displays a listing with a description than the web page (not the link) seems to be valid. (Jump to C. Not indexed due to the Webmasters intervention) No – If the page is not indexed than this could be due to several reasons:

A. The web site is banned.
B. Not indexed due to being to new
C. Buried to deep within your web site
D. Not indexed due to the Webmasters intervention

A. To see if the web site is banned – It is critical not to link to banned web sites. Incoming links from other sites might not have an effect on your overall Search Engine Position, but linking out to the wrong web sites will raise a red flag and your web site might receive penalization. Banned web sites& Free For All web sites (FFA – Different, unmoderated category links, all on one page) are considered bad neighborhoods, and Google has banned the site due to intentional misuse of its Spam Policies for the personal gain of higher rankings (a.k.a. Black Hat Techniques). People around the web are stating that a petty first offense gets your site banned for approximately 30 days and with each offense a 30 day increase, until you strike out (See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya). To see if the site is banned use this Google Banned Tool

B. Not indexed due being New – Many times it can take a new web page up to 30 days for indexing in Google’s Search Engine depending of how often Google revisits the web site. If you would like you could exchange links with this site, depending on your personal opinion of the site. If offers valuable content you could go ahead on exchange links since it mostly likely will receive a PageRank (PR) rating on Google’s next update.

One thing to consider is the that the Google updates PR irregularly (We hope for it quarterly) and even though the PR toolbar is not showing any Green, does not mean that the web site does not have PR. It could be that PR just has yet to be updated in the Google toolbar. Google is notorious of providing PR updates with PR ratings that in fact where the PR statistics from a month or months prior.

C. Buried to deep within your web site – If the web page is buried too deep within the web sites, it can take a long time for the Search Engines to discover the web page, and if the web page is more than 3 clicks from the home page or linked-to-page, it can altogether prevent spidering. The size and importance of the web site in overall does play a large factor since this determines on how frequent and deep the Search Engine Spiders are willing to follow for valuable content.
A Great method of determining the link depth of your web site is to calculate the deep link ratio which is throughouly explained by Aaron Wall of SEOBook – Deep Link Ratio.

D. Not indexed due to the Webmasters intervention – Here is the trickiest part. Many webmaster become Page Rank greedy and choose not to have it “Leak-out” (non-sense) to other web sites by the means of external links. There are many ways to mask the link. Here are the mostly often used ones:

robots.txt – In the Address bar type in www.thedomain.com/robots.txt. You can view an example on my web design page. Following the root document type in robots.txt so the that the URL tool bar looks like this http://www.intensedevelopment.net/robots.txt. This is the universal location for the robots.txt file and if a white page comes up, ensure that the URL location of the web page you are attempting to exchange with is not getting disallowed. (e.g.: User-agent: *
Disallow: /Folder/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /File

META ROBOTS file – Check the Page Source and ensure that META name=robots tag is not disallowing indexing such as noindex or nofollow. – In Firefox you can easily check information on the web document by right click your mouse and selecting “View Page Info”

rel=nofollow – This is the newest way to prevent links from being spidered by the major Search Engines out there. Check the direct link pointing to the link page and see if it has this attribute in the anchor tag.

Redirects – Some redirect might be determined, some can’t. We will review some that can:
Right click the link and select Properties. This will display the URL path. Many of these redirects are processed on the server side and are unfortunately masked and cannot be determined.

JavaScript
Rumors are that some Search Engines are able to follow a JavaScript link and has become increasingly less effective. To check if their links are “clean”, mouseover their links and look at the URL in the status bar at the bottom of your web browser. If the status bar shows the URL like redirect.cgi?id=2, then it is not considered a clean link. But what if the mouseover gives you a description rather than a URL? In this case, when you mouseover the link, click on the link without releasing the mouse button. It will display the URL.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Is the link spiderable
To determine if a link exchange is spiderable can be a daunting task and quite impossible due to server side programming. We will review some of the basic methods which should eliminate some of the bad link exchanges.

On the web page, open the source code and find your link text within the document. Ensure that anchor attribute does not have the rel=”nofollow” which will in fact not be spiderable by Google. Other Search Engines such as Yahoo and MSN have stated that the will be supporting this attribute and as of 03/2005, have not yet publicily confirmed that these links in fact will not be spidered.

1. The page has no PageRank
IF PageRank (PR) is not passed to your web page, than this result in not receiving any boost in the Search Engine Result Positioning (SERP’s), meaning no vote was casted to your web site and no PR was passed on. The only benefit you will get is by obtaining the ability of receiving click-through traffic. Taking these factors into consideration, you are only receiving 1 out of 3 benefits of the link exchange which overall does not make this link exchange to appealing.

2. The page has PageRank
If the web page has PageRank then you are on the right track on getting a link exchange that might be beneficially to your needs. However even though this is true there still are ways to manipulate the PR to not follow external links.
Ways of determining if the link exchange is worth it.
a. robots.txt
b. JavaScript
c. Redirection
d. rel=nofollow

robots.txt
Check the robots.txt. The robots.txt will always be lowercase and always at the root of the web sites such as: http://www.website.com/robots.txt
- In Firefox you can easily check information on the web document by right click your mouse and selecting “View Page Info”

PageRank value – Ensure that the web page does not have a huge quantity of links, since this page might have become devalued and the benefits of sharing PageRank with all the other external links, just might not be worth it. Each web page has its on amount of voting points that it is allowed to distribute. Lets say a web document receives 100 points. These points are evenly distributed between all outgoing links. The more links, the less points your outgoing link receives.

Азбука Терминов И Жаргонизмов Для Seo Новичка

Решил, что упустил одну вещь – список терминов и понятий для SEO новичка, вообще, конечно, с этого нужно было начать, но как говориться лучше поздно чем никогда. Этот список – результат компиляции примерно десятка источников + некоторые собственные определения, перечень конечно не полный, но является хорошей отправной точкой для новичка. Кстати, опытному человеку тоже иногда посмотреть интересно.

CTR (Click Through Ratio) – отношение числа кликов по ссылке или баннеру к числу показов ссылки или баннера посетителям (дробь с числителем, равным числу кликов, и знаменателем, равным числу показов).

nofollow – Google использует атрибут rel=”nofollow” у ссылки. Такие ссылки не учитываются при расчете “авторитета” сайта для поисковых результатов. Страница на которой будут такие ссылки не получит штрафа “negative vote”.

noindex – теги . Мета тег Robots и файл robots.txt могут запретить индексацию поисковыми системами только целых страниц. Тэг noindex служит для запрещения индексирования части страницы. Не поддерживается Google.

PPC (pay per click) – партнерка где платят фиксированную сумму за каждый клик.

PPV (pay per view) – партнерка где платят за каждый просмотр.

PR (PageRank) тоже что и вИЦ, только для Google.

robots.txt – файл robots.txt запрещает индексацию поисковыми системами отдельных частей сайта (страниц) или даже всего сайта. Описание robots txt – стандарт для роботов поисковых систем, Файл robots.txt – Советы от Яндекса.

Адалт (adult) – адалт бизнес. Рынок товаров и услуг для взрослых.

Адверт – вебмастер продающий сайты, продукты какой либо партнерской программы.

Аккаунт (акк, account) – учетная запись. Обычно состоит из логина и пароля.

Анкор – текст в обратной ссылке.

АП (апдейт, update) – обновление (пересчет) позиций и показателей в соответствии с новыми данными, собранными поисковой системой.

Апрув (заапрувить, approve) – принять, одобрить.

Бан (Ban), глаголы соответственно банить, забанить, отправить в бан, от англ. Ban – налагать запрет; запрещать; объявлять вне закона.

Бэк (Back)- обратная ссылка. 10 бэков = десять ссылающихся на вас сайт.

вИЦ – взвешенный индекс цитирования Яндекс. Определяет положение сайта в результатах поиска в Яндексе.

Даун – недоступность сервера, хостинга из сети. Простой.

Домен 2-ого уровня – domain.com

Дорвей (дорвеи, doorway, doorways), входная страница, страница-ловушка, страница основной смысл которой отлавливать посетителей поисковых систем для того чтобы перенаправить трафик на головной сайт заказчика или владельца дорвея путем редиректа.

Дорвейщик – вебмастер занимающийся дорвеями, обманом поисковых систем и довольно часто спамом.

Зеркало сайта – копия сайта по другому адресу.

Индексация в поисковой системе – добавление страницы в индекс поисковой машины.

ИЦ – индекс цитирования. Количество ссылающихся сайтов.

Клоакинг – технология, в результате которой человеку выдается одна страница, а роботу поисковика – другая.

Контекстная реклама – контекстная реклама позволяет разместить рекламу на странице, которая наиболее подходит к содержанию рекламного объявления.

Контент (content)– материал, наполнение сайта.

Кэш поисковика, снимок страницы из кэша – записанная во время индексации версия интернет-страницы. Поскольку страница могла измениться после индексации, то текст в кэше иногда отличается от текста на реальной странице.

Мета теги для поисковиков – Мета теги (meta теги, meta тэги, meta таги) используются для описания свойств HTML документа и должны находится внутри тега HEAD.
Для поисковиков имеют значение три мета тега: Мета тег Description – служит для описания страницы, Мета тег Keywords – служит для описания ключевых слов, Мета тег Robots – содержит указания для роботов поисковиков.

Морда – главная страница.

Пессимизация – искусственное занижение релевантности со стороны поисковой системы.

Поисковая оптимизация сайта SEO (Search Engines Optimization). Комплекс действий по повышению релевантности страницы поисковым запросам.

Поисковые роботы – программы, входящие в состав программного обеспечения поисковой машины. Поисковые роботы занимаются индексацией страниц – скачивают страницы и заносят в индекс.

Ранжирование в поисковой системе – определение места в результатах поисковой выдачи для страницы.

Редирект – перенаправление посетителя на другую страницу.

Релевантность – степень соответствия страницы поисковым запросам.

Реф-ссылка (реф-код) – Ссылка с кодовым обозначением Вашего аккаунта в ссылке. Все продажи по такой ссылке будут зачислены Вам.

Реф – человек который получил аккаунт в партенрке по Вашей ссылке.

Сабдомен (subdomain) – name.domain.com

Счетчик (каунтер, counter) – скрипт позволяющий считать количество посетителей на сайте.

СЕРП (SERP – Search Engine Results Page) – поисковая выдача, страница выдачи результатов, поисковой машины.

Серфер – посетитель сайта, иногда «Дрочер», хотя больше касается посетителей адалт сайтов.

Система обмена ссылками – это как правило, это система сайтов, позволяющая автоматически ставить чужие ссылки на своем сайте и, размещать свои ссылки на чужих сайтах.

Сквозная ссылка (Сквозняк) – ссылка, которая находится на всех страницах сайта.

Скрипт – программа работающая на сервере.

Хост (host) – хостинг. Ваш фтп аккаунт, сервер.

Хостер (hoster, hosting) – компания предлагающая услуги хостинга.

Сниппет – часть текста страницы, как правило, содержащая слова поискового запроса, которую поисковик выводит в результатах поиска по этому запросу.

Спамдексинг, поисковый спам – спам индекса поисковой машины, например, путем клоакинга или создания дорвеев.

тИЦ – индекс цитирования. Местоположение сайта в ЯК, а также стоимость размещения ссылки на этом сайте.

Толстая ссылка (сильная ссылка) – ссылка со страницы с большим весом (авторитетом).

Топ, рейтинг, пузомерка – любой рейтинг, в частности рейтинг сайтов, например рейтинг посещаемости сайтов, счетчики.

Траффик (трафик, траф, traffic) сайта – поток посетителей сайта.

ЯК – Яндекс каталог.

Еще больше информации можно найти на блоге “Как сделать деньги в интернете”.

Why You Should Pay for a Keyword Research Tool or Software – Such as Keyword Elite and Wordtracker

For everyone that conducts keyword research, so basically everyone that has a website and wants to increase traffic we all know that there are free keyword research tools that seem to do the job fine.

So you may ask your self why you would need to pay for a keyword research tool.

Well the answer is in the productivity and quality of results that you are returned with when using free keyword research tools.

Free keyword research tools do not give specific enough results which you can use to fully successfully optimise your website. The results that you receive through free keyword tools such as wordtracker’s tool are some what restricted to the use of them. Free keyword research tools are only useful for testing whether or not a niche is worth entering or not, other than that you really need a paid piece of software or tool for performing proper quality keyword research.

Now you have quite a few choices that you can make when purchasing a software or tool for keyword research, some which you pay monthly others which are just a one off payment. The main factor to consider is the price of each piece of software or tool. The tools all perform the same job however they differ in the simplicity and interface which they use as well as the data they give you some are limited to 1000 results where as others delve deep in to the results with more than 10,000 results possible such as keyword elite

FREE SEO TOOL – SEORUSH

SEOrush is one of the latest webmaster tools to hit the web, SEOrush’s goal is to provide its users with a free SEO report. Many webmasters have been using this free tool of late and the sites reputation is on the rise.

SEO (search engine optimization) is an important aspect of being a webmaster, regardless of the type of site you may run.

95% of people use search engines to seek information and products on the internet, if your site isn’t ranked highly in the search engines you likely not to be found by potential users and customers.

The two main types of SEO are “on page” and “off page”. On page is how well the site in question is optimized for the search engines and how visible it in to them. Off page are mainly backlinks, references and material linking

back to your site. Both are very important to your sites success.

With this in mind, Tropica Web Design (who are an award winning Liverpool web design company) set to give webmasters a free resource to enable them to quickly check indexed pages, meta information, social presence, standard domain information, various ranks and pointers on how to improve SEO in these areas, then deliver it in the form of an online report.

The report can be beneficial as it may help webmasters improve their sites performance in the SEO aspects, as well as giving the site more exposure and to gain more traffic. It can also be used to research competitors in your niche and how well they are doing in comparison.

SEOrush is a clean, modern looking site which has great functionality as well as being lightning fast.

How Do I Get My Pages Listed on Google?

I’m sure anyone in the SEO community has been asked this countless times and why many people reading this will be thinking about asking it in reference to their own site. It is as after all a very important question and the answer, if you can turn it to your advantage, one that could prove to be very valuable.

It is however, quite an easy question to answer, at least at a general level, the answer demystifying the oft said “black art” of Search Engine Optimisation. (I do however have to state again that this is an “idiots guide” and does therefore not cover some of the more complicated issues of “keyword density”, “deep linking ratio”, “code to text ratio” and others, all of which have a bearing on the effectiveness of any web page).

We can illustrate the answer to this queston by using an analogy.

This analogy is based on an old fashioned market place, the sort when men with barrows come in and then shout out what they have on offer, you know “A pound of plums for 50p” or “Genuine leather jackets for £50″, you get the picture. However, in my description of the system, these “market places” are actually set up by Google, one for each type of goods or services. So you have one for cars and another for plumbers and another for houses for sale, and so on.

Now every one who wants to get into any of these market places can try regardless of what they sell, however, Google will be quite ruthless in stopping anyone it feels is not in the right market from getting in (however, just like any process this is not fool proof). This leaves countless thousands of “web pages” (not sites, but pages) that want to get in to sell their wares. Why, because to get in gives them a chance to be picked by those “Google Agents” who come into the market place looking for the best pages to list.

But getting into the Market place is only the first step, how do they get picked by the Google Agent for one of those coveted top ten positions??

To better understand what is going on, you must first get to know the rules of these marketplaces.

The first and most important rule is that all webpages start at the back of the marketplace, which of course makes it very difficult for the Google Agents to “hear” them crying out their wares. As the sites to which the web pages get older, so the web page move up the marketplace, getting nearer and nearer to the front (and are thus more easily heard).

More Rules

In each marketplace you will find two types of webpage, one that is trying to catch the Google Agents eye for a listing place and the other, well they are saying, “go and have a look at this page, its all about x”. These are the “links” to pages from other sites around the web, and because these Google agents listen to them, they are, as you may know, very important indeed. They can even get an agent to look into the sandbox area, especially if there are enough of them and or they are deemed important in their own right. The rules for these links pages are simple enough, they say “I represent XXX website and we are all about YYY. I’d like you to consider ZZZ website, they are very good at what you are looking for”.

So much for these “link pages”, but what of the normal webpage. What are the rules for them.

First, each webpage must only utter the words on its page, it cannot say anything else.

It first shouts out its Title (the bit in the blue bar at the top of your browser), here it can really boom out the words, which make them easier to hear. Then it continues down the page, saying the words on the pages, pausing when it comes to paragraphs etc. Whenever it comes to a Heading in a page or something in bold or italics it can say the words a bit louder, and when it comes to lists, it can pause between each phrase, all the better to make the words more effective.

It can also make it quite clear to the Agents that there are other pages in its own site that are very relevant (these being the internal links), all with the aim of trying to impress upon the agent that the webpage’s website is very useful indeed and should therefore be listed.

So, what does the above mean to the unprepared website??

Well for many, although they have managed to get into the marketplace, they find to their horror that when it comes to shouting out their Title, they have to say “WM Cooper” and not “Plumbing Suppliers, Showers and Taps by WM Cooper”, which if the agent is looking for plumbers to list is far more interesting.

Then when they come to the words on the page, they have to drivel on about “Welcome to WM Cooper website. We have been in business for 30 years and have 1000’s of happy customers, come to us…”, by which time the Agent has “switched off” and started looking elsewhere.

Now, if the words in the page had had a Heading of “Plumbing Supplies” and then read something like “We can supply you with taps, bathrooms, tiles, wash basins” and so on the agent would have been far more likely to listen.

Other sites have different problems, sure the webpage’s exist, but they are not being pointed at in the right way by other pages in their own site. Such pages are barred by Google from even getting into the marketplace, their argument being “there is no record of your existence on the website you are claiming to have come from, therefore you don’t exist, please go away”. Thus such pages fall at the very first fence…

Then again there are those unfortunate pages, that even though they are quite clearly, to the human reader anyway, all about “hotels in Portsmouth” do not actually say this on the page in any convincing way, thus if another thousand pages (and there could be a lot lot more) are all shouting out, in no uncertain terms, that they are about “Portsmouth hotels” who are they going to pick, do I really have to say more…

Thus it is only those web pages that have done their homework and who come into the marketplace prepared that win those coveted first page positions. Well that is true to a point, but we have forgotten those “linking” pages we spoke of earlier, just what part do they have to play in this saga? quite a lot actually, in fact it is now calculated that our friends the Google agents listen to the shouting of these “links” to such a degree that as much as 50 % of the reason they choose A over B is down to them. So that means it pays to get lots of links pointing to your site into that marketplace.

But be warned, Google, in a perverse sort of way, and knowing that people know it listens to the shouts of these links, will only listen if the website that the link is on is relevant to the site it is talking about (pointing to). In other words a site all about Florida Fish Farms will be of little use “link pressure” wise to a site selling Combine Harvesters, and vice versa. Also, just to spice the pot a bit more (as if it needs it) Google also keep an eye on the number of sites in a marketplace “shouting” about other sites, and if one site seems to get too many new sites “shouting” about over a short period of time are likely to get a wee bit suspicious. Is, heaven forbid, someone trying to make a site appear more popular than it really is….

So the market place is full of dangers, but basically it is “trick” free. If the pages of a website do their homework and make sure that they are really “saying” what they are all about, making it quite clear in the Title of the page as well as the headings on the page, have plenty of links and references to other pages in their site (and even ones outside it) and, just as importantly, get some links pointing to them and the other pages in their webpage, they WILL get listed. Do anything else though and be prepared to go on asking that question “why do some pages get listed by Google while mine do not….?”

Web Host Review – To Prevent Web Host Shut Down

This article is based on a true experience that took place with my web host. I am not here to blame or try to give my web host a bad name, I am here to give an honest web host review, that makes sense to you before choosing a web host provider that is right for your business.

All web host are created equal in my eyes, that is, or that used to be, until I got shut down without warning. It was very hard for me to understand how I could start a new website from scratch and eat up 40 Gigs of bandwidth in that short span of time (3 months, and I was shut down).

You should do a web host review, before you make a choice. The problem online today is, how can you make a sound web host review with all the thousands out there.

It is impossible to review the thousands of web host out there, but it is in your best interest if you base your web host review on high in demand providers. Many of the top marketers have their own server, and you can’t afford to pay $200 or more monthly for your own server.

For you to prevent web host shut down, you will have to learn how to use the forums to find recommendation for choosing your web hosting provider. I didn’t do my own research and that is why my web host shut me down without notice.

After being shut down, I went to two of my favorite forums and read a couple of post regarding my hosting company, and realized that no one had any great experiences with that company. They gave poor web host review grades for that host, well life is a learning process, and I know what not to do when choosing a web hosting provider.

Here are four tips you should follow to get a web host review:

1) Don’t ever go for unlimited domain names.

One other point worth mentioning, don’t ever go for unlimited domain names, whenever you create a new account they automatically divide up your hosting bandwidth. That means that if you have just 40 Gigs of bandwidth and you divide it up by four domain names, you have used up all your bandwidth.

So, any other new domain name you add will make you exceed your bandwidth, please understand I am just showing you the rip offs that takes place with some low cost web hosting providers. They say that they will warn you when you’re exceeding your bandwidth, but they just never do. They make you pay extra for unlimited domain names, but you being new to the Internet, you won’t ever need more than three to six domain names to get you started.

2) Don’t go with any web hosting provider that requires the full amount up front.

They offer low cost web hosting if you pay the yearly price up front. Well, once you have paid for the year, you are tied to this company, should their service is not worthy, and you will loose your initial yearly payment. Go with a company that has a 3 month or monthly payment plan, with a money back guarantee.

3) Test by sending a simple email to your web host first.

Just send off a simple email telling your web host that your interested in their hosting, this is a must for you to review web host that are unknown. The response time to your email will let you know what type of service they offer.

4) Ask for a charge back.

As you know, the client is supposed to be king, keep all your receipts in place, and should you ever be shut down by your web host after paying a yearly plan, just go to your credit card provider and file a complaint for a refund. Don’t let anyone scam you out of your money.

The final conclusion, you’re the one to blame if you get scammed, so make sure you follow my web host review tips before handing out your credit card.

Yahoo Maps and Mapquest, which one should you use?

Cartographers spend days taking trips, mapping out destinations all over the world. They are the people who bring us online mapping, atlases and those little driving direction texts that can be sent to our GPS systems or mobile phones. Yahoo Map Quest is one of those online tools that can help us if we become lost. You can go onto google or any search engine and type in Yahoo Map Quest and it will bring up a plethora of possibilities. You can type in where you are and where you want to go and Yahoo Map Quest will get you there in easy step by step instructions. The best part of this tool is that it is free to the public.

No one likes to be lost and with this application you may never be lost again. You can even print out the directions and keep them in your glove box if you choose to do so. Another option that Yahoo Map Quest allows you to do is send the instructions to your mobile device (GPS, Blackberry, Cellular Phone). You can save the directions right on the website so
you do not have to search for the same address ever again.

You can pinpoint interest points right there on Yahoo Map Quest if you like so it’s perfect for a road trip with friends. Another great feature about Yahoo Map Quest is that it’s not just intended for the United States. Cartographers have brought us online mapping worldwide. You can take points of interest anywhere, even if you are overseas or even as close as Canada. Online mapping has given us the chance to not be scared of exploring new places and doing it all on our own. For those who do not have access to the internet can always stop and get directions at any local store or convenience center, but those are not nearly as accurate as the directions you can find on Yahoo Map Quest. You can get up to date traffic information on the site as well. If there is a detour or a traffic jam, it can be easily avoided with these real time updates.

How to Beat Internet Explorer When it Comes to Css, and Stop Its Regime of Terror

I am guessing an article on this subject has been posted prior to this one, I should hope a few have! However I hope this will provide a refreshing angle on the subject and branch to some other interesting bits of stuff.

I am sure that anyone who has taken even only a few steps into web development has come across the gigantic force that is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Even for the most experienced coders, the most popular browser of this age has always been a prominent foot across the path of our websites technological progression and the possibilities of which the internet is yet to yield. Maybe not crushing ideas, but certainly making it a lot harder to bring these ideas from paper to browser.

However, although IE, wielding its scathing weapon the Microsoft corp. and therefore for-fronting the battle as the windows default has dominated the market; we have weapons which allow us the fight back! I think I’ll cut the metaphors here and get back to business… Well, how can we fight back? And more importantly, what can be done to keep our designs looking slick in the interim… Yeah before the proper browsers take over!

I’ll start with the fighting back. Personally my favourite method would be to utilize a conditional comment and tell people what they should be doing! Something like this…

Sorry in advanced that all the code used in the article has had to be altered so that articlesbase wouldn’t filter it out If you pretend that there is an open triangle bracket infront of each bit then you’re okay! eg h1> /h1>

!–[if IE]>

h1>strong>Internet Explorer is Sh**e! Get a proper browser like a>Firefox/a> before I come round and make you!!!/strong>/h1>

![endif]–>

Realistically I wouldn’t try this method though, probably not the most tactful way when it gets down to it. You could however place a banner showing your support of these less buggy browsers such as firefox. This websites great for this promoting firefox business, very nice banners right here: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates/homepage

Conditionals are pretty clever little buggers though, for general use they can become quite useful. And you’re not just limited to !–[if IE]>. The comments understand other operators as well; you’ve got the NOT operator which is an ‘!’. So “if not IE” would be !—-[if !IE]>. In addition to this there are “greater than” = ‘gt’, “greater than or equal to” = ‘gte’, “less then” = ‘lt’ and “less than or equal to” = ‘lte’. These can be used when referring to browser versions, so !—-[if lte IE 5.0]> could be used to warn users about a feature unavailable to them when browsing your site with IE version 5.0 and below.

But we are not here to help out the Internet explorer users; we’re here to convert them! Doing your bit locally can make all the difference. If you are round at a friends and he/she happens to log on to the internet using IE (boooooo), make it your concern that the very first thing that is done is the downloading of firefox (sorry Opera etc I’m a bit biased to the mighty fox.) Of course if the loging on to the internet part does not occur in the general flow of things it must also be your concern to make sure it does!… “Umm, you mind if I check the train times?” Okay I’m getting a bit carried away here, although very important to the advancement of the human race, you need not devote your life to spreading firefox.

The great progression in the internet and its uses over the last few years has meant that the look and the feel of a site has come under a lot more scrutiny, especially with ever rising amounts of traffic as more and more people connect to the internet. Complicated uses of graphics and CSS mean that when it come to interpretation by different browsers, everything can go wrong. The Browser that is renowned for taking perfect code and screwing with the end results is of course Internet explorer. It is so tempting just to say screw it and ignore the IE users and their browser, but with over 58% still using a version of IE this really isn’t plausible solution.

So okay we’ve got to fix the problem. Where to start?

Well firstly it is a must to make sure your code is valid. Just from an incorrectly written Doctype or wrongly phrased line of css can through internet explorer into all sorts of funny modes where anything can happen. Make sure you get a green light here http://validator.w3.org/ and here http://htmlhelp.com/tools/csscheck/ .

Good stuff, that’s one step in the right direction if anything. Now if the problem still exists, what now?

Most of IE’s rendering blips are caused by bugs, which can be worked around with quick alterations or what are called hacks. Chances are your problem has been experienced by people before you and a fix has been fabricated already.

So what’s going wrong? I will list a few of the most common bugs, some which I myself have experienced and a link to some relevant articles explaining in depth the fixes.

• My borders have gone crazy! – fix… http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/border-chaos.html

• Margins doubled, pushing my content down and generally mucking stuff up – fix… http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/doubled-margin.html

• Contents there one minute gone the next, the peekaboo bug – fix… http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/peekaboo.html

You may have noticed that all those fixes above are at one website. Basically “Big John” and co of Position is Everything .net have done a fantastic job among some other geniuses out there, so why don’t I just give you guys a link to his site, the chances are you’ll be able to find a fix there… http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html

You’ve now with a bit of time and effort (it sucks doesn’t it, and it really is unnecessary effort!) probably been able to fixed up your site. But what if something still purists, what can you do!? Well here is what I do…

Firstly if you know something which could be causing the inconsistencies in your site when rendered by different browsers, try just experimenting with this particular element of the code. Say the content part of your page is being pushed below your side navigation and you recon that IE is playing with your margin values but it’s not the double margin bug. Just adjusting the values of margins can bring results. This is a good time to introduce an excellent piece of free software called CssVista. If you know css well it can also be an excellent tool when in depth analysing your code when looking for problems. Check it out here http://litmusapp.com/cssvista/

If you can still find no joy using this experimentation method I’m afraid the best hope is now to do what I really find annoying especially since if browser bugs didn’t exist it probably wouldn’t be necessary. We’re going to have to start again. Now don’t panic we’re not going to redesign your site from scratch, we’re going to make a mock up page of your current design, testing for rendering problems all the way.

Okay, well your average website nowadays is divs inside divs inside divs. So first step is to create you’re outermost div and in your css give it all the position you want and a background-color so that you can see it. Now add the divs that are contained with-in this one and do the same thing, giving them all nice bright colours so you know exactly where they are. Now test it like crazy, anything going wrong so far? Basically keep going like this, until something starts to look weird, then think why it doing this? What have I just done to make it go weird? Google and other free recourses can be come very useful now. Yahoo answers is fantastic for everything so it is always worth a try at http://answers.yahoo.com.

That’s about it really; Give that a try and well, good luck!

So, we’ve had a quick look at how to rid the world of Internet Explorer and how to get by in the time being. I’m not a fan of Microsoft attempt at an internet browser but not really in the league of this guy http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html .

Basically guys have fun and make sure you’re not supporting the IE domination by using it!

Pete Taylour is co-owner of the fast growing ebook site http://www.liquidebooks.com the only place to go for your cheap and free ebooks. With strong interests in a huge amount of different music styles Pete and friend are soon to embark on some crazy mix submission site for upcoming DJs across the globe, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for that and make sure you check out Liquid Ebooks at http://www.liquidebooks.com

Next Page »