Benefits of Adding News to Your Website

 Posted by Daryl H. Bryant

You’ve just signed a huge new contract. Your company has just launched a great new product. You have just formed an advantageous strategic partnership that will bring new business leads for years to come.

Adding news to your website can prove to be highly beneficial in many ways. If you’re thinking about adding something new to your website, one thing to consider would be to add in a news section. First off, it’s relatively inexpensive to build and maintain a news section. Secondly, it can offer several benefits for your company.

Below are just a few of the benefits you will receive if you include a news section on your website.

Keeps your clients informed

We as humans love news. What better way to allow your clients to learn about your company’s latest and greatest achievements, then through a simple online news section. Now your clients can continue and check your site to learn about your company’s latest developments.

Shows your company is constantly growing

If I came to your website and noticed that you had a new company news article added to your website every month, it would prove to me that you are a company that is focusing to grow and expand your business. It also shows me that you are proud of your company’s achievements. I would definitely want to do business with a company like that.

More content for the search engines

What is the basic rule for Search Engine Optimization? You need good, quality content to be properly and successfully indexed in the major search engines. Adding a news item or two to your website every month will provide you with a more enhanced site for the search engines.

Knowledge for current and future employees

What a great way to provide a history of your company by giving your current and future employees a central location where they can educate themselves about your company’s developments over the past years.

A perfect marketing tool

News events can be used to help market your business for FREE. You can take your company’s press releases and simply add them to the news section on your website. Since this will eventually be picked up in the search engines, the media could even come across your news piece and pick it up for their next big story.

So like I said before, adding a news section to your website can prove to be a highly effective tool to help build credibility, market your business, educate your employees and helps enhance the SEO of your website.

At Hudson Horizons, we provide website Content Management conversion for the small to mid-sized business to easily allow our clients the ability to manage the data of their website on a day-to-day basis.

Hudson Horizons is an e-business product, solution and marketing company specializing in creating highly sophisticated customized websites, web-based software applications and providing e-marketing services for small and mid-sized businesses.

Our vision and ultimate ambition as a company is to always strive to be “The New Light for e-Business.”

By offering new, innovative and extremely competitive products and solutions to our customers, we provide better ways to run and operate their business online.

Why The Search Engines Don’t Care About Your Website

Posted by Neil Street

It’s a fact. The search engines don’t really care about most websites. If the search engines could talk (perish the thought) they’d tell you that for most keywords, only the first page or two of results are really worthwhile. The relevancy drops off very quickly, and the remaining several million websites stored in their indexes are irrelevant, and invisible. If this sounds like the problem your website is facing, read on.

In order to rank well, you have to do certain basic things. You can’t expect to get to the top of the pile without any effort. To get your website near the top, you’re going to have to break a sweat. The ten rules that follow aren’t the only rules in the SEO game. But they are good ones. Use them all, diligently, and your site will start moving up the charts within a couple of months.

1. Stay organized. Develop good planning habits and record-keeping and stick to them.

2. Start with a good website. If you site is boring, uninformative, and unoriginal, why would the major search engines want to send visitors there? They wouldn’t. So build great content.

3. Directory submissions are nothing to get hung up on. Just do it and move on. Directories are a small piece of the puzzle, not a whole campaign. You can find suggestions for good directories at www.directorylist.org, www.isedb.com, and www.searchengineguide.com.

4. Write regularly and promote your articles online. This is the guts of your search engine optimization work. To get found on the internet, you have to get your name known in your niche. You also have to get links back to your site, so you can rise in the search engine rankings. By publishing good quality articles via some specialized article distribution sites, you can accomplish both. You can also use article-writing to help you acquire links to important inside pages on your site. (Known as “deep-linking.”) Some reliable article distribution sites to check out include www.goarticles.com, www.articlealley.com, www.isnare.com, www.ezinearticles.com, and www.authorconnection.com.

5. Become a trusted community member. Search marketing is all about community and neighborhoods. If you don’t join in, you won’t get recognized. You can start by posting to forums in your field. Real posts, not just link-dropping. Social networking also belongs under this heading. You can join MySpace, and start spreading the word about your business, your hobby, your work, whatever it might be.

6. Start a blog and host it on your website’s domain. Learn about tags at www.technorati.com, and add them to each post. Start a “blogroll” of blogs you like. Do something useful with your blog (annoucements, reviews, advice, so on) then ask for links from trusted sites to help you keep blogging.

7. Do organized link searching. Pick your targets, such as “trade asssociations in the antiques business,” and go to those sites. Ask for links. Look at links on those sites, and follow them. And so on, until you reach the end of a particular line. The trick here is to keep it organized and keep good records. (I use Excel).

8. If organized link hunts are good, disorganized link hunting is just as good. Huh? Disorganized link hunting occurs when you track the competition to see who is linking to them. Then you go after the same links. That’s why it’s disorganized – you are just hunting around wherever your nose leads you. For in-depth tracking, consider the tracking service from www.googlealert.com. They are not a part of Google, but they track Google, and they are Google-approved.

9. Study your web statistics. For successful SEO, you must track who is coming to your site, how they are finding you, and how they navigate your site. Good stats packages can be found at www.google.com/analytics, as well as www.websidestory.com, and www.webtrends.com, to name a few.

10. Stay on top of the news, and be alert for random opportunity. This is often overlooked. When things happen in your industry – a new product, a show, a controversy – be ready to write about it. If you don’t, someone else will, and they will get all the links. If news breaks, talk about it in forums, on your website, and in your blog.

Sound like a lot of hard work? It is! The rewards go to those who put in the effort, not to those who want to “get rich quick” with a few tricks. Use all these 10 rules, and your website will become one of the few sites that the search engines really care about.

About The Author:
Neil Street is co-publisher of Small Business Online, at http://www.smallbusinessonline.net. This article is excerpted from his original work on this topic, at http://www.smallbusinessonline.net/omo.htm. He can be reached at neil@smallbusinessonline.net

Why Top Level Domain Names Mean Better Search Engine Rankings

Posted by Paul Wolbers

With the recent explosion in the availability of website domain name extensions (i.e. .com, .net, .ws, and others) it’s never been easier to register a domain name that is highly descriptive of your website’s subject matter.
For example, if you want to create a website about search engine optimization, it would make sense to use a domain name including the phrase “SEO” or “search optimization” or something similar. However, you can bet that many other people have had the same idea, so “seo.com” is no longer available, nor is “seo.net”, .org, .biz, or any other simple domain name with a top level extension.

Additionally, it’s a fact that most people who are searching on the internet are going to give top priority to websites with top level domain names like .com or .net.

This is simply a matter of these being original suffixes, and the average web surfer believes that they have more credibility and authority.

This is especially important if your website is selling or promoting your business or products, as these factors translate into how trustworthy your website may or may not be in the mind of the web surfer.

To put it simply, A top level domain name extension is one of your strongest sales tools.

Many people believe that the search engines will give more weight to your domain when considering your site for search engine rankings. Keep in mind that there should be a clear relationship between your domain name and website theme to increase your chances of ranking well in search engines.

Here are a couple of tips that may help you to bag that all important top level domain name for your site.

First, try a plural version of your key phrase. So, in the example above, you might check out the availability of top level names using “search-engine-optimizers”, rather than “search-engine-optimizer”.

However, when used on its own, this tactic may be a bit too obvious, and more often than not, when the singular version of a phrase is taken, so is the plural.

This second little trick is far more effective and well worth trying if you are looking for a top level name for your site. The trick is - Numbers.

Not numbers at the beginning of the domain name - that’s already been done to death and you only have to look at a list of expired domains to see how many owners of such addresses just allow them to die. Why? Because they don’t work very well with search engines or with real people - and something like “0000seo.com” just looks wierd.

So that’s not likely to be of much benefit to your site. But numbers in the “body” of the domain name itself, especially the numbers 2 and 4, very possibly will be.

Why?

The number 2 is a simple substitute for the word “to” or “two” and 4 can be read as “for” or “four”.

Now combine that with one other little substitution trick. Take the word “You” and substitute the letter “U”, and finding a good top level domain name that still relates very closely to the site subject matter becomes relatively easier.

Let’s take our SEO example to demonstrate how effective a strategy like this can be. Using all three of the highlighted tricks, try searching for “seo4u.com” or “searchoptimizers4u.com”. Still available? If not, how about “seo4us.com” or “searchoptimizers4me.com”?

Even if all of these are now taken, all you need is a bit of imagination to create a “.com” domain name that relates directly to your subject matter. An easy but effective method of grabbing good a top level domains for your websites.
For More Highly Effective Internet Marketing Tactics Visit The Internet Marketing Website. Get Free Internet Marketing Tips, Tools and Techniques: http://www.TheInternetMarketingWebsite.com

cPanel Tutorial - Email Manager

How to Access Your Web Mail?

The Email Manager allows a user to do many different tasks involving email accounts. This includes creating email accounts, removing accounts, forwarding email, and more. The following section of this documentation will familiarize you with using the Email Manager to accomplish the many different tasks that are associated with email accounts, and email account maintenance.

You can use the Mail Menu to access one of the three web mail programs included in cPanel. These programs will allow you to read your email through a browser window without having to make any changes to the computer you are on or leave any email on the computer you are on.

Step 1: To access the Mail Menu, click on the icon above the word Mail on the main screen of your cPanel interface.

Step 2: Click on the words Web Mail to enter a screen where you can select the mail program you wish to use.

Step 3: Click on the icon of the mail program you wish to use. More information on the benefits of each mail program can be found in the web mail section.

Step 4: You will now need to choose the web mail program you wish to use:

• Neomail (note that you need to fill the required information when accessing the Neomail program for the first time)
  

  

• Horde (note that you need to choose the language interface before logging in)
  

  

• Squirrelmail
  

  

NOTE: You can also access web mail through the web using the following URL: http://yourdomain.com/webmail where yourdomain.com is your actual domain name. The full email address should be used as username.

Troubleshooting Tips: Make sure to log out of web mail when you are done. If you do not log out, it may be possible for another user of the computer you are on to access and read your email.

cPanel Tutorial - Email Manager Article source :

http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/cpanel/email.htm

Four Strategies On Finding Out What Visitors Think Of Your Website Information

Posted by Chris Le Roy

The Internet is what I consider one of the most awesome things every created. I am of that generation that grew up with computers and the Internet has really been a god send for me as it allows me access to places and people I would never have had the opportunity to meet. It is also the source of some of the best information you could ever wish to garner. But! It is also the source of some of the worst information as well.

Website owners, just like you and me really need to carefully look at the material that we provide on our websites and consider the issue of whether everything we are providing is really what our visitors really want. So, the question is, how do we find out?

There are four simple key strategies you can use to find out whether the visitors to your site actually value your information. The four strategies are –

1. Email the Visitors
2. Survey the Visitors
3. Put Feedback Ratings on the Page
4. Email to Friends buttons

These four strategies might seem obvious or simple but how many people actually use them. Not too many.

Why Put These Strategies Into Place?

The key reason for this is that by understanding what your customers are thinking you can tailor the information on your website so that they are more inline with what they want. For example, and I will use my own training company as an example, if we had let say a sudden rush of 10,000 visitors to our site and they told us via the four strategies above that they wanted more information on Excel, what do you think we would do. We would add more information on Excel. If through the Feedback ratings we got higher positive responses for say articles on Pivot Tables, what would we do? We would put more articles on Pivot Tables onto our website.

Let me give you another very clear reason to do this. My team and I run a website in Townsville, Australia called GetTheRightPrice.com. This website provides the fuel prices for the local community and tells them where to get the best price. For three years my company had been running this site to the tune of $100,000 plus a year. We had struggled to work out how we could run this site and make a profit. Over the three years we used some of the strategies above to learn one clear lesson. Nobody in the community was prepared to pay for the fuel price, which meant we had to change our way of thinking to find a model that worked.

Okay so let’s look at the four strategies.

Strategy 1. - Emailing Your Visitors

This strategy I personally think is quite simple and straight forward, but it does rely on one thing. You need to be asking your visitors what their email addresses are. If you own a website and you are not collecting visitors details, then what are you doing. Remember one thing, always ask your visitors their first name and their email address so that when you send out an email, you can address the email to them personally. You will always get more responses if you address the visitors by their first name.

One other thing, get the visitors details into some sort of Customer Database as soon as possible. There are lots around.

When you email your visitors you could ask them simply some questions to reply to, you might ask them to complete an attached survey or you may just ask them to give you some feedback on say a certain webpage.

One thing to note to, sometimes people can be very shy about completing a survey via email. You may want to consider finding a way, with this strategy where they can reply, but anonymously.

Strategy 2 – Survey the Visitors

This is one, I have been using a lot of late and I have learnt so much about my customers. You can survey the visitors in to ways, have a link on the page that takes them to the survey or you can use what we call an Exit Survey. This was a strategy I learnt from a series of interviews done by a gentleman called Mr H. An exit survey is where a screen will popup as they leave your website and done effectively is a really simple way to learn what your customers think.

I thought when I first used it people would be really anti the technique, but they haven’t been and I have got some really cool information from my customers. One thing though, if you are using Pay-Per-Click search engines, then they usually frown on this technique. But, if your traffic is from other websites then I encourage you to use this technique.

Note a few things though, for this method to work, the questions must be extremely simple and quick and to get the optimum responses back you need to make sure that you offer the visitor something. In particular some Free Gift like an eBook, article or report and make it something worthwhile not rubbish. Nothing irritates me more, than registering for something free and it being a load of rubbish. If you do this, it will affect your credibility.

Strategy 3 – Feedback Ratings On Your Webpage

Feedback ratings are definitely what the big boys are using. If you visit sites like MSNBC and goto their news articles, at the bottom of each article you will see the ability to define how you rated this story and they give you five stars to click on. With this sort of information what you can do is to then look at the styles of articles you are providing and provide more in that category. This will ultimately help you to attract the customer back in the future.

The other key thing with this style of tracking is that you can work out if a particular author or style of article is more attractive to your visitors. It can also help you work out whether its worth paying to get a key author to write for you.

Strategy 4 – Email This Article To Your Friends button

This strategy is really an extension of Strategy 3. What it essentially requires you to do is to track how many times somebody forwards your article to a friend. By looking at the statistics from here, if a certain style of article is being emailed then you may again want to look at getting more articles in that category.

What’s the bottom Line?

The bottom line is this, the more you learn about your customers behaviours, what they like, what they don’t like, who they are etc. The more effective your website will become and the more likely people will come back to your website.

The other thing I would like to put to you, is not to loose your statistics. You need to be looking at them regularly. In our centre we use Microsoft Access to view and evaluate our statistics. Trends change in the marketplace and what works today may not work in the future, so by keeping those statistics you will be able to see if the trends are changing.

For more information on MoneyMaking At Home Business or Unique Ways to Earn Money visit our website at http://www.1-on-1.biz

How to Increase Your Google Adsense CTR

Posted by Enzo Chiu

This is the first part of two series of articles about How to Increase Your Google Adsense CTR. Many people think that they just have to copy and paste Google Adsense code into their website and start earning a huge amount of money from it. What a huge mistake! I also thought the same way two years ago. Later I realized that without optimization, that’s impossible. Here I will share all of the tricks to increase my Google Adsense CTR that I found within the last two years.

Here are some tips to increase your Google Adsense CTR:

1. Make sure the ads that are appearing on your site are closely related with your content. This is the first thing you have to do because if your ads are not relevant, there’s small possibility that people will click on them. Then, what should you do to tackle this problem? Here are the tips:
   • Create a keyword rich content. I suggest you creating one topic a page.
   • Check your keyword rich content and then mark some of your keywords as bold or italic. But don’t do it too much, just do it 1 – 2 times per page. Otherwise, Google assumes you are doing spamming.
   • Use your keyword in your page title.
   • Use HTML Tag H1 as your content title, and put your keyword in it. Don’t forget to place this tag at the beginning of your content.
   • If all those tips still do not work, there is just one possibility: there are no ads that matched with your keyword! You can check this out by using this marvelous tool from the Digital Point Website. It is called the Google Adsense Sandbox, and located in http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/Adsense-sandbox/
     You’ll be asked to enter your selected keyword and it will display every Adsense ads that’s connected with that keyword. What if your suspicion is correct? Change your keyword! Do not worry; sometimes you just have to change one or two words.

    

2. Use wide ads (336×280, 300×250 or 250×250). Because these are the best performing ads. 
3. Blend your ads with your website themes. For example, if your background color is white, change your ads border and background color to white as well. If your background color is dark (black), use bright color such as yellow as link color. This will decrease user ad-blindness. 
4. Place your Google Adsense in these positions:
   • Above the fold
     Above the fold is the top position of your page that’s visible without your visitor having to scroll down. This is the best location that works for me. I place 336×280 ad unit in this location and it works very well. Why? Okay, back to our example. Your article is about “how to bake delicious bread”. Someone finds it from search engine; when he opens it, he first sees ads about “baking school”, “baking book” or “bread recipes”. Who won’t be interested?
   • In the middle of an article.
     This works well if your article is long (more than 500 words). People tend to stop for a while and look for something different while they read. I suggest using rectangular ads (125×125, 180×150, 300×250, 336×280, 250×250 ad unit) for this purpose and make it left justified.
   • At the end of an article.
     Many people reported that placing Google Adsense ads at the end of their article tends to work very well. This is because when people finish reading an interesting article, they usually think “okay, what’s next?” That’s your chance! By placing Google Adsense ads at the end of this article, people will spend a minute to read it and then (maybe) click it. For example, you write an article about “how to bake delicious bread”. And at the end of it, there are some ads about “bread recipes”. Who won’t be interested?

    

5. Regarding the fourth tip, I don’t recommend you placing three ad units in a single page. From my experience, the number of ad unit you place in a single page doesn’t affect your CTR. In fact, I even found that placing three text ads in a single page make my ads “unblended”. For example, I put 160×600, 468×60 and 336×280 ads on a single page. You know what? My 468×60 ads only showed 3 ads in it, whereas my 336×280 ads only showed 2 ads in it! My suggestion is: use 1 – 2 ad unit and a single link unit on your page (Google allows 3 ad unit and 1 link unit to be placed on a single page). 
6. Always use Link Unit! Many people never realize that Link Unit is the most profitable format if put in the right place. Try to place it near your navigation menu. People will misidentify it as a navigation menu and automatically read it. If your ads are closely relevant to your content, there’s big possibility they will click it. I move the top navigation in one of my websites to the bottom section and replace it with 728×15 Link Unit Ads. You know what? My Google Adsense CTR increased by 200%!

Enzo Chiu - Freelance Programmer & Web Developer. You can find many advices about how to make money at home and also many Google Adsense tips and tricks at his website www.MakeMoneyAtHome-Idea.com

All About Dedicated Hosting Providers

Unless overtly listed otherwise, most web hosting packages you’ll come across in your search are what are called shared hosting providers. What this means is that the server or servers that host your website are simultaneously hosting numerous other websites also. This gives you a discounted rate on web hosting services in exchange for tolerating certain technical constraints, like bandwidth, disk space, upload and download speeds, security and privacy, traffic, and probably the most notable restriction — total control.

If you want total control not only over the administration of your website but also over the very hardware and software used to run it, then you should be evaluating not shared hosting providers, but dedicated hosting providers. If your business is large enough or growing fast enough that it requires its own internet connection and server, you may need a dedicated web host.

What’s the downside to going with dedicated hosting providers? In a word: responsibility. In most areas of life, with total control comes total responsibility, and it’s no different with hosting providers. With a dedicated server, the onus is on you to buy, install, and maintain the actual equipment — the server itself — mounted in the dedicated hosting providers’ data center.

Fortunately, you still get the benefit of their presumably top-notch, around-the-clock security over the physical premises, but you remain fully responsible for the security of your cyber-premises. Likewise, dedicated hosting providers will ensure that the systems in the building are all provided with redundant uninterruptible and backup power and environmental controls, but it’s you who must keep your machines and cables maintained and functioning in this idyll environment.

How do you identify whether it’s time to switch from a shared host to a dedicated host? There are 3 main indicators to stay alert for:

Speed

If the traffic streaming through your shared server is slowing down your customers’ pace as they browse your site (or your employees, if an in-house site), it may simply be time to look for more unencumbered shared hosting. But if you’ve tried several shared hosting providers with the same results, then it may be time to remind yourself how impatient the average web surfer is. While you’re jumping from shared host to shared host trying to save a buck, your customers are jumping ship. Your ability to respond promptly and effectively to customer transactions and inquiries cannot be overemphasized either.

Reliability

The limits to your control are nowhere more apparent than in the areas of reliability and security. It’s not simply that problems can arise: problems do arise. It’s the nature of the biz. And if you don’t have unlimited access to your own operating system, software and database apps, etc., there’s not much you can do when one arises.

Customizability

If your company is growing fast, you’re going to be changing many aspects of your web presence along with it. You may regularly need to tweak your disk space and bandwidth and experiment with using different applications to better serve your changing needs. On a shared host, upgrading in such a way usually involves leaping from one “package” or “plan” to another. These packages are generally preset and may or may not serve your immediate needs. They may be riddled with programs you don’t yet need, for example, yet lack in the one singular program you do. Or the next leap up from your current plan has way more disk space and bandwidth than you need at the moment. With a dedicated server, you can make changes incrementally, step forward, step back, heck, step sideways if you need to — and when you need to.

In large part, it’s the size and growth rate of your business that will dictate whether you need a shared or dedicated host. Affordability and personal time commitment are nice secondary considerations, but if your business is booming, you would do it a great injustice to try and save on a few bucks and few extra hours per week of your time in exchange for slower and poorer quality of service for your customers.

By the same token, however, if your business is small enough to function quite smoothly on any of the shared hosting providers out there, don’t squander your precious capital on a dedicated server just so you can have total control. Because sometimes total control isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.