About The Author Britt Gillette is author of The DVD Report, a blog where you can find more reviews like this one. Source: http://thedvdreport.blogspot.com/2006/02/terminal-dvd.html

The Internet is growing at an exponential rate, resulting from greater masses attempting to earn an income from the Computer Revolution. It doesn’t take long for a developer to realize the magnitude of increasing competition, when attempting to obtain more visitors. How much competition exists? The fact is, when this article was written, “Whois,” reported 65,443,044 active Domains existed. Additionally, 446,308 Domains where, “on-hold,” and 1,184,180 Domains where created by 18:00 EST (1). While this information does not illustrate direct competition for a given niche, it’s apparent that any type of Website created will have modest rivalry.

The Business model of an Internet Website is relatively simple; increasing traffic means increasing revenue. However, with the growing number of Websites, it will become more difficult to obtain greater traffic. So how is traffic disbursed on the Internet? Traffic disbursement can be isolated to two primary sources: Search Engine Queries and Incoming links.

Search Engines have evolved greatly in the past few years. However, the principal is still the same. A Search Engine Spider travels through virtual space analyzing Webpages’ encountered and assessing their premise. Spiders can quickly route through deeply routed pages within any given Website and index them within a Database. In addition, they can assess which Websites change frequently, and retrieve new data on a scheduled basis. Because of their ability to quickly assess pages and their changes, they offer the internet community one of the most valuable resources, “The ability to accurately locate documents of interest”.

Based on the fundamentals of Search Engine’s, developer’s can increase Search Engine traffic by offering more content and resources. As relevant pages and resources are added to a Website, the premise of the Website becomes more apparent. In addition, expanded queries will match relevant pages displaying new content.

The other source of Internet Traffic, “incoming links,” can benefit a developer in several ways. First and most obvious, we can achieve greater traffic from the visitor of Websites displaying the incoming links. Also, if used properly, incoming links that are text based (Anchor Text) help Search Engine Spiders determine the premise of a Web-page. Finally, the total number of incoming links improves rapport with Search Engines (2).

Because some Search Engines poses the tools and resources to quickly archive numerous pages and their data, they have begun to utilize, “Anchor Text,” to leverage their Search Engine Results. The most famous example, of this technology being implemented, is the Apple QuickTime Download page showing as number one in Google for a search query of, “Click Here”. The term, “Click Here,” cannot be found anywhere on the visible page or Source Code. So why is it number one? Because the Developer linked the words, “Click Here,” to the download page from many pages with good rapport (High Google PR). Naturally, this is pure speculation, as only the Google Engineers could explain exactly why it is number one accurately. However, most are probably familiar with the famous Google Bomb of, “Miserable Failure”. A large number of people linked, “Miserable Failure,” to the Official White House Web-page of President George W. Bush. As a result, George ranks number one on Google for the search term.

Text links can be acquired through paying for placement or through exchanges with other Webmasters. For the most part, paid links will generate a lot more traffic then exchange links. This is due solely to placement. In a typical link exchange, the incoming links are placed on, “Weak,” pages that receive little traffic. In contrast, advertised links will be presented on prominent pages with a lot of visitors. Moreover, a lot of speculation exists regarding how the major three Search Engines treat reciprocal links. Some believe they cancel-out one another, as a vote. This speculation suggests that, “one-way,” incoming links provide the greatest benefit.

Bombing, as illustrated in the above examples, has created a large market for the purchase of Text Links. As a matter of fact, text link advertising is soaring right now. A number of people now offer broker services, connecting text link publishers with people wishing to advertise. It has gotten so big the Major search engines are beginning to demonstrate concern. Matt Cutts, a developer for Google, has offered some insight on the matter (3). Acknowledging that many Websites rely on the sale of ad space for income, he explains how this method of calculating the premise of a page has greatly improved Search Results for all the major Search Engines, and selling links hurts this technology. Matt suggests that sold links should include an additional tag, “rel=nofollow,” to tell Spiders not to count the vote. The Consequences of not including the tag means that Google may not pass PageRank with links coming from the site selling the links. Essentially, purchased links that do not include that tag will eventually become worthless for Search Engine recognition.

Outside of paid advertising, it would require something really special to acquire incoming links. With practical reasoning, a developer would have to either create something very useful to the Internet community, or offer valuable information that will be referenced by others often. What ever method is conjured, it’s obvious in this point of time, the text link prevails for traffic generation.

(1) Whois Source: Detailed Domain Counts and Internet Statistic (http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/).

(2) Google: Google Technology (http://www.google.com/technology/).

(3) Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO: Text Links and PageRank (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/).

About The Author Michael Medeiros is the developer of Mjmls. Michael has an extensive background in Business and Advertising. He offers Internet Advertising Solutions through his free classifieds (www.mjmls.com), Website Directory (links.mjmls.com), and Internet bulletin (forums.mjmls.com/advertising/).

About The Author Britt Gillette is author of The DVD Report, a blog where you can find more reviews like this one. Source: http://thedvdreport.blogspot.com/2005/02/under-tuscan-sun-dvd.html

Yes, anyone can create a Website, it is not as hard as you may think and it will not take a long period of time to get done. If you can not afford for pay for a professional to create one for you, there are other options you may not have considered.

Most people today that have a PC (personal computer) at home today also have some sort of ‘office’ program, either from Microsoft or some other company of the same level. You may even want to take advantage of the offers from the big search engines themselves, such a Google’s new page creator, and have an additional websites on the internet.

These programs come with additional programs that make life easier, such as Word, Publisher, Power Point to name a few. Since many are well versed in one of these programs, they often use it’s ‘website’ function as their first tool for creating a website. It all depends upon the level of the master program you install, and that depends upon the value you think the program will have for you at the time of purchase. For instance, you can get Microsoft office ‘pro’ or ’student/teacher’, which will have only certain programs included. The ‘pro’ version has Access, FrontPage and Publisher, where as the ’student/teacher version does not.

You will just have to try them out and select the one you feel is best suited for your level of expertise. You can always at a later time,use one of the others and even a ’stand alone’ program of some sort to make your website better, if desired. There is nothing wrong with any of the mentioned programs,I used Word as my very first website creation tool once Microsoft added that function to it. I have been active with computers since the early 70’s when I took computer science in college and majored in programming. At that time is was all ‘main frame’ languages since the internet as we know it today did not exist. There was one but it was not available for public use and many did not know about it, only the colleges and government.

We know the search engines love to ‘re-visit’ your site and check for changes in order to have the latest changes you have made to your site. There will be changes during the course of time as many change associations, add links or pictures and text. I too go through this and get tired of having the same old page jump up at me when I go to my site. If you are like most of use, you visit your site much more than anyone else. You like to check things like your ‘hits’, ‘page views’, and links ( to see if any are no longer valid ).

Here is where having an advanced editing program (the more common are ‘Dreamweaver and Frontpage’) comes in very handy or having a working knowledge of html code as you will need one of them to get your ‘meta tags’ in place. Do you have to do this? No, you do not, but if you do not then you may never get listed with some of the better engines since the ‘robots’ they send to check out your site for listing may not find the information they require.

The key to any website when creating it is to detach yourself and think about what others will like or think about what they see when the visit your site. There are physical aspects to this, not only mental ones. You will find in a room of many people they each will have input on what ‘they’ like. You will have to get the common factors and use those as your basic ones as the starting point for your site. You can always ignore this and do what you like and that is ok too. With the millions of new people getting on the internet every month, the chances of ‘like minds’ like yours that will love your site just as you created it grows. It will be seen no matter what, so don’t become overly concerned and get your site up as soon as you can.

When Google came out with ‘Adsense’ they found many neglected certain aspects called site page ‘hot spots’. These ‘hot spots’ should never be overlooked when creating a website or any of it’s ‘related’ pages. Google has a set of articles about this.

I, like many of you, love to ‘do things myself’ and got advanced programs such as Frontpage to use for my website creation and up-dating once I had the initial site up using one of the basic programs such as the ones mentioned above. I am even more into learning how to use them myself by relying on the ‘help’ aspects. I have found that for me, trial and error brings more rewards. I also just have not the time to attend a night class or private class on the program, although I do think most should do this before attempting to do a site with an advanced website program.

Once your done, you will face another challenge and that is ‘up-loading’ it to your domain for the rest of the world to view. There are several ways you can do this or you can contact your hosting company and they will assist you or do it for you. If they charge will depend upon the level of site you have with them or other factors. I have found it is better to create the site first, then get your hosting. Let them know you have a ‘web’ ready to up-load. In the process you will also find it will take up to 72 hours before your domain will be viewable across the whole internet or for your hosting server to get what is called the DNS active.

The bottom line is to get your site up as soon as you can and start making money with it if that is what you desire.

Good Luck,

About The Author Robert Nixon has been active on the internet since it’s start. Had a successfull shareware distribution business. Now dedicated to helping others with site improvement and avoiding scams. View their website at: http://www.cpucash.net robert@cpucash.net

About The Author Nan Edemann worked in a karaoke bar for 9 years before starting his own audio electronics store. His store specializes in karaoke machines and accessories and has a much larger variety of items than almost all large department stores. At http://www.karaokeadvisor.com, he shares his experience with you by listing out the top karaoke essentials with buying advice on various products.

Why Can’t I Get Indexed by the Search Engines? Unfortunately, this is an all too common question. If it makes you feel any better, you’re not the only one frustrated about the length of time it takes to be indexed, or the many pitfalls involved. It often takes anywhere from two days to as much as six months to be listed on a search engine. For example, last month Excite finally updated its index for the first time since last August! Luckily, Excite is the most extreme case lately, but waiting several weeks to a month can also be extremely frustrating.

A Web Position Submitter report will give you current time estimates for each engine so you’ll know what to expect. However, an engine at any time could choose to delay their indexing beyond the “norm” for maintenance or other reasons. On the flip side, you could get lucky and submit just a couple days before an engine does a complete refresh of their database. Therefore, submission times can never be an exact science since we’re all ultimately at the mercy of the engine. If you’ve submitted your site and have waited the estimated time to be indexed and there’s still no listing, what do you do now?

Here are 16 tips that should help you solve this problem:

1. First, be sure you’re not already indexed but just don’t know it. Unfortunately, none of the major engines are kind enough to e-mail or notify you as to if and when you’ve been indexed. The method to determine if a page or domain has been indexed varies from one engine to another, and in many cases, it’s difficult to tell for sure. Never assume that you’re not indexed just because you searched for a bunch of keywords and you never came up in the first few pages of results. You could be in there but buried near the bottom. In addition, it’s not very practical to check the status of a number of pages on each major engine each week. Fortunately, Web Position has a URL verification feature in the Reporter that makes this process much easier. Each time you run a mission, it will report which URLs exist and do not exist in each engine.

2. Make sure you have uploaded the pages to your site before submitting them. This one seems obvious, but submitting a page that does not exist or submitting with a subtle typo in the URL is a goof we might all make at one time or another. If you’re using Web Position’s Submitter, there’s a checkbox on tab 2 that forces Web Position to verify that all your URLs are valid before submitting them.

3. If you have information inside frames, that can cause problems with submissions. It’s best if you can create non-framed versions of your pages. You should then submit the non-frames versions of your pages which can of course point to your framed Web site. Alternatively, you can enter your relevant text within the “no frames” area of a framed page which most search engine spiders will read.

4. Search engine spiders cannot index sites that require any kind of registration or password. A spider cannot fill out a form of any kind. The same rule applies regarding indexing of content from a searchable database, because the spider cannot fill out a form to query that database. The solution is to create static pages that the engines will be able to find.

5. Dynamic pages often block spiders. In fact, any URL containing special symbols like a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) will be ignored by many engines.

6. Most engines cannot index text that is embedded in graphics. Text that appears in multimedia files (audio and video) cannot be indexed by most engines. Information that is generated by Java applets or in XML coding cannot be indexed by most engines.

7. If your site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex and take a long time to load, it might time out before the spider can index all the text. For the benefit of your visitors and the search engines, limit your page size to less than 60K. In fact, most Webmasters recommend that your page size plus the size of all your graphics should not exceed 50K-70K. If it does, many people on dial up connections will leave before the page fully loads.

8. If you submit just your home page, don’t expect a search engine to travel more than one or two links away from the home page or the page that you submitted. Over time they may venture deeper into your site, but don’t count on it. You’ll often need to submit pages individually that appear further down into your site or have no link from the home page.

9. If your Web site fails to respond when the search engine spider pays a visit, you will not be indexed. Even worse, if you are indexed and they pay a visit when your site is down, you’ll often be removed from their database! Therefore, it pays to have a reliable hosting service that is up 99.5% of the time. However, at some point a spider is going to hit that other 0.5% and end up yanking your pages by mistake. Therefore, it pays to keep a close eye on your listings.

10. If you have ever used any questionable techniques that might be considered an overt attempt at spamming (i.e., excessive repetition of keywords, same color text as background, or other things that the WebPosition Page Critic warns you about), an engine may ignore or reject your submissions. If you’re having trouble getting indexed in the expected amount of time, make sure your site is spam-free.

11. If your site contains redirects or meta refresh tags these things can sometimes cause the engines to have trouble indexing your site. Generally they will index the page that it is redirecting TO, but if it thinks you are trying to “trick” the engine by using “cloaking” or IP redirection technology, there’s a chance that it may not index the site at all.

12. If you’re submitting to a directory site like Yahoo, Open Directory, NBCi, Looksmart, or others, then a human being will review your site. They must decide the site is of sufficient “quality” before they will list it. I recommend you read the submission guide on the directory tab of the WebPosition Submitter. It contains tips to improve your chances of obtaining a good listing on these directories.

13. A number of engines no longer index pages residing on many common free web hosting services. The common complaint from the engines is that they get too many “junk” or low-quality submissions from free web site domains. Therefore, they often choose not to index anyone from those domains or they limit submissions from them. It’s always best to buy your own domain name (very important) and place it on a respected, paid hosting service to avoid being discriminated against.

14. Some engines have been known to drop pages that cannot be traveled to from the home page. HotBot has been rumored to do this. You may want to consider submitting your home page that links either directly or indirectly to your doorway pages.

15. Make sure you’re submitting within the recommended limits. Some engines do not like more than a certain number of submissions per day for the same domain. If you exceed the limit, you may find that all your submissions are ignored. Fortunately, WebPosition’s submitter will warn you regarding current limits and recommend you stay within them. Some submission consultants feel it is dangerous to submit more than ONE page a day to a engine for a given Web site. For those who wish to be ultra-conservative in their approach, the WebPosition Submitter includes a checkbox to limit submissions to one URL per day per engine.

16. Last but not least, sometimes the engines just lose submissions at random through technical errors and bugs. Therefore, some people like to resubmit once or twice a month for good merit in case they do lose a submission. Certainly if you’ve followed all the “rules” and are still not listed, re-submit! Sometimes a little persistence is all that’s needed.

If any of the above scenarios apply to your submission, you should make the necessary adjustments and re-submit. If that still does not work, you should consider e-mailing or calling the search engine and asking them politely why you have not been indexed yet. Sometimes they will reply back with “Sorry, there was a problem with our system and I’ve now made sure you’ll be indexed within the next couple days.” Or, sometimes they’ll tell you why you were not indexed. In other cases, they will ignore your e-mail and you’ll have to keep e-mailing or calling them until they respond. Still, it’s definitely worth the effort to get your site listed with the major engines assuming you also take the time to optimize your pages so you’ll achieve top rankings. I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.

Help with website design and Smarter Marketing options can be found through Online Web Consultants SEO Firm. The specialist here are experienced and certified in search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

About The Author Lee Rummage is a certified SEO expert specializing in search engine marketing and search engine optimization. He also has a back ground in web design and website linking services. For help with any of this please visit www.onlinewebconsultants.com. info@onlinewebconsultants.com

Parties are fun but they can be expensive. You have many options to keep the costs down, but the easiest thing you can do is watch how much you are spending on food. If you have hosted parties in the past you know that food can be one of the most expensive aspects of the event. You don’t have to hire an expensive caterer to have a good time. A little imagination and effort can make a low budget party a memorable occasion.

Finger food such as small sandwiches, potato chips, dips, fruit and vegetable trays are fairly inexpensive. This is a great option for informal parties.

A great alternative to a professional caterer is to have each of your guests do the catering for you. A potluck allows your guests to become amateur caterers. It also makes sure that each guest has something they like because it is unlikely that someone would bring something they don’t like. To help your guest and to avoid redundancy, include a suggestion as to what kind of food you would like your guests to bring such as a salad, dessert, and soft drinks.

Pizza is an all time party food. Young and old love pizza, and there is a wide selection of toppings that should satisfy all your guests.

Don’t serve alcohol if you want to save money. Alcohol free parties are safer, and less out of control. You won’t have to worry about designated drivers, or taking peoples’ keys once they had one too many drinks. In addition, you don’t have to worry about people staying over night.

You can have memorable party without spending a bunch of money. When you shop for food use coupons and look for sales. Always give yourself plenty of time to shop, so you can bargain hunt.

About The Author George Meszaros with http://www.partyfantastic.com.

According to NewOpenWorld, the organiser of the new world natural wonder selection, Vietnam’s Phong Nha-Ke Bang and Fansipan Mountain were rejected from the selection list because of lack of official support committees.

In an email answering Tien Phong Newspaper’s question about why it removed the two above sites from the nomination list, NewOpenWorld said all nominees become official nominees when they have official support committees, otherwise they will be removed.

According to NewOpenWorld, each nominated site must be registered, using NewOpenWorld’s form, and faxed to +49-89-818196033. The registration form includes the name of the site and information about the support committee.

The committee must be assigned by the government or have a legal presence or responsibility to the registered site.

Nguyen Van Tinh, Head of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Physical Training’s International Cooperation Agency, said that Phong Nha-Ke Bang and Fansipan were nominated by local administrations and the media. Only Ha Long Bay was registered and supported by the government and state agencies. Ha Long’s support committee is temporarily the People’s Committee of Quang Ninh province.

To maintain the top position of Ha Long Bay in this selection, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is printing posters to deliver to passengers on Vietnam Airlines flights, organising Vietnamese cultural weeks abroad, which include events to advertise Ha Long Bay.

Quang Ninh province, the site of Ha Long Bay, is awaiting the government’s approval to launch a nationwide campaign calling for votes for Ha Long Bay.

Pham Sanh Chau, Chief of the External Cultural and UNESCO Agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said NewOpenWorld will choose only one wonder in each country. Is it reasonable that three scenic spots of Vietnam be represented in the selection? Should Vietnam focus on only one nominee?

(Source: TP)

About The Author Gordon Meyer created, produced and hosted the long-running series, “Hollywood’s Master Storytellers” which enabled audiences the opportunity to see and hear some of the most successful and celebrated filmmakers in the world talk about the movies they’re best known for, including Academy Award® winners Oliver Stone, James Cameron and Paul Haggis. His book “The Screenwriter’s Manifesto” explores the concept of the writer as an entrepreneur in detail and can be downloaded for free at http://www.stiylagency.com/screenwriter/index.asp

One of the great benefits of email marketing is that it delivers measurable metrics. To run a successful email marketing campaign, you need to monitor and understand email statistics such as Open Rate, Click-Through Rate (CTR), Bounce Back rate etc. Understanding these metrics will allow you to improve your email marketing campaign and achieve better results.

1. Basic Email Metrics you should evaluate in each email campaign:

Open Rate – that is the total number of emails opened (in HTML format) divided by total emails delivered/distributed.

Click-Thru Rate (CTR) – calculated as the number of unique clicks on links in the email divided by the number of emails opened. It basically means how many people interacted with your email.

Bounce Rate – represents the total number of emails that were not delivered and bounced back. There are several reason why the email was rejected such as the email address is no longer valid, a server filtered the email out, or the recipient’s mailbox was full and over quota.

Based on your unique email marketing campaigns objectives, you can measure more advanced statistics such as:

- Number of Emails Open based on Region/Country

- Number of Click-Thru based on Region/Country

- Number of Sales based on Region/Country/referring URL

- Conversion (Click to Sales) Rate

- Total Revenue per campaign

- Return on Investment (ROI) per campaign

2. What metrics you should focus on?

Well, this really depends on your campaigns objectives. Open rate is a very important indicator to some extent however to get a better picture of your campaign performance, it should be analyzed in combination with other metrics – such as click through rate (CTR) and click to action rate (conversion rate).

Why is that? Because CTR and conversion rate are able to tell you how many recipients took an action you wanted them to take, such as purchased your product, signed up to your newsletter, downloaded the whitepaper etc. Whereas the open rate will only tell you how many people read your email. So in order to measure the effectiveness of your message, you need to go beyond the open rate down to the action level.

3. How to boost the Click-Through Rate (CTR)?

Savvy email marketers not only want to get the email opened and read but also want to know how many people clicked through (measured by CTR) and they want this number to be as high as possible. There are few key points in each email you should review because they critically influence the open rate and CTR. Those are:

Subject Line and Greeting:

Make you subject line attractive. Subject line is one of the most important factors that may affect your email campaign results. However, please do not over “optimize” your subject line otherwise it may look like spam email and the client could delete it without opening it. Keep the subject line short and specific, and if possible address the subscriber by his/her name.

Compelling Offer:

It should be obvious from the first paragraph what you offer as well as why the offer is important to the recipient and how he/she can benefit from it. The first paragraph should grab the attention so don’t write it too long. Include your offer on top of your email and make your offer attractive to the recipient (discount and free offers usually make users to click).

Call-for-action:

Always include “call-for-action” button or link to instruct the user to click for more details.

Spam issue:

“Spam” issue may affect your successful open rate tremendously. Most of the ISP and hosting companies have implemented the “spam filter” that can filter out suspected spam emails. Please try to avoid using any common suspected spam words such as “free offer”, “money”, “30 day guarantee”, “free trial”.

Message Design and Structure:

Use same colors and images in your emails; this will help people recognize your brand. When you have a lengthy message, try to include interactive links so people can access more information through your website. Also, very few people read the email word by word, most of readers just scanning the message to quickly find out what’s in it for them. Keep this in mind and structure your email – include headings to separate the message and use bullets so the reader can easily see listed features or benefits.

Today’s readers are busy people and it usually takes them just few seconds to decide whether to read your message or delete it. So construct your message carefully and monitor your email statistics to find out what works best for your business.

About The Author Ivana Giardi is Marketing Director at Apex Pacific, the leading developer of Internet Marketing and Web Promotion solutions. Apex Pacific helps organizations of all sizes increase their online marketing presence leading to stronger business results. If you would like to learn how to improve your website performance, visit Apex Pacific at http://www.apexpacific.com.