You are a proud owner of a popular website. Since your site has many visitors you have selected a good, well known and respected web hosting company. Your pages load quickly, from advertising you are getting a stable income, visitors come from search engines and links at various places. You are a happy webmaster until the website is for some reason down. The website is hosted on a server. This is a computer with some increased throughput and reliability. But it is a physical machine which can fail. And web servers do fail.

Because every machine can fail, hosting companies advertise their up-time which is typically 99.9%. This means that on average a maximum of 8 hours per year you can expect some malfunction or inaccessible website. In general this is not a big deal. Any respectable hosting provider will be back online in a very short time. If your site is up and running after the offline period, you only loose some visitors during the time when the website was down. However, if there was a problem with the disk drive where the website files are stored, then you might have a problem. Some files might be missing or corrupted.

Every hosting company uses reliable servers with RAID disk arrays but there is no guarantee that this equipment will not fail. The hosting company performs regular backups of the files and databases and this is probably done on a daily or weekly basis. If you have recently updated your website with some new content then you might expect that after the problem has been solved, your latest configuration and database will not be restored. You will lose some files or latest updates stored in the database. Sometimes it might also happen that your website will be hacked by some evil hackers. They might change only the homepage, but they can also delete your files.

Therefore you should do your own backups regularly before and after each major update to the website. This way you will have your own copy of the website and anytime you will be able to restore it to the last state. This way you will also have the possibility to restore it to a different web server if the repair of the original hosting computer will take some time.

Choosing a reliable web hosting company is always a good idea. This will guarantee that your visitors will always be able to visit your website. This hosting provider will have reliable web servers and will perform regular backups. But there is no hosting service that can guarantee 100% recovery in the case of failure. This would be possible but not for the money you are paying. To avoid unpleasant surprises make sure you backup your website regularly.

About the Author:

Even a simple website like http://fpga.si/ needs regular backups. Since this website has only few pages about FPGA devices and some other programmable circuits, the backup is done very quickly.

Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your business online. The idea behind social media marketing is tell the people about your product or business and you have to attract them by an interesting content so that they can share it with their friends and families.

Why was social media created?

The reason behind it was to create a spot for social deliberations not for the promotion of one’s business. The search engines have changed their rules as they are aware of these social marketing tricks so they have devalue the links which are coming from various social sites.

Social networking is a time consuming process especially when you are working on more than one social websites. The best practice is to get maximum results out of little effort. Well these social media tips will surely provide you with maximum results. To generate high quality traffic you must have an interesting content, which really encourage the search engines to list your pages. On the other hand you must obtain a visitor reaction which can tell search engines about the liking of the people.

The major search engines like Google monitors you website activities, like the number of visitors to your website and how long they stay at your page. These aspects are known as off-page criteria. So to be successful on the internet you need and interesting and unique content, the content which your customers want to read or you can say what they are expecting to read. If the content on your website is not unique and attractive then it’s really hard to generate traffic from search engines as well as from social networks.

One of the easiest social media tips is social bookmarking. If you know how to bookmark page on your browser its mean you have an idea of bookmarking. A social bookmarking is similar to it but in social bookmarking the bookmark appears to be on social media site and can be publicly accessible, so that people can see your bookmark and might get interested in visiting you website.

Some social bookmarking website also allows voting your bookmark to tell the people weather its good or bad. As the votes of bookmark increases it will become prominent on the social site which results in high quality traffic.

Another interesting tip to get traffic is seeding. Seeding is about setting up links of your website on various social media pages. First of all you have to find out the social networks that are closely related to your business and from where you can get targeted traffic. After selecting some most relevant sites to your business create accounts on them and add URL of your home page to your public bookmark. Remember don’t submit your all web pages as public bookmarks, if you do your submission will be considered as spam and you’ll get banned from the site. While adding pages keep in mind to include relevant tags to your pages. Tags are the keywords which are closely related to your business and they make it easy for the people to understand, what your bookmark is about.

Bookmark some different and interesting websites in your profile so that when people see you have other websites bookmarked, it will increase their trust on you. So Social media marketing is a real tough job one must have complete knowledge about the key factors involved in it. By following these social media tips you can get maximum benefits out of your social media marketing campaign.

About the Author:

This article is provided by “The Internet Marketing Company” (TIMC). The Internet Marketing Company – TIMC is a researched based agency always passionate for building businesses from grounds to heights.TIMC has been serving clients for years by affordable website promotion services and online marketing services.

There are a lot of social media websites out there. You could spend hours each day on marketing on them, but which ones will give you the best results?

That depends on you and your target market.

No social media website is going to do you any good at all if you don’t put some effort into it. If you just sign up and drop your link in, you probably aren’t going to see much benefit from any of them.

Where’s Your Target Market?

Start by figuring out which social media websites your target market is using. With the wide range out there, they may be using a few, but there are some rules of thumb, such as more professional networking going on at LinkedIn and sites such as Twitter and Facebook having a huge range of people on them.

Social bookmarking sites can also be a good choice, although it can be hard to say how the quality of traffic will be. A ton of traffic doesn’t always mean a ton of conversions, subscribers or anything other than a ton of traffic.

How Do You Use Social Media?

How you use a particular social media site depends on which one you’re using. What works well on one may not be the best way to build a network on another.

To find people on LinkedIn, you may be best off letting them find you. Become an expert there. Join groups. Answer questions. Show that you’re an expert and build your references as a professional. It’s social, but more professional than personal.

Twitter does well if you can provide interesting information in a small space. It’s good if you’re able to tweet regularly and be interesting in some way. Share good article links, make interesting observations, interact with people as they post interesting things.

With all sites, the challenge is to keep them from eating up too much of your day. It’s very easy to get sucked into the various sites. If you don’t want to waste a lot of time on Facebook, for example, don’t start playing the games there. Sign up, connect with some friends and you can quickly tell who’s gotten too much into the various games. They might invite you, but unless you have time to spare you’re better off avoiding the games. Better to spend your time on things there that will benefit your home business.

Using StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and similar sites can also be a huge time suck. You can get some good traffic out of them if you build a good profile and connections, but you can also lose a lot of time wandering them aimlessly. Use them wisely and at times when you can’t so easily do things that will more directly bring in business.

On any social media site, being overly promotional is not a good idea. People aren’t there to have things sold to them. They’re networking because they enjoy it, to build their own business, to get good information, that kind of thing. If you do nothing but say “buy, buy, buy,” they’ll unfriend you as fast as they can.

Instead, give quality information to bring people to you. If you sound like an expert and they need what you have to offer, they’ll decide to do business with you.

How Many to Use?

You can’t do a good job of using all social media websites, not even if you only stick to the big ones. There’s too much to do.

You’ll be better off if you can pick a couple to focus on. Get good at marketing on them.

Dividing your efforts dilutes them. There’s a balance between being available on a variety of networks and being unable to keep up.

As with any other sort of marketing you haven’t tried before, start by using just one social media site. Figure out what you’re doing. Get some fans, friends, followers, whatever they’re called. Get comfortable.

Social media marketing isn’t something that comes naturally for everyone, but it’s a big help for bringing in traffic and business if you use it right. Give yourself some time and really pay attention to the learning process. You might find it a lot of fun as well as profitable.

About the Author:

Stephanie Foster runs http://www.homewiththekids.com/ as a resource for people who want to work from home on the internet. Learn more ways to build a home business on a budget at her site.

Why is it so easy for content-based websites to generate traffic while it seems impossibly hard for application-based websites to get even a few visitors? The purpose of this post is to explore the nature of the web and how to formulate a marketing strategy for your website depending on its classification.

What is a content-based website?

A content-based website is a site that produces high volumes of quality content. Some of the best well known examples of content-based websites are blogs, forums, and news sites.

What is an application-based website?

An application-based website is a site that provides a usable service. Some good examples of this type of website are Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter.

How do search engines fit in with both website types?

If you’ve ever created a website that does something, and you’ve also created a blog, then you’ve experienced firsthand why content is so powerful. For those of you who haven’t, let me explain. If you create a website that does something, like an online application that helps you map out a jogging route somewhere in your neighborhood, then you’ll quickly realize that it’s impossibly hard to get the word out about your new service. If on the other hand you create a simple blog, you’ll be amazed at how much traffic you start getting after just a few posts. What’s going on here?

This phenomenon can be explained if you understand the nature of the web. There are two kinds of websites: websites that do something (application-based), and websites that provide content (content-based). In terms of searching the internet, it’s relatively simple to quantify the usefulness of a particular content-based website by counting its number of inbound links. Generally speaking, websites that provide content will link to other websites that provide additional relevant information. As a result, you can measure the usefulness of a website by comparing its number of inbound links to other websites. As simple as it sounds, this is the basis for search engine algorithms today.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to quantify the usefulness of a website that does something other than generate content. This is why blogs can get a lot of traffic immediately after its launch while other types of websites can struggle to get even a handful of visitors.

Content-based vs. Application-based

When using a search engine to find information, you probably traverse dozens of websites by reading content and clicking on related links. This is how content-based websites are generally found. On the other hand, do you remember how you found out about Facebook, Amazon, or Twitter? It probably wasn’t from a search engine. This is because application-based websites have a harder time leveraging search engines and usually have to rely on other mechanisms to drive traffic to their services.

Marketing strategies for each classification

Due to the different natures of each website type, it’s important to understand how online marketing will play a role for each classification. If you have a content-based website, you definitely need to spend a lot of time on SEO and social media marketing. If on the other hand you have an application-based website, you need to spend a lot of your time working on viral marketing and paid advertising campaigns.

Good luck!
About the Author:
founder of http://www.WebKrunk.com

Sometimes called inbound links, backlinks are the lifeblood of Search Engine Positioning. In order for a website to be on the top of search engines like Google without the webmaster having to pay big money for advertising, the website has to have a large number of backlinks. Backlinks are links on one website that lead back to another website. The more established, high quality, and high Page Rank the website that contains the link has, the more power it has to help the linked website with its search engine position. If the website that is getting backlinks gets many High Quality and High Page Rank backlinks, the better the chance it has of being in a high position on the Search Engines.

How does a webmaster go about getting high quality backlinks to his or her website? There are many ways this can be done. Some people advocate writing and submitting articles, posting on forums, making comments on blogs. Others talk about submitting their website to various Internet directories. One directory that has an excellent reputation is called DMOZ, or the “Open Directory”. This directory is probably the most respected directory online today. The websites it contains have all been placed there by human editors; there is no “automation” to this directory. The only drawback that’s been discussed about this directory is that it takes so long to have a website included.

Another way that many people build backlinks for their website is to use Social Bookmarking websites. A “Social Bookmark” is a website that usually has a very popular ‘community’ aspect to it. Users sign up and create profiles on the sites that contain photos and information about themselves. They then can save “bookmarks” of favorite websites which can be itemized by ‘tags’, which are one or two word descriptions of what the sites contain, and these bookmarks can be saved to a list that’s private or can be listed publicly, so that everybody can see it.

With the advent of what is known as Web 2.0, gaining backlinks is easier now than in any time in the history of the internet. Most sites now have an “interactive” quality to them nowadays. Readers can often sign in and create profiles. They then are often allowed to post comments on the stories or articles on the website or blog. In many cases, the website or blog owner responds to these comments; thus making this section of the website or blog a conversation.

Backlinking strategies can be easy and fun and the website owner who is working on getting more backlinks for his website can learn new things, meet new people, and have a tremendous amount of fun doing something that was once a chore: building backlinks.

About The Author

Get 30 *New* High Page Rank Backlinks every month for only $5!!

http://angelasdiscountmarket.com/backlink_builder.html

Below are SEO friendly website designing tips where web designers should pay attention to during the early stage of their web designing process.

Avoid creating menu on the left-hand side of a website. If unavoidable, an alternative way is to put some text with rich keywords at the top or above the left-hand menu so that this text will be the first thing to be read by search engines.

Headlines are rated more important than the rest of the web page by search engines . To take advantage of this, you should have your keywords in the page headline. Since the header tag (h1) is quite large, you should format it to make it smaller.

Every page should contain the title and description tags with good keywords to describe the page content. The number of words for the title should not exceed 9 and that for the description should not be more than 20 words in order to keep within the limits of most search engines.

Try not to use Flash when possible . Flash cannot be read by the search engines to date and will cause slow page loading time and make people run away. If you really have a reason to use flash, try to make it smaller (e.g. as a flash header) and leave other area of your website for keyword-rich content.

Think twice on how to use graphics . Make them relevant to your content and use an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to read as they cannot read graphics and also for your visitors so that they can have something to read when waiting for the graphics to load.

Do not only use images to link out . You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site. Spiders can follow image links, but like text links more though.

Avoid using frames . Some search engines cannot spider web pages with frames at all. For the other search engines that can, they can have problems spidering it and sometimes they too cannot index the web page.

Avoid using too complex tables when laying out your page but to keep them simple for the spiders. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the navigation bar is too complicated.

Use external Cascading Style Sheets and Java Script files to reduce page size and make the download time much faster . It will allow the spider to index your web page faster and can help your ranking.
Use standard HTML . Software such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver or a WYSIWYG editor will often add unnecessary scripting codes that will make the page larger than is needed and make it harder to crawl. It will sometimes add codes that cannot be read by search engines, causing the spider not to index the page or even the whole website. If to use, you should use those web page creator software wisely with a good understanding of html so that you may manually avoid or even delete those unnecessary scripting codes.

Page Title: use a different descriptive page title for each page. Make sure your primary keyword phrases for the given page are at the beginning of the page title.

Interior Linking: when generating your inner site linking it is important to use keywords in the anchor text (anchor text is the referring text or the stuff in the blue with an underline on most links). Search engines use incoming anchor text to evaluate what a page is about.

Navigation: When possible it is important to use at least one set of text links to create effective navigation for your site.

Heading: use a keyword rich heading if possible.

Subheadings: keyword rich subheadings also help improve keyword density and make the page easier to scan.
File Naming: name the files words you want to list high in. separate the words using a – not a space or a _. This is not an issue worth changing your current pages over for, but is a quick way to add a small boost in relevancy in some engines.

Using Flash: The main thing that you need to remember is that flash text and other rich media sources are not always recognizable to search engines. When they are, they frequently offer little content to the search engines. If you must use flash make sure you add textual content to the pages.

Write For The User: Some people argue that the verbiage in the text around links is important also, and some think it is not since search engines are not theme based. Either way, focus on the user with your writing. You should try to have each page optimized, but optimizing text NEAR an outbound link to another page should not be a major priority on the current page. Writing text that reads well to users should help encourage more inbound links.

IMG ALT: use descriptive IMG ALT tags where applicable.

Bolding: bold or italicize important ideas. Also use bulleted lists to chop up text to make it easier to read and improve keyword density.

Meta Description: get a couple variations of your primary keyword phrases in your meta description tag.

Meta Keywords: place synonyms and misspellings of your keywords in a meta keywords tag. (Usually I am too lazy to make a meta keywords tag.)

Sequence Pages: when you have an FAQ section, or something similar that can be sequenced, provide a link from one page to the next such that the user does not have to go back to the FAQ page to go to each question.

Dynamic Pages: follow the tips to help list your dynamic pages in search engines.website designing gurgaon website designing gurgaon web hosting gurgaon web hosting gurgaon seo company gurgaon

Website/Functionality Questions

• Will you be updating the website on your own? (ie: using a Content Management System.)
• If you are not using a CMS, how will you be updating the site in the future?
• Do you already have a domain and host setup for your new website? If so, what is the FTP and host log in information?
• Will this be an e-commerce website? Will you be selling any products or taking payments on your website?
• If this is an e-commerce site, do you have an Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate? If you don’t, will you need help aquiring an SSL certificate?
• What is your idea completion date (website launch and go live for public viewing) for your website?
• Is there a budget you are trying to meet?

Design/Aesthetic Questions

• What are the 3 most important elements about the design of your new website? Images? Gallery feature? Prominent calls to action? White space? Rotating image or slide show? Company colors? etc.
• What are the 3 least important elements the design of your new website?
• Do you have any color preferences, existing brand colors, and/or colors you do/not wish to use? You can also provide other website URLs with colors/color palettes that you like.
• What are some of your favorite websites, include URLs? These sites do not need to be industry-related, but knowing what other sites you find appealing helps get a sense of your aesthetic.
• Is your logo and other imagery web-ready?
• Do you have all the assets/images that you would like to be included in your website? Or would you like the designer to help you acquire images – photo shoot or buying stock imagery?
• Home Page Design/Aesthetic Questions
• How do you want to draw your user into your website from the home page? What are the most important elements of your home page?
• What are the 3 things you want your user to do? (Calls to action)
• What is the goal of your home page?
• What sections does your website need (if new); are you changing your top navigation bar if you already have a site?
• What kind of interactivity would you like on your home page? For example, search function; sign up for newsletter/quote, etc.; subscribe to an RSS; etc.

Services Questions

• Do you need a photographer to help with any image assets of your products, location, facility, staff (if bios will be included on your site)?
• Do you need a copywriter? If you are using existing copy on your current website, will it need to be modified in any way? Who will be doing this?
• Whether you need a copywriter or not, if you have current copy, is this content optimized for search engines? For example, are the window/page titles, page headlines, keywords and any meta descriptions optimized for your key words?
• Will you need help determining your keywords?
• Will you need additional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) help? For example, registering with search engines, adding businesses to Google Business Center, Analytic setup, etc.
• Do you anticipate needing a Site Maintenance Plan after your site is live?
  

Client Website Discovery

The first of three articles on website discovery and what to ask your clients before starting on the design and development phase of their website.

Client’s Company

• Do you currently have a website? What is/are the URLs?
• Describe the products/services you sell?
• Who are your 3 main competitors, please include their URLs?
• What makes you stand out from your competitors? How do you differ?
• What do you like or dislike about your competitors’ websites; is there anything on their sites that you would like to emulate?
• What is the demographic of your target market or client base: age, sex, income, education, geographic region, etc.

Website/Functionality Questions

• If you have a website, do you have a site map? If you don’t already have a website, do you have a site “blue print” that includes the sections and pages of your site?
• If you have one, what do you like most about your current website?
• What are your top 3 frustrations with your current website?
• What is the goal of your website? What 3 actions would you like your user to take?
• How web- or tech-savvy is your client base or target market? 0 being the least savvy and 10 being a “power-user”.
• Do your visitors require any special technology such as a mobile version of site, multiple language support, larger type for easier reading, etc.
• Any specific features you would like included? Separate log in area for clients; calendars; forums; blog; forms; subscription services (RSS, email or newsletters); share by social networking; uploading files (documents, images, audio, video)?
• If you do not currently have a form on your site and need one, what information do you want to capture from the user? Will you be using this for email-marketing campaigns? What email-marketing service do you use or do you need to subscribe to one?

In the next article I’ll cover the second half of the discovery document and answer some of the questions.

Use keywords and key phrases in the title tags of your web pages

The most important ‘on page optimization’ techniques is the title tag. Write your title using the keywords that you are targeting. The sooner the keyword appears the better off you are. The title tag should also be kept between 60 – 90 characters in length.

Example Title Tag:

<title>Temecula Web Design, Web Hosting and SEO Services </title>

Create unique title tags for each page

This will both increase you chances of getting multiple listings for your website and gives you the opportunity to create variable but similar key phrases.

Accurately describe your web page’s content in your title tag

Doing this increases your ranking by establishing relevancy to your content, keywords and other SEO tags. Not doing this not only hurts your ranking but also can penalize you for appearing to spam or trick the search engines.

Match the title tag with the h1 and h2 tags as much as possible

Example h1 and h2 Tags:

• <h1> Temecula Web hosting Solutions</h1>
• <h1> Temecula Web Design Services</h1>
• <h2> Temecula SEO Services</h2>

Your most prominent keywords should appear in the first 100 words of your website content

Example of keywords in web page content

I am a web designer. My name is Sean Murphy and I specialize in creating dynamic web site and printed media solutions. I am a Temecula-based designer, but design for clients in San Diego, Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange County.

My clients range from law firms to wineries and the wine industry to non-profit organizations and a variety of niche products and services. I have successfully launched web sites with custom designs and integrated SEO best practices to optimize client search engine ranking

Keyword repetition and density

Although search engines do not measure keyword density, repeating keywords the right amount of times will help increase you ranking. Be very careful though, too much repetition and your website can be labeled as spam. Alternatively, too little keyword repetition and you may loose significant SEO Ranking.

Use strong or em along with bullet points

Emphasizing text with Strong or em is a great idea. You can highlight the keyword or whole sentence containing keywords. Research has shown that italic usually works better than bold. Mainly because people know bold influenced the search engines and abused its use.

The use of images and ALT text

All images can have a distinct filename and “alt” attribute, both of which you should take
advantage of. The “alt” attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. This alternative tag gives you the opportunity to reiterate your keywords but only if it’s both short and descriptive of the image.

Example Alt Tag

<img src=””linux-server.jpg”” alt=””Linux web hosting server” />

Beware, making your Alt tags too long, keyword heavy or repetitive can produce the opposite effect by being labeled as spam by search engines.

In my next article:

I’ll cover anchor text, page descriptions and social media to increase page rank and SEO.

If you are designing a website or working on copy for a site you’ve already designed, the content of the web site is one of the most important factors for successful search engine marketing (SEM) and optimization (SEO). The pages you create should provide valuable information that reference specific ‘keywords’ and ‘key phrases’ that are unique to your business and target market.

In most cases coming up with unique information can prove to be a challenge since you’re competing with numerous other websites attempting to do the same thing. I’ve found that creating geographic key words and phrases, specific to the region you’re marketing can eliminate much of the competition.

Example:

General key phrases:

web design, web hosting, SEO

Geographic key phrases:

Temecula web design, San Diego web hosting, Orange County SEO

By adding specific regions (city, county, state) you narrow both your target market and competition, increasing your search engine ranking and your chances of a successful ‘click through’ conversion. This obviously doesn’t work with every business module. If you offer services/products globally you’ll need to change your strategy somewhat and may want to consider breaking your web site into regional markets or segments.

A few SEO Resources

Google Analytics -Free analytics tool from Google
SEO for Firefox -Provides easy access SEO data
Website Grader -Free website grading tool/ competing website analysis.

In next weeks article

I’ll discuss page structure as it relates to SEO