Dec 21

I’ve collected some really cool free products for you that will help with your website marketing efforts.  What do I want in return?  Nothing!  By the way – I don’t have any connection to these resources and I don’t get paid for listing them here or by you clicking on them!

They are purely here for your information.

Free Gift No. 1 - How To Keep Track Of Your Google Rank Without Wasting Hours

This is a very nifty tool that let’s you keep track of where your website is listed in Google.com for your key phrases.  You can also input other websites and keep track of them as well (you didn’t hear me say ‘competitors’ did you?).

Download it, install it, run it.  Simple.

http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor-query.htm

Free Gift No. 2 - How To Check For Broken Links

One of the things that can really annoy visitors to your website is if you have links that simply do not work.  Well worry no longer!  You can now insert the web address of the page you want to check and this brilliant little tool will run off and check every link on your page to make sure that it works okay – how cool is that?!

http://www.siteowner.com/badlinks.cfm

Free Gift No. 3 - How To Check The Speed Of Your Homepage

It’s essential that your homepage is optimised so that it loads up on people’s screens as quickly as possible.  You can use this handy tool to simulate how long it takes your homepage to load up at different connection speeds.  The tool will also provide you with some handy tips on how you to speed up your homepage.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze

Free Gift No. 4 - Free Web Tutorials, Reference Materials and Resources For Your Website

Whether you have created your own website or someone else has built it for you the following resource is a great place to learn more about web development.  Even if you don’t develop your own website you can access the free, simple tutorials to grasp the basics of web design.

The site has lots of free tools you can just copy and use straight on your website, tutorials on different aspects of web design and bulletin boards where you can discuss problems with other website owners.

http://www.bignosebird.com

Enjoy the freebies!

Dec 9

The number of Googlewhackers is growing all the time.

You can Googlewhack in the privacy of your own home or you can Googlewhack to your heart’s content in the middle of the office..

What The Hell Is Googlewhacking?!

A Googlewhack is when you enter a two-word phrase into www.google.com that only returns one solitary result.  Fancy giving it a blast?

http://www.google.com

Before you start getting all high and mighty about discovering a Googlewhack within seconds of reading this article I suggest you first check out the ‘rules’ of what defines a Googlewhack.

http://www.googlewhack.com

If you find a Googlewhack you can also register it at the above site.

Some of the rules include that you can’t use numbers or punctuation.

Once You Whack You Just Can’t Stop

Remember – I am not responsible for your sleepless nights, divorce or loss of employment in search of what Googlewhackers refer to as “The One”…

Dec 6

The latest news to hit the Internet’s ‘water fountain’ is that Lycos and Ask Jeeves are to begin their own SEO services..

Search engine optimisation (or SEO) is any practice related to the end goal of improving your website’s positioning in the search engines.

The brief history of SEO is that it first started out solely as the remit of the developers themselves.  This was back in the day when one person designed, built, maintained, hosted and marketed a website.

The Ever-Changing Internet Landscape

During the past few years, however, the entire Internet industry has divided up into a myriad divisions to such an extent that SEO is now a booming sector in its own right.  Entering the term “seo” on Google returns nearly 20 million results!

Now businesses recognise that it is no longer possible to expect one individual or company to possess all the necessary skills ‘under one roof’ to be able to achieve great results on the graphic design, technical construction AND marketing of their website.

This has led to the trend of bringing in specialist search engine marketing consultants or companies to assist.

As Google and the like are spending millions every year on developing their tools to accurately sift through the billions of web pages that exist it really is a full time occupation just keeping track of what has an effect on search engine ranking and which strategies work best.

Everyone Wants ‘Organic’ Nowadays!

Ask Jeeves and Lycos are now offering their SEO service to help companies get found in the ‘organic’ results of search engines.

‘Organic’ results are those results in a search engine listing that are non-paid.  Almost all search engines now offer businesses the shortcut of simply paying to get an ad listed whereas as a latest study indicates that only 28% of searchers will click on an advertisement as opposed to one of the ‘organic’ results (on Google).

This is the reason we’re all fighting for high rankings in the ‘organic’ results.  This demand from businesses is also presumably the main driving factor behind Ask Jeeves and Lycos starting to offer their own Search Engine Optimisation services.

Money Well Spent?

In short – I’m not sure.

If you have a 50 page website, getting Lycos to provide you with SEO services will cost you a tidy $10,000.  They also include the questionable tactic of re-submitting your website over and over to search engines which is both pointless and risky as some will act against those that submit more than once.

$10,000 sounds like a lot to me for a service that is only dealing with search engines and which talks of ‘recommendations’ that you then have to implement yourself.

Really though - it comes down to what you are trying to achieve with your website.

My two cents on this is that the Lycos service doesn’t devote enough attention to links – your money may be better spent on getting more high quality in-bound links or on a well-managed Pay Per Click Campaign.

Ask Jeeves

http://www.askjeeves.com

Lycos’ SEO Service

http://ranking.lycos.com/sitesidemore.html

Search Engine Users Survey
http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/software/article.php/3348071

Dec 3

It’s a nightmare isn’t it? You fire up your email system first thing on Monday morning to be greeted with hundreds of new messages.

“Great”, you say, “I’m so popular!”

But no – your email has been added to thousands of spammers’ lists, that’s all.

After exploring the seedy underworld of human growth hormones, get rich quick schemes and offshore investment accounts you’ll find you don’t have much energy left for anything else!

So – put a stop to the madness.

Can The Spam!

I found a great service provided by some clever people over in Australia.

It’s called SpamTrap and it does what it says on the tin.

You can sign up for a free trial and then it costs you a small sum to have the service on an ongoing basis.

There are other solutions to this growing problem but I find SpamTrap easy to use, no messing about and most important of all – it works!!!

I went from receiving approximately 200 spam messages a day on one of my accounts to receiving maybe one or two – and that’s on a bad day.

So How Does It Work?

The guys at SpamTrap will tell you more but at a basic level their nifty bit of software can recognise virtually every form of spam and ‘learns’ what is junk and what isn’t.

All email that is flagged as spam is stopped before it reaches you and if you’re the paranoid type you can take a look through it to make sure nothing legitimate makes it into the bin.

But, from the hundreds of emails I checked (initially) the SpamTram robots hadn’t made a single mistake.

Where To Go

SpamTrap - http://www.spamtrap.net.au

Other providers:

Block All Spam - http://www.blockallspam.com

Clean My Mailbox - http://www.cleanmymailbox.com

SpamArrest - http://www.spamarrest.com