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The Top 10 Tools for Monitoring the Success Your Website

By Steven Snell in Webmasters

One of the most important aspects of running a website is monitoring the site and its progress. By monitoring your website you will be able to see how it is performing and how it can be improved. This article covers 10 free tools that can help you to optimize your site for maximum results.

1 – Google Analytics

Google Analytics has become the preferred option among free statistics programs. Like any other stats program, Google Analytics provides data on the number of visitors, and page views, referral sources, entry and exit pages, and more. Unlike most other programs, Google Analytics includes the ability to track and monitor pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. Other useful information includes the geographic location of your visitors, their internet connection speed, and their screen resolutions. You can sign up for Google Analytics at http://bizsolutions.google.com/services/.

2 – Google Webmaster Tools

Want to know how the largest search engine in the world sees your website? Google’s Webmaster Tools will give you loads of information such as the pages that are indexed, errors found by the Googlebot (dead links), your search engine rankings for specific search phrases, your anchor text on inbound links, internal and external link data, and robots.txt and sitemap data.

By knowing how Google sees your site you will find some basic items that you’ll need to change in order to reach your maximum potential in search engine traffic. You can sign up for Google Webmaster Tools at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/.

3 – SEOmoz’s Page Strength Tool

SEOmoz is one of the leading search engine optimization (SEO) firms and their website provides a wealth of information through their blog, articles and tools. Their Page Strength Tool shows you the “relative importance and visibility” and the “potential strength and ability of a page to rank in the search engines.” SEOmoz provides a quick way to get a basic look at the strength of your page. The Page Strength Tool can be used at www.seomoz.org/page-strength.

4 – Sitening.com’s SEO Analyzer

Sitening is another leading SEO firm with several valuable tools on their website. The SEO Analyzer differs from SEOmoz’s Page Strength Tool in that it checks the internal structure of your site to determine how well it is constructed (in terms of search engine optimization). The structure of a website is the framework for a good SEO campaign, and Sitening.com’s SEO Analyzer will help you to build the right framework. Sitening.com’s SEO Analyzer can be found at www.sitening.com/seo-tools/seo-analyzer/.

5 – Mike’s Marketing Tools

MikesMarketingTools.com has two tools that every webmaster should use regularly. The Search Engine Rankings Tool will show you where your site ranks in several of the top search engines for a specific word or phrase. You can save time by using this tool instead of visiting each search engine and clicking through the search engine results pages to find your website.

The Link Popularity Tool will quickly show you how many inbound links each search engine recognizes for your site. Inbound links are a major factor in search engine rankings and each search engine recognizes a different number of links. From this tool you can also click through to see the specific pages that are linking to you. To use these tools visit www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/free-marketing-tools.html.

6 – Summit Media’s Spider Simulator

The spider simulator shows you “how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your usability.” Search engine spiders see web pages much differently than human visitors do. A page may look attractive and well-designed to a human visitor, but a search engine spider may not be able to find what it is looking for. This page is a great tool to assure you that your site is built for maximum search engine results. The spider simulator can be used at http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/.

7 – SelfSEO Page Speed Checker

Your average website visitor will have a very short attention span. To have the best chance of making a positive first impression on new visitors your page must load quickly enough that they do not leave right away. SelfSEO has a Page Speed Tool that shows you how long your page takes to load. The tool allows you to enter multiple pages to check at one time. It is a good idea to compare the load time of your page against pages from several other websites. Try entering your homepage and the homepage of several of your competitors. If your page loads considerably slower than the others try to make the file smaller by reducing the number and size of images or by cleaning up the coding. The Page Speed Tool can be used at www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php.

8 – Dead Links Checker

Having dead links on your website can frustrate visitors and damage your search engine rankings. However, checking all the links on your site manually is not realistic. Fortunately there are a number of tools online that will automate the process. The W3 Link Checker will crawl through your pages and report which links are broken. To use this tool visit http://validator.w3.org/checklink.

9 – GoogleRankings.com

GoogleRankings.com will show you which words and phrases appear most frequently on your website throughout the text of the page, title, headings and meta tags. This is a useful tool to be certain that your pages are optimized for the words and phrases that you are targeting.

10 – FeedBurner

If you publish a blog FeedBurner’s service is a must have. Feedburner will provide you with statistics regarding your blog’s feed and you can give our readers the option to subscribe by email instead of RSS. There are a number of other features that you can read about at www.FeedBurner.com. With FeedBurner you can always see how many subscribers you have and how many of them are clicking through from your feed to your site.

Author:  Steven Snell is a web designer for Vandelay Website Design. Steven regularly writes new articles on the topics of design, blogging, marketing and eearch engine optimization. His articles can be read on the blog at www.vandelaydesign.com.

Finding the Right Niche - Finding Your Alternatives

By Steve Buchanan in Webmasters

Ironically — or perhaps appropriately — the quickest way to find out about alternative search engines is to search on that phrase in Google. The first site that comes up is Search Engine Watch, a regular stop for anyone who does SEO. After all, they’ve been covering the field since 1996. If you visit this page on the site, it takes you to a list of links. These links take you to specific categories of search engines, such as news search engines, shopping search engines, multimedia search engines, kids’ search engines, specialty-related search engines, and more. If you have a fascination with knowledge in general and a few specific areas in particular, you might want to line up a number of pointed queries, get comfortable with this site, and spend a day or two poking around. Depending on how lucky you’ve been finding that kind of information on Google, you just might find some new favorites.

Another web site worth checking is altsearchengines. The entire site is devoted to coverage of alternative search engines, though it does cover the majors as well. You can subscribe to the site via email or RSS feed. While the site definitely has the feel of a professional blog (which is what it is, essentially), it’s better organized, making it somewhat easier to find things. There are colorful tabs labeled “alts,” “majors,” “updates,” “in beta,” “newcomers,” “news” and “verticals” to help you navigate. There are also ads from alternative search engines on the site. Each month, they compile a list of the top 100 alternative search engines; it seems to have turned into a mission for Charles Knight, the man doing the compiling. Here’s a link to the list for April 2007.

To coin an analogy, think of Google as the biggest department store in the world (I know, that’s either Wal-Mart or Amazon, but bear with me). For most of your needs, you’ll probably be able to find the right item at that department store. But say your portly Aunt Edna just fell and did something nasty to her knee, for which she now needs a custom-built brace. You wouldn’t go to the department store for that; you’d go to a hospital, which would be able to refer to you to the right place to have that made.

By the same token, if you’re looking for the most up-to-date medical information on a particular condition, you might go to Google if it’s a well-known and much-discussed condition such as breast cancer, but not if it’s something that’s more rare and unusual. For that, you’d be wise to consider some of the vertical search engines that explicitly cover the health and medical field.

Yet another site to check is About.com. Of course, it’s an alternative search engine itself these days. It has a guide, Wendy Boswell, for the Web Search topic. One of the areas she covers is search engines. The link I gave will take you to articles that review and discuss the alternatives. She even has an article titled “Web Search 101,” which gives you answers to frequently asked questions about search and helps you zoom in on the kind of search engine you want based on your needs.

Author:  Steve Buchanan writes article on many topics including Article Submission Service, Directory Submission Service, and Website Submission Services.

How to Choose a Right Web Hosting Service

By Corey Geer in Webmasters

Indeed, choosing a right web hosting service for your website is not an easy task especially when there are thousands of web hosting providers all offering almost identical web hosting packages. Therefore, it is important to know few major considerations even before you start your web hosting search. Below are three major criteria for web host seeker:

1Web hosting features requirement

This is probably the most important consideration to start finding a host for your site. You need to decide the technical requirements for your website, this including:

a) Server platform and hardware requirements If you plan to set up a website that uses programming environments such as Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic scripts, Cold Fusion or Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQL database, in this case, you will need to find a web hosting service that supports Windows platform such as Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers.

Likewise, if you plan to use programming languages such as Perl, CGI, SSI, PHP or mySQL database, then any web hosting plans that support Unix/Linux platform should be sufficient to meet your hosting requirements. Once you have these server platform and hardware requirements in mind, you can decide the best web hosting plans for your need. For more information, you can read “How to select a web server and server platform?”

b) Disk space & Bandwidth requirement Here is another technical requirement that you need to consider before selecting a web hosting plan, i.e. disk space and bandwidth. If you intend to publish a website that does not have a lot of contents (meaning, web pages), then the disk space requirement may not be a big concern to you. In general, a disk space with 200MB to 500MB should be enough to meet your hosting requirement. In contrast, if you plan to host a website with enormous amount of graphic pictures, mp3 or video files, then you should consider a web hosting plan that provide huge disk space, for example, 500 MB to 1,000 MB.

Similarly, the bandwidth requirement will depend on your site traffic estimation. Obviously, a website that expect to attract high traffic will consume the monthly bandwidth allowance very fast. If so, you will need to find one web hosting service that offer huge bandwidth with 40 GB to 100 GB per month. Depending upon your website requirement, choosing a web hosting service that provide sufficient amount of disk space and bandwidth is crucial consideration to prevent paying extra costs in the future should you overuse the monthly disk space and bandwidth allowance.

c) Other hosting features While the above requirements are utmost important, there are other hosting features that you have to consider too. Can web hosting provider support video clips on your website, if you have? Is the web hosting service compatible with Dreamweaver or FrontPage web authoring tool? Do you plan to set up a virtual store online? Can the host support the e-commerce features without adding extra cost to your monthly payments? On top of that, you may also want to find out the number of email accounts provided, number of FTP accounts, web statistic software (analyze your web traffic), type of control panel supported (manage your web hosting account), database and scripting languages supported and etc.

2Reliability and scalability

A first-class web hosting provider offers reliable server uptime and fast Internet connection. You should only choose a web hosting service that guarantee at least 99% server uptime with high-speed Internet backbones using at least OC3 (Optical Carrier) lines (155 Megabits per second) or above instead of T1 or T3 lines. A reliable web hosting provider usually invests heavily on their data center infrastructure with high performance servers, high speed multiple backbones providers with fail-over redundancy, backup power generators and firewall software protection in place to ensure they meet the uptime guarantee specified in the terms of service.

Similarly, you should choose a web hosting service with hardware facilities that designed for scalability, so that they can grow with your business. For example, if you need to increase more disk space, bandwidth or number of mySQL databases, you should be able to upgrade as needed without any problems.

3Customer service and support

The last major consideration in choosing a web hosting service is to find a web hosting providers that offers excellent customer service and support. You should always search for a web hosting provider that offers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week technical support that fielded with highly experience technicians, so that any web hosting problems will be resolved within a reasonable amount of time. You may also want to consider to test how responsive is their customer support by sending few inquiry emails to the web hosting provider. In general, any response in less than 24 hours is considered acceptable. It is a sign of poor customer support if they take more than one day to response.

In addition, a web hosting provider with excellent support should also provide multiple support channels, such as toll-free phone support, 24/7 email support, live chat, online knowledgebase, Interactive flash tutorials and FAQ.

Above are few major considerations before you choose your web hosting service. In addition, how long has the web hosting provider in business and the number of customers that they currently have are also a good indication of the quality of their hosting products as well as the stability of the company. Even though cost of the web hosting service is also important but it should not be your major consideration. Because the price of a web hosting service has been declining over the years due to competition, as a result, the price of most of the web hosting services offering quality hosting features has been converging to less than US$10 per month. If you can’t afford less than $10 per month, you probably isn’t in the online business for the long haul. Therefore, price should not be a major deciding factor.

On the other hand, it is more important to ensure the web hosting service that you choose is able to meet your website hosting requirements, guarantee your website is always accessible with satisfying speed, provide scalability to grow and expand your website as well as offer excellent customer supports.
Author:  Corey Geer is an author and marketing expert. Other works by Corey can be found at, http://coreygeer.blogspot.com/

5 Ways to Add Human Touch to Your Business

By Joel Christopher in Webmasters

Make your business personal. This is the credo of the more successful internet marketers. Nobody wants to make business with a robot! While you will be using automation and outsourcing techniques, this is not an excuse for you to let them do all of the work for you.

There are different ways to add human touch to your business as an internet marketer. Review them, apply them, and you will surely have your business thriving in no time!

Modify Your Autoresponders

Your autoreponders must be as personalized as possible. The good thing about autoresponders is that it has a capacity to hold in huge amounts of memory. Your autoresponders must be tailored to suit the mood you want to convey to your prospects.

If at all possible, do multiple versions of autoresponders, be it in the form or text, audio or video, so that you will be able to reach out to more people who dig different types of media in getting information.

Ask your Prospects

You heard me right. Ask your prospects on what they would want to see, what they expect from you and what their needs are. You may have done your research, but there may be other pressing matters that went beyond the scope of your research at the time you were building your business.

Everyday, more and more people are being included in your target market. It would be safe to assume that it is perpetually changing, so in order for you to remain at the winning edge, you must be able to ask your prospects what is it that you can change or what you can do to further improve your business in serving them.

Invite Your Prospects to Interact with You

Have a contact number handy. Invite prospects to interact with you. This is really the ultimate human touch you can offer. Your autoresponders are not quite enough. There is a different appeal and ring to it when you are able to interact with your prospects. Treat them as you would treat a good friend.

Welcome their inquiries and actually encourage them to call you. If you find yourself unable to answer all of their queries at the same time, just make sure that you are able to get back to them somehow, either by means of having an assistant or an autoresponder while they wait for your response.

Be conversational in your approach

This is a winner when it comes to marketing. Since they do not really see you face to face, the next best thing you could do is make your text seem to be friendly enough for them to read. Communicate, register warmth and have them directly involved with whatever it is you are writing them for.

Customize Your Products

When you have a specific target market, you put human touch to it when you do choose to deal with products that are made just for them. It will also be so much better if those products can be modified to suit their individual preferences. Do not just make your autoresponders, conversation skills and website friendly. Include your products as well and make it as personalized as possible.

Author:  Joel Christopher is a best-selling author, speaker and mentor, known worldwide as The MasterListBuilder. To find out more on how you can triple your leads, sales and profits. Visit MasterListBuilder.com

Trustworthy - Presenting Your Small Business Online

By Jacob Fillipp in Webmasters

Would you feel confident buying a high-performance car from a street-corner vendor?

If you are like most people, you would much rather buy the car from a dealership that sells other cars, has a good reputation and employs many people. This is the same logic your online customers follow.

The web has empowered individual entrepreneurs to provide professional services and products that match those of large corporations - but most potential clients would still rather do business with a large company than a sole-proprietorship. People who are searching for products and services online constantly look for indicators of reliability, quality and trust in vendors’ websites. Visitors will examine your website for these indicators beause it is a substitute for examining your wares and visiting your offices. You can dramatically increase the number of casual browsers that you turn into clients by incorporating those indicators into your site. This article will show you how to achieve this.
Reliability

You can convey reliability through your site by giving the impression that your company has good customer service, a bureaucratic hierarchy and that it’s large in size. Showing these qualities can be done by doing the following:
For one-person companies, classify the owner as a “General Manager” or a “Chief Technician”. This will explain to clients why their inquiries are handled by a single contact, and will imply that there is another person in the company who is the “Owner”. This already increases the perceived number of people involved in the company twofold.
All companies should have their telephone, email and mailing address proudly displayed. Lacking a mailing address or a phone shows visitors that you are not a legitimate company, nor reachable when needed. Many contractors and owner-operators who work from home are reluctant to post their address online, but the chances of being visited in person (without prior contact) are slim compared to the benefit your address gives to the “tangibility” of the company. One approach to decreasing the chance of someone actually visiting is to classify the address as a “mailing address only”.
Providing a guarantee gives another boost to your company’s perceived reliability. This guarantee does not have to be substantial, though, and may be as vague as “we guarantee the most professional customer service treatment”.
Finally, a mistake that many small business owners make is using a free email (Yahoo! or Hotmail) as the company email. This sets the alarm bells ringing in visitors’ minds - real companies have email addresses at their domain. There is no reason why your company should not have its own email addresses, as even $7/month hosting plans provide this capability.
Trust

Encouraging visitors’ trust mainly involves showing to them that your company is “real” and “tangible”, not a fly-by-night operation.

Regardless of whether this is exactly what your company is, there are several ways to make it seem otherwise:
Do not use generic stock images. Customers are constantly bombarded with generic pictures of smiling people, computer racks and skyscrapers - why should they trust someone who’s pictures they’ve seen on another site?

Create your own pictures, or take the time to choose unique and appropriate stock images.
Give visitors a glimpse into the “guts” of your company: post short employee or manager profiles, with their pictures. Show pictures of your offices or worksites - and ensure that they look authentic. When they see these two things, visitors know that a) your employees are real b) you have an actual location. If you have neither employees nor an office, post a good picture of yourself working at a computer or answering a phone (but make sure that your workplace is tidy and does not look like a home office).
A great way to make visitors feel secure about giving you their contact information is to have seals of approval posted next to your contact form. This has been researched and proven to decrease “abandonment” of your online forms. The best way to acquire seals of approval is to get them from organizations such as the Better Business Bureau, TRUSTe, and other approval organizations. A less expensive substitute is to be certified by a smaller niche-agency or post a membership seal from a professional association.
The final element of building trust is to have a privacy policy, and to address visitors’ concerns openly. In the text of your site, openly state that you value clients’ confidentiality, understand their needs and hold each employee accountable for their ethical conduct.
Quality

Showing the quality of your products and services is related to showing that you are serious about your business. Because your site visitors cannot touch your product or experience your service, they have to resort to evaluating your website itself as an indication of the care you take in your craft. This makes it very important that you take care in the way your site is built.
First of all, the look of your site matters greatly when it comes to showing quality. If your website looks like it was made in 1997 (big and blocky, misaligned, flashing animated GIFs) then you will not impress any web surfers - regardless of whether you are the best company in the offline world. Invest in bringing your site design up to date visually.

This does not mean being on the cutting edge, just having tasteful design.
Also, you should ask a third party to review your website for spelling mistakes. As we do more business online without seeing our counterparty, we rely more on things such as spelling and grammar to assess intelligence, intentions and background. For a client, shoddy copywriting means shoddy workmanship on your end.
The final indicator of quality - testimonials - comes from the realm of Sales. Having testimonials indicates to potential clients that others have successfully used your services, and were satisfied. Place testimonials in areas of your website where visitors will start doubting your product or service’s quality - such as in “product showcase” pages or on sign-up forms. The more authentic your testimonials feel, the better. It is always better to place a scanned image of a written testimonial than to retype it into a webpage.
Honesty

Something that you should remember as you integrate these indicators of reliability, trust and quality into your site is to never lie. You should never place pictures of nonexistent employees, locations or testimonials. You should never misrepresent the quality of your wares, exaggerate your achievements or provide a fake address instead of your home office address.
Your ultimate goal is to turn visitors into inquiries, and inquiries into customers. If you initially misrepresent your company, the truth will always come to light once you begin a business relationship with the customer. There is nothing more embarrassing than having your clients find out that you lied about yourself mid-project, withdraw the project and complain about you to the local business chamber.
Most of the approaches outlined here put your existing business in a better light. Once website visitors begin inquiring through email or phone, you should frankly and openly discuss your company with them. You should explain that “your location” is your home office, your “team” is actually made up of subcontractors and professionals to whom you outsource on occasion and that you are the Owner as well as the “Manager”. Honesty is very attractive. And once a potential client hears that you are honest and knowledgeable, they will feel that there is a real person interacting with them. There will no longer exist a cyber-chasm that you need to bridge with your website, and you can begin selling your product or service on its own merits.
Conclusion

Potential clients who visit your company’s website feel that your site reflects on your company. Because visitors cannot touch your products, hear your voice or visit your office online, they have to rely on certain factors in your website to decide whether to do business with you. Through better design, better communication and genuine imagery, your website can show that your company is reliable, trustworthy and provides a quality product. If your website can convey those qualities, then it’s clear that your company is worth doing business with.

Author:  Jacob Filipp is the owner of the Toronto-based Powerspirit SEO company. Jacob draws on 7 years of experience as a programmer and web developer.

The Website Hosting Ripoff

By Jan Chilton in Webmasters

High-prices hosting costs and unethical domain name registration is rife in the website industry. Learn what you should be paying and what NOT to do when you hire a webdesigner!

I have been helping real estate agents and vacation rental companies in Myrtle Beach, SC for over 5 years now. In the last year or so I’ve gotten out of the designing end and more into SEO and copywriting. But since the beginning I’ve seen and heard more customer horror stories than seems natural in this day and time. There are a few basic Do’s and Don’t’s that everyone should know to avoid this problem, and I’m surprised that it isn’t broadcast more often. If you are planning to have a website designed, please READ this and do a little “due diligence” to protect your own interests now.

Buying Your Domain Name

I won’t go into how to choose a domain name here, although it is something to consider. What I want to uncover is one of the worst, most unethical, and COMMON practices I’ve seen in this area, and make you too smart to fall for it.

Before you hire a designer, go YOURSELF, to one of the major domain register sites. Open an account. Choose a user name that you use often. Choose a password that you can remember. WRITE THIS INFORMATION DOWN. Give it to your wife or husband. Give it to your secretary. Just be SURE you have it where you can find it again. I can’t emphasize this enough.

After I’ve yelled about keeping the login information, let me again say, DO THIS YOURSELF.

You should never, ever, have a webdesigner or website company do this for you. Inevitably, at some point, you are going to either become dis-satisfied with your designer, or find someone else that provides more services, such as SEO. No matter how much you trust the person you hire to do your website, do NOT expect them, or allow them, to register your domain name for you.

This is one of the oldest nasty tricks I’ve seen, and is still one of the most prevalent. The web designer registers the domain in HIS OWN name. All goes along smoothly until such time as you want to change web companies. All of a sudden you find this “nice guy” you hired laughs in your face and refuses to give you your own website. Or he tells you he will for several hundred or thousand dollars more. Much of the time, you’ve hired someone locally and don’t even have a contract. To my knowledge, you don’t have much recourse. You may even have a contract that says in the small print that your designer owns the site.

I had an older gentleman call me one day to ask for help resolving a situation like this with one of the more well known companies here in Myrtle Beach. When I looked at the “Whois” information and told him the designer owned that name, he literally cried on the phone. He had had the website for 2 or 3 years, and was a small sign company whose business practically relied on that website. It broke my heart, but I had no solution for him except to start over.

Buy your own domain name. Keep your login information safe, and be sure you pay for it when the yearly bill comes in. Godaddy.com has domain names for as litte as $8 a year. Pay for it for several years, and be sure your email address is always correct with the registry company. Maybe it’s something you would rather not be bothered with…but it’s a small bother if you end up with a website that literally makes or breaks your business.

Hosting Your Website
This is another area that I continually see agents and others being taken advantage of all the time.

NEWSFLASH: You can choose your own hosting company!

I have been using Pair.com since I started doing websites. They are the best in the business as far as I’m concerned. If you have a small website that won’t have a million visitors a month, you can get a hosting package for under $10 a month. Hosting packages are based on total file size and something called “Bandwidth”. Bandwidth concerns how many times your website is visited, plus the size of each page that a visitor looks at. The more large files such as photos, music, or video that you have, the more bandwidth you will use. If your website will contain videos or many photo galleries, you may have to go to a larger package…say $20 a month…to handle the volume. But a normal small website will hardly ever cause an overage.

Now, why would you want your designer to host your website? There are some good reasons. Your website will also usually control your email(s). When there is an email problem, or you need to make a new one for a new office person, it’s easier to pick up the phone or email your designer to handle this. Sometimes it can be complicated. It might be worth paying a little extra for them to host it and handle this. But how much is legitimate, and how much is highway robbery?

I have a few clients and even friends that I host a website for. I buy a larger package, and can have multiple websites in my account. It’s very important that your website has its own separate dedicated IP number also, but I’ll save that for another article. It may be that some designers will offer you a cheaper package to share hosting. They may not even TELL you that you are on the same IP with a dozen other websites. It’s much cheaper for them to host them all on the same IP… and worse, many of these designers are actually hosting your site on a private computer in their basement! Ask them where they are hosting it and get the details. Verify what they tell you with someone else if you can. If not, and you trust them to do the right thing, then figure on paying an average of about $25 a month for most designers to host your site. That is the going rate around here.

This means the designer is probably making about $20 a month at a minimum.If they are hosting it on their own server, it may not cost them a dime.

My average price for hosting a regular to large website is $15 a month. If the company has 30 employees that constantly worry me about emails and problems with forgetting passwords, I might increase the price to $25 a month. I never have done this so far. And they DO bug me fairly often…:-)

If your design company is charging you more than $25 a month for an average website, then you are paying too much. If you have a small site and can take care of basic email setups online yourself, then open your own hosting account and save the extra monthly amount. If not, then at least question the amount and make sure it’s reasonable - and with a reputable hosting company that provides multiple backup and very low downtime.

If you plan to have a website with an IDX database, or are going to invest heavily in video or virtual tours, then choose a real estate web design company that provides this, and be prepared to pay considerably more than what I’ve described here. But if you are going to have an ordinary website, little or no video displays, and a reasonable amount of traffic, don’t fall into the trap of being overcharged.

You can have a great website for a very reasonable amount of cost if you do your homework up front!

Author:  Jan Chilton has been helping realtors with search engine placement and internet marketing since early 2001. If you are interested in website hosting or want help with choosing a domain name, Jan would be glad to answer an email question. Her website at Myrtle Beach Web Design can provide more information as well. Bone up on real estate marketing tips at www.Echoforum.com.

Website Project Management - Dealing With Large Companies

By Stuart Mortimer in Webmasters

The business of developing websites is a real challenge but working with large client companies and keeping control over large projects is another task in itself. This article examines some of the pitfalls of doing web design work for larger companies and suggests some approaches that you can adopt to keep tighter control over your web design projects.

Dealing with large web design clients is more difficult that one might think. For a start a larger company means more middle managers and marketing people to satisfy and unless you keep tight control over the project from the start, clients of this nature can run you ragged with switching the goal posts, adding in new requirements and conflicting requests.

Having said this, working with larger clients is usually far more profitable than working with smaller companies so it is often worth the extra effort in keeping the larger projects under control.

The first step in maintaining tight control is to have a really tight website specification in place before the site is started. It is also work taking the time to make sure the clients actually understand what you are going to deliver when they signup. I have seen project spiral out of control because of the abscence of a well defined specification. Another thing to look out for is ambiguity in a specification. If it can be argued that a point in a specification document means something else then there is a real chance that you will have to alter the website which ultimately means more development time and less profit.

A real problem when dealing with larger companies is something called ‘feature creep’. Feature creep is when a client sees a demo of a website at a review stage, has a brainwave and says - “oh i really like that, but can we just change…”. I have seen this happen lots of times in the last few years. I call them ‘can you just…’ requests. A well defined spec will act as your shield against this particular situation. If you have yourself covered by a tight specification, you can give one of my own favorite answers - “of course we can, we can make it do anything, would you like us to put a quote together for the change.” You never agreed to do the change so why do it for free just because Mr Big Client has asked you. Its not Mr Big’s fault - he didn’y think of it until now. If you had a builder contracted to do an extension to your home you wouldn’t dream of asking him “oh i really like that - but it would be better if you could add an extra room over here”, you are in tight control remember so why stand for it on your project?

Another big problem with dealing with large companies is dealing with lots of different people. There is nothing wrong with taking in the views of many people, the problem is when people at the same company start to contradict each other. For example, Person A may request a blue background then person B may request a red one! Where does that leave you? It leaves you with either a phone call or an assumption to make. And we all know that making assumptions over client requirements is not good!

Another thing to watch out for is having more that one client spokes person at kickoff meetings. I have lost count of the number of hours I have lost in meetings listening to clients decide on their requirements on my time rather that where the decisions should have been made - before they arrived at my office!

To help with this situation, a really simple and useful thing that you can do is to insist on having one point off contact for each client company. This works well because their spokes person is responsible for collating the views of all the people involved with the website project. When meetings are held they are much more productive because their requirements have already been decided and the message comes across much clearer allowing you to get things right for the client the first time.

Conclusion:

By insisting on and being consistent with these simple but effective rules you can give yourself the best chance of maintaining control over large client projects. You can avoid ‘feature creep’ and the associated frustration of having to make amends for free. Also by making sure to explain things clearly to your clients at every stage you can maintain a rapport with them and offer them your best possible service.

Author:  Stuart is a freelance website designer in wakefield UK who specialises in search engine friendly web design for companies of all types.

Web Hosting Inside Out

By Daniel Briere in Webmasters

It has become very common to see webmasters posting on popular forums such as WebHostingTalk, angry at their web hosts and demanding a refund. It is not always immediately evident what the cause of the problem is, but it almost always ends up that the problem snow-balled because of a simple misunderstanding between a web host and a client. This article takes a brief look at a few common web host issues and customer responses, in an effort to help you better understand and improve your relationship with your host.

Issue One: “My Site is Not Working”

Perhaps the most common issue is when a client contacts a web host and is too general in their initial contact. For instance, if they can’t access their website from their browser and send a message such as “my site is not working”. Although at first glance one might not see anything wrong with this, consider things from the host’s standpoint: they don’t know what operating system you’re using, whether your Internet connection is working intermittently, etc. There are many things that can cause a website not to load that are completely out of a website host’s control. So if your host answers your question with questions, don’t get mad - they’re only trying to help diagnose your problem, and learn more background information about the situation. Also, if you have time when submitting your support request, be sure to include as much information as you think is relevant, and take the time to ensure it is grammatically correct and worded in an easy-to-understand manner.

Issue Two: No Response From Host

Another common scenario that I see quite often is when someone contacts their web host and does not wait long enough for an answer. Granted, many hosts these days have a response-time guarantee, and if they do not live up to them, by all means, complain. But most often I see situations where a host has a one-hour response guarantee, and a client submits a ticket and waits only about twenty minutes before ranting about how the host doesn’t answer their support tickets. To avoid these sorts of problems, make sure you know whether or not your host has a response-time guarantee for support tickets - and if they do, find out how long it is.

Now, having said that, there are times when you have every right to demand a super-fast response from your host. For instance, if your website is down and you can’t even login, and you have submitted a ticket asking why to your web host, they should answer it ASAP with a genuine reason why and also a realistic estimate of when your site will be available again. Even if their guaranteed response time is twenty-four hours, I think they should make an effort to answer what I’ll term “extra-critical” tickets in a much shorter amount of time than all the rest. Many hosts complain that they cannot fix the problem and communicate with their clients - my answer to that is this: “Get out of the business!” It’s the biggest phony story I’ve ever heard, and you should not accept it as a valid answer from your host.

Issue Three: “Stolen” Domains

The whole issue of web hosts offering free domain names has become a hot topic in the hosting industry lately. I’ll explain:

Many web hosts offer a free domain name to every new hosting account signup. It is usually (but not necessarily always - it depends on the host!) a gimmick, just to get a few more clients. As long as the customer stays with the host, everything is Ok.

The problem arises when a client decides to switch web hosts. Usually, buried in the dark confines of a TOS near you, there is a clause that states something to this effect: “If client receives a free domain name upon account signup and cancels his or her hosting account, he or she must pay a (insert amount here) one-time fee to release the domain name.” Many folks overlook this clause when they signup, and as you can probably guess, this causes alot of trouble when they want their domain name and have to pay a fee to get it.

So what do they do? They sign online and post a complaint! What should they do instead? Pay the fee, and be more careful next time!

What can you as a hosting client do to prevent this from happening to you? As boring as it may sound, it is very important that you read - carefully! - the TOS and AUP agreements for the host you are signing up for. There’s not necessarily anything underhanded and sneaky about these charges (after all, the host has to cover their cost if they pay to register the domain for you and the you only stay on for a month), but if you don’t want to get hit by them, then find another host.

Issue Four: Failing Reliability

Here’s one that perhaps all of us have experienced in some way or another - a superb web host, a rising star with the hosting world at its feet, suddenly experiences pitifully low server reliability. Complaints don’t seem to get through to them, their own fixes don’t seem to work - in short, it looks like a complete and total failure of the hosting company, and it leaves one wondering whether or not they’ll even be around in another year.

The good news for the host and the customer: These are common symptoms of the “hyper-growth” condition that affects every web host at some point or another. Usually, it only happens once in a host’s life (and yes, the host does recover!). The host usually spends its time in the doldrums for anywhere from six months to one year, and after that things are fine.

If you’re a webmaster who stuck with your host through times like this, you have experienced firsthand what I’m about to say: You become one of the host’s favorite clients, and they wil bend over backwards to help you out. For those of you who could not stand the anguish of your site being down more often than up and switched hosts (who can blame you, after all!), realize that it did not affect your old host one bit.

As I already said, every host goes through this phase, where they transition from smalltime player to bigtime giant. There are no exact statistics of how many hosts make it through this phase, but I personally have never heard of one failing through this point in its life. It actually seems to benefit the host in that they can really nail down what they’re about and clarify their business processes, and it seems to help the clients who stick with them in that the clients themselves can provide feedback and actually take part in shaping the company as it morphs into a giant.

As hard as it may be to do, my recommendation would be to stick with the host. They have proven themselves to you in the past, and they may be experiencing growing pains right now, but once they pull out - they will again prove that they can meet your every hosting need. Don’t sacrifice a long-term relationship for short-term site uptime, especially when you’ve been with the host for awhile. And if you choose to stay with the host, don’t complain every few days - nobody else cares to hear the same person complaining over and over again, and even if you stay with your host, they’re not going to care for you too much if you are constantly publicly complaining about their services.

(A personal note: I especially know about the growing pains of a web host - we experienced ours this past summer. It was a huge learning experience, we pulled out, and now things are Ok.)

Issue Five: Unlimited Everything

After touching on every hot button in the hosting industry, I knew there had to be at least one more. I only had tot hink for a few short seconds before it came to mind!

The practice of offering unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage space, unlimited email accounts, and unlimited everything else is sweeping the hosting industry in a shockingly stupid wave. Folks, I’ll put it as plainly and simply as I possibly can: there is no such thing as unlimited.

Yes, a host advertises this. And yes, you login to your account, and there are no limits on anything. But have you ever noticed, as soon as you start using alot of something, your account is terminated? Do you know why this is? It’s because the host is not getting unlimited service - and neither will you!

Web hosts have to purchase their bandwidth, servers, operating systems, and other equipment and software from real companies. These real companies do not offer their wares in unlimited increments to the hosting companies - Verizon does not sell unlimited “all-you-can-eat” network access for $500 per month, Dell does not sell unlimited server contracts for $200 per month, and Red Hat does not sell “unlimited support” for its Linux operating system for $10 per month. These Web hosts have to pay real, limited prices for the things they buy, and they are just using one of the cheapest marketing techniques around by advertising unlimited resources to unsuspecting victims.

Do yourself a favor and don’t buy from “unlimited” hosts. The unrealistic features sets combined with the rock-bottom pricing mean that the first time you exceed a limit the host is not comfortable with you exceeding, or the first time you call for support, your account is terminated.

Proceed at your own risk!!! (But if I were you, I’d run the other way!)

Author:  Daniel J. Briere is the CEO of Netpreneur Host, a Web hosting and domain registration company for Webmasters and Internet entrepreneurs.

Benefiting From A Generator Sitemap

By Carl Hoffman in Webmasters

Generator sitemap programs can be downloaded from various sources on the Internet. Generator sitemap programs have two fundamental purposes. These sitemap programs help surfers navigate a site effectively. At the same time, this program encourages search engine spiders. Google offers one of the most popular generator sitemap programs ever to hit the Internet.

This type sitemap of google makes it possible for a website to get listed and get updated by the google search engine. Setting up the generator sitemap helps speed up the addition of the web pages of a site to the google listing.It also makes it easier for a site to get noticed by online surfers. In addition, any changes made to a website that has a generator sitemap is immediately picked up by google. These sitemaps also helps keep online information fresh and up-to-date for users.

Visibility is key to a sitemap:

Visibility is a major concern when using a generator sitemap. A website that is completely indexed has better chances of getting top search engine placement in page results. Many of the popular browsers used by searchers and that support java recognize generator sitemap programs. These include firefox and Internet explorer.

An online consumer that searches for a specific content on the web can immediately be directed to any one of the web pages of a particular site. This sitemap makes it easier for a search engine to provide accurate results from web pages they are familiar with.

Who can benefit?

A generator sitemap is highly recommended for websites that often do repeated modification of their web pages. You can use these sitemaps for websites of any size, regardless of the number of web pages a site may contain.

Although using this sitemap is not a guarantee of increased site rankings, it does however provide a website a better opportunity of getting listed on a search engine.

Working with it:

Most of the available generator sitemap programs available on the web make use of extensible markup language or XML. Similar to hypertext markup language or HTML, XML is used widely in blogs and syndicated feeds on the Internet. Each line of a XML code for a this sitemap has a specific purpose.

The location or (.loc) identifies the name of the web page of a website. The line (lastmod) indicates when the web page was last modified. The format for (.lastmod) can either be dd.mm.yyyy, dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm, dd/mm/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm. Shortcuts can also be used to simply the assignment of dates to the cell.

(.changefreq) advises the search engine of a specific time frame when the web page is regularly updated. This can either be done on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. For web pages that are not updated, the value ‘never’ is used. (.priority) indicates the level of priority that a search engine should give a particular web page of a website. These levels range from 0.0 for least priority to 1.0 for high priority.

Creating a dynamic generator sitemap:

Creating a dynamic sitemap is useful for websites containing various web pages. The google search engine makes it easy for users to adapt their google sitemap with the help of a python script.

The python script generates a sitemap using sitemap protocol. This creates a sitemap from either access logs, URL lists or from web server directories.

Tips for using a generator sitemap from google:

As one of more popular search engines offering a generator sitemap for websites on the Internet, google offers a few tips for its loyal users. Using the google sitemap url encoder/decoder is helpful for submitting sitemaps to google. For websites that have numerous web pages, creating a sitemap can be a tremendous task. For this situation it is best to click on the column title in order to make it easier for a URL list to get sorted.

The google sitemap allows users to save their settings after creating a sitemap. Users can use these saved settings as a guideline for succeeding sitemap updates. The sitemap also recognizes the use of robots.txt files.

Using a generator sitemap is a positive move in getting top ranking on the Internet’s top search engines as well as high visibility among online users.

Author:  Carl Hoffman has over 20 years of sales and marketing experience. He has many online ventures and author of many articles on sales, leadership and marketing. Visit him at http://www.CEHoffman.com

More Ever-lasting Habits of Highly Successful Webmasters

By Daniel Briere in Webmasters

1. Making Use of SEO

Every good webmaster should use search engine optimization techniques for their website. At first glance, this can seem to be an intimidating area to get into, and when you don’t have a very large budget, you may think that it is impossible to use SEO to your advantage. However, there are several free, and/or low-cost, tools on the Internet that will help you out. In addition, websites such as PromotionWorld and SEO-News offer a wealth of content on the subject of SEO. And even Google offers up some candid advice on giving your site an advantage in its results pages. Yes, SEO work takes a large investment in the way of time, but the results of continuous hard work will pay off - there are many companies today that do not use any form of paid advertising because all of their website traffic comes exclusively from non-paid search engine links. I suggest that you give search engine optimization a try for awhile, and see what happens.

2. Exchanging Links with Related Websites

Much has been said lately about the benefits of links, both outgoing and incoming, on the overall marketing success of a website, especially since Google’s Jagger update. The common perception has always been that you need as many incoming links to your website as possible, and that you should spend all of your time exchanging links with everyone you can think of. While I could write a whole article on the myths of links and link exchanging (and I probably will at some point), I’ll try to stay basic here. The main thing to know is that if the site that links to you - or the site you are linking to - has nothing to do with your website, it will do you no good, and may even penalize you in search results. Exchanging links can not only bring you actual traffic, but a link to your website can also act as a “vote” for you in the search engines’ eyes. So choose your link exchange partners wisely. Do not use link farms. Do not blanket the Internet with links to your website. Instead, choose quality, non-competing, content-related websites that are willing to link to your site, either for a fee, or in exchange for a link from your website back to theirs. A strategic link-sharing campaign will be of much greater value to you in the long run than a poorly-planned “blitzkrieg”.

3. Examining (and Conforming to) Customer Needs

Of course, you do know what your customers want, don’t you? So often, entrepreneurs jump into business without even asking potential customers what they really want. This mistake can be deadly, and certainly won’t earn you any friends. And just because you are currently successful does not mean that this will always be the case. Constantly ask your customers what they think about your products and services. Get their suggestions. And if a customer complains to you, or offers up a suggestion on their own, take it to heart - they have gone out of their way to communicate with you, meaning they want some sort of resolution for the situation; this is a golden opportunity to keep them as a customer for life.

4. Keeping Things Simple!

My own company, GlobalWebBrands, made the near-deadly mistake of “over-expanding” in two-thousand-and-five. I will always remember last year as the year that we tried too hard. Things have since settled down, but I will never make that same mistake again.

Please allow me to offer any startups or struggling businesses a very important piece of advice: when you start in a certain line of business, stay in that line of business! Until you have actually been there, you cannot imagine just how much trouble you will get into by rapidly expanding the number and type of products and services you offer, or the number of payment methods you offer, or the number of brands you have, or in the cases of some - the number of physical locations you have.

Diversify - ah yes, the golden word of the past fifteen years. Everybody has been chanting it: business ‘gurus’, personal investment ‘gurus’. Folks, these people are not really gurus at all; rather, they’re goons looking to make a little bit of money!

Customers today want simplicity. They want stability. They do not want everything from one person. Wal-Mart is failing, and they are proving that you just cannot be everything to everybody. Become the expert in your field, and not the Wal-Mart. Be one thing to everybody, and you will be successful beyond your wildest dreams.

In other words: Keep it simple, stupid!

Author:  Daniel J. Briere is the CEO of Netpreneur Host, a Web hosting and domain registration company for Webmasters and Internet entrepreneurs.