I’ve installed an Internet Tool called xinu over on zap123 that you might like to try out. I initially installed it just for my use, but after using it for a while, I’m now offering usage to the public.
zap123 - Try it out - don’t abuse it and I might let you use it regularly 
It will allow you to quickly check your PageRank, backlinks and much more.
Someone recently asked me - “Please look at my blog site - does it have a nice design?” I said yes it does, why do you ask?
He was concerned that the only people who come to his site repeatedly are the ones he either gives the link to (in an IM) or after he’s commented on their site. Here is my take on it…
Let’s say I can’t see the site, I would say that design isn’t really an issue with a blog - as long as it is appealing to the eye - people come to read what you’ve written not how it looks - unless you are going to have a template a day!
People say “content is king”, I disagree - you can fill your site with the same stuff other people are writing or you can come up with something unique. So “Great content is king”.
Commenting for comments basically means that you get someone type “nice blog” or “I agree” most of the time. Go find a blog that reflects/mirrors your own - something with maybe the same niche (stuff) as you have - send them an email, tell them you like their site and ask them if they want to trade stories/content/comments.
Do that with a few people in your niche and you get nice content without having to write it all yourself!
Onward and upwards
Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog)
Before you think about submitting your site to a search engine, you need to be prepared. Don’t think that because you have your domain name registered and a ‘under construction’ page up that you are ready.
Don’t even think about submitting your site to a single search engine until you are ready to receive guests or visitors. The worst thing in the world (I think so anyway) – is to follow a link to a website and only find a ‘under construction’ message or a front page with lots of links with ‘coming soon’ as a reward for my click.
Why did I come to your site? I want to either find out something interesting, look at something, download something or buy something – not to be told to come back later when you are ready – to tell the truth, I don’t think I would bother coming back. Even when you tell me to come back because I’ll remember and think “been there before, it was a waste of time, full of coming soon stuff”.
If you have a blog – don’t leave the messages saying ‘Just testing’ or ‘congratulations and welcome to your new blog’. Don’t even think about writing ‘Welcome to my blog, over the next coming few days I will be…’ Just remember, the internet has no concept of time, but humans do. If I come to your site and find a ‘Welcome to my blog…’ post with lots of promises, but you don’t deliver, why should I trust you with my time? My money? My business? The truth of the matter is, I won’t.
I’m not going to go through a whole list of things that tend to put visitors off staying on a site – but here are a few of them:
Broken links (always check your links before you upload to a site)
Awful color schemes (Yellow and Red? – Try pastel colors)
Tiny fonts – I like to be able to read without pushing my nose to the monitor.
Difficult navigation – I want consistency and clearly labelled links
That should give you a bit to think about…
This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.
The 48 Hour Plan | How To Get Your Website Quickly Indexed
“Discover how to create, launch and get any website quickly indexed in 48 hours”
Im spilling the beans How long does it take you to come up with an idea, build a website and launch it? Not only launch it but also have it quickly indexed in the search engines? How would you like to put the whole process on speed dial? And do it all in less than 48 hours?
Too many people are getting sidetracked chasing magic bullets and looking for easy push button answers. It is time to get back to the basics Before you try and make money off Adsense or any other program you must have a website and you need to have it indexed. No matter how many $97 programs you buy or download nothing is going to happen unless you are up and live on the internet.My new report is called the 48 Hour Plan. I called it the 48 Hour Plan because thats how long it takes me from the first flash of inspiration to having a web site up and running live on the internet. Not only do I outline the steps I take but how long they generally take. No fluff or BS, just 20 pages of the meat and potatoes. I list the programs I use and the sites I go to. These are the techniques that I have been using and they have worked very well for me and I know they will work very well for you also.
Here is what you will learn in the 48 Hour Plan…
Interested? I thought so.
Believe it or not, you don’t actually have to directly submit your site to a search engine. More often than not it will come and find you from links on other sites.
They find you either from links on another site (this is called ‘organic’ traffic) or a direct submission to the search engines database using an ‘add url’ link on their site. You can also use a service or a piece of software that submits you to several (or thousands) search engines at once. Please do watch out for some directories as they tend to either send you spam themselves or sell your email address to others to spam you.
What types of places are there to submit my website?
Directories (free and paid). Search Engines. Individual sites. Free For All (FFA) pages.
What is the difference between a directory and a search engine?
In simple terms:
A directory only stores links that you or someone else submits to their database.
A search engine normally follows a link that you, or someone else submits and then looks at all the other links on that page and follows them one by one until they get a list of all the pages on your site (sometimes this is called spidering or crawling, hence the terms ‘I’ve been spidered or my website has been crawled’).
Search engine spiders very rarely crawl every page of your site – they do it in batches. Depending on how ‘important’ the spider thinks your site is, depends on how deep or how many pages it will crawl.
If you have a busy site with lots of visitors and you are adding content very regularly – the spider will come visiting more often and will crawl more pages.
Getting links back to your site from your friends or forums you visit often are very good ways of getting the search engines to come spider you more often.
It is all about popularity. The more popular your site is, the more the spiders love you.
This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.
You need to get your web site index by the search engines so people can find you!
If you were to think of your site as a shop on the high street of your local town - People would walk past, see your displays and shop front and maybe pop in. This however is not true for the web. The way the internet is made – there is no such thing as passing trade. You can have the best site in the universe. You can have a revolutionary product which will change the way millions of people search the internet. You could have a very important message that everyone should read – but no one will come if they don’t know where it is.
To get people to visit your site, to read your message, to buy your products they need to know where to find you. People need to know your website address, your URL or be able to follow a hyper link to your site.
How do we tell people about your site? Word of mouth? Yes, this works but you can only tell so many people face to face. Should you send out an email to a list of people you recently bought from someone on the internet (10,000 email addresses for $10)? In one simple word - NO – This is the easiest way for you to lose your website, your credibility, your hosting - even your email and internet account. This is called spam.
Even though you personally may get tons of spam in your mailbox each day doesn’t mean you should do it too. It is something protected by law. Yes, you can be in serious trouble if you spam. As a rule of thumb - Only email people who have either emailed you (not spam) or someone who has personally asked you to send them information of a particular type. It would be a waste of time sending someone an email about automobiles if they are only interested in stamp collecting. I know, there could be an exception to the rule where someone could be interested in stamps with automobiles on them.
Statistically most people visit web sites by searching for them in a search engine. The funny thing is, that even if someone knows your URL or website address, they still type it into a search engine. Almost everyone has either a search engine as their homepage or they use the one provided by their internet provider and that almost always has a search box provided by a search engine.
They type your URL into the search box and press enter. If you aren’t listed in the search engine they are using, guaranteed one of your competitors will be.
Just to summarize:
You need to get your web site indexed by the search engines so people can find you!
This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.
1. IE Sucks. In fact its worse than that. A new post appeared on webdesignerwall.com that was very intriguing. It says to trash all IE Hacks and force Microsoft to improve its browser’s page rendering. Read more here…
2. Keep your site Clean. Don’t make it all singing all
dancing. Clean designs are best. Take mine for example. The background
is nice and dull. But the green middle and white text make up for it.
The navigation is simple and so is the logo. But take this website: http://mito.cool.ne.jp/chinari21/2-16.html its got a bad background no main content moving gifs, scrolling text and much more I cant bear it.
3. Keep it to 5 colours at the most. Most people don’t want to
see a site with millions of colours so it looks like the rainbow. So
keep it at 5 colours!
4. Have a contact page that works. The worst thing to do is not have
a way of contacting the webmaster, even if the contact page just
displays an email, its better than nothing.
5. Lorum Ipsum. This is one of the best dummy text generators
around. It displays latin text to put in templates rather than adding
your own. It is a long established fact that a reader will be
distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its
layout, this therefore means if you make a template they wont focus on
the design. Get it from here
6. Don’t use a free host. (unless you have to) Free hosts
often give you adverts, slow loading times, too much of a community
(unless you like that stuff) and addon’s you don’t need. To
be professional, you need a payed one. I recommend neoboffinhosting.
They are very good and they host my site. Remember to put psycho3000 in
the referral box to get yourself 50% more bandwidth for free.
7. Take time on designing your site. Most people wont like it if its
rushed. Make sure you post it on forums and around at home to see if
everyone likes it. Then offer a beta stage of the site with a password
protected directory where people can login and look at the design
before anyone else. This also means you can test it for compatibly with
different screen sizes if yours is to small and different browsers if
you don’t have a certain one.
8. Test, Test Test. Run your site through many tests. Check for
broken links, broken images valid coding (XHTML and CSS) check for any
error pages ect. Also run it though browsershots. This tests for many different things that may be wrong with your site.
9. Update often. Most people don’t want to see a site that
hasent been updated in a month, year ect. Keep it updated with bug
fixes, content updates, small design changes ect. Don’t think
once the site is up, you can leave it and get hits automaticly. Offer
somthing to keep the visitor on your site. (templates, codes) and make
sure to keep offering it.
10.Meta tags and SEO. Make sure you have meta tags in your site.
This picks your site up for many different things and gets it on search
engines. Use a meta tag generator for simpler implantation of the code. SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimism” Use this website to learn everything you know about SEO and more.
10 Things every website designer should know.
Written by Lewis King of psycho3000 designs
Here is a list of my favorite Google advanced search operators, operator combinations, and related uses:
There you go - now go find what YOU really want
This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.
Web CEO is the most complete SEO software package on the planet; plus, our SEO software offers more for free than any other software package or suite for SEO.
Here is a list of free directories where you can submit your website to, all of the directories should be search engine friendly meaning that the directories will be spidered by google and other search engines. None of these directories require a link back, and that means its totally free. Read the rest of this entry »
