Find Motive

A great evening in Manhattan, a fantastic atmosphere in Madison Square Garden. Web business people is waiting this match for a long time. One side there is Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing on the other, both seems fit and there is desire to win on face. Last years both sides challenged to other but they never came to face to face. Before the match starts, lets take a short look to their career, strength and weaknesses.

Called SEO is short term of Search Engine Optimization. A milestone in web business since the search engines are the main source for web users before they buy services or products online. Finest and most trustable data source with their high indexing capacity and different logical algos working on the back round may depend on your rankings while results are listed. As most web users do not look much after the 3rd pages of results, web business owners are directly influenced. A web surfer can be your client if your web site is ranked at the top of search results but how you get listed at the top of a major engine? Even there are different algos powering the search engines the main theory is mostly same, simple algo stands on location and frequency. A crawl base search engines use spiders a web site and classifies with different principles to define the ranking. A fact about algo can be changed or improved for search quality. I’am sure all professionals will remember Florida Update on Google. Indeed it was an earchquake more than an update, many results were changed or disappeared on Google, some high rankings even lost from the index. Actually general Google algo is formulated as Relevance Score , PageRank , Local Score with other tweaking , tuning or filtering aspects. Main development point of a search algo is how much off page factors are important and their degrees take part in your algo. The theory on here is not giving much control to webmasters with on page factors .Other search engines do not use Page Rank since Page Rank is a trademark which belongs to Google. Avoiding any spamming , manipulation trials, over optimization or even cloaked content, engines are modifying or changing the degrees ,adding new variables on their algo time to time but all work done is to provide higher search relevancy and quality for users. (Relevance score is SEO efforts, Page Rank is Link building efforts for Google and Local Score is links from expert documents) As seen from the formula, SEO efforts only work on relevance score and vary your ranking 10% if you hired a SEO professional but this can increase 18% if your SEO is master level. I would like to talk about Yahoo and Live search engines’ secrets either but as mentioned they are my professional secrets for now, if you don’t know these, its impossible to get top results on Yahoo or Live.

Search Engine Marketing (Pay Per Click) is paid inclusions as seen Sponsored Results on engines based on pay per click. This marketing tool has been increased enormously in these years, even with expensive per click rates. In some keywords or phrases a click may cost 10€ ( online dating industry) whether visit converts to a lead or not. Ads buyers are ready to pay these high per click bills because SEM efforts bring more revenue than they spent. How this technology works while displaying the ads? Lets say few words about Google Adwords. Google has 2 different networks such as search network and content network. Search network means Google powered search results that you may see on any website with a search bar using Google’s search technology. Content network is different spidering technology and matching the search query and web site content. If you have a web site with high quality and useful content, you may apply and get involved Google’s Adsense network to make money. Google will classify your content and display related ads when a search query is matched as you have probably seen Ads by Google on web.

If SEO and SEM are powerful marketing tools which is the best and effective on sales conversion rates? This is the fatal question, both have advantages changing to the case, then lets compare:

A)In SEM, your web site does not need a change in most cases. If you want high conversion rates, a SEM professional should prepare high quality landing page is necessary only, not your entire design. On the other hand SEO may require some major design changes to get good spidering by engines.

B)PPC Ads charged when clicked only, displaying your ads will not cost you anything but poor Click Through Rates will increase your minimum per click costs. SEO visits are free of charge as visitors comes by clicking the natural search results from a search engine. Most visitors likely to trust a site they find on a search engine, they feel like natural results have been approved by the search engine.

C) SEM brings very quick results to analyze your campaign while SEO effects can take long time on ranking. On Adwords, just 15 minutes is enough to display your campaign on screen but SEO results may take up to 3 months on engine’s ranking.

D) ROI and Conversion rates are higher in SEM because you may design different landing pages according to your major products or services with price charts, feature comparison tables .However in SEO, you can not make these much because your most powerful PR page is your homepage so your sub pages which includes your product specification will not get listed higher than your main page.

E) Targeting is easy in SEM with campaign settings option. You may target national ,regional or international geographical areas depending on your shipping options. Google has features to promote your local business with accessing your business address or just selecting distribution area on Google Map. Another useful tool is matching options are enables you to select broad ,phrase,exacxt or negative matches while displaying your ads.When you prefer SEO, you can not prepare different target pages as they will be sub pages and will not get listed higher than your main page as above.

F) SEM limits you with your budget because your ads campaign will stop displaying when your daily, keywords or monthly budget is reached while SEO results longer even months after optimization work is done.

Finally who wins this match? Well, this depends on your expectation, budget and targets from your campaigns. As long years professional , I dont have a preference . Each business needs different campaigns, you may select to attract new clients in both tools while achieving your corporate targets.

Ladies and Gentlemen, unforgettable match is about to start in Madison Square Garden, please sit back and watch this.

Whether your company is large or small, you must have a web presence that works for your business. Commanding a powerful presence on the World Wide Web has become a table stake. A company’s web design details and web presence has replaced a wide array of communication vehicles. Nowadays customers, suppliers, and even potential investors form a first impression from a company’s web presence. And it’s not just the homepage – a good cover followed by unfriendly navigation, hard to decipher visuals, or simply too many graphic images will ruin a visit to a website. 

Next, you have to be sure that the front end, “the market engine,” is tied tightly to all of your company’s back-office functions. Everything must work smoothly so that billing, customer care and relationship management, inventory, shipping, and even sales can use your web presence as an integrated business tool.

So in a nut shell, here is basically the steps to great web design when you tie it into SEO and SEM. Getting yourself a favorable listing in search engines is a matter of following these two steps when designing your website pages.

Step 1: Use your TITLE Tag Properly!

Most search engines place a lot of weight on the content of your TITLE tag. Your page’s title is very important and you should design it properly. Do not set the title of your page to something totally unrelated to your site. For example: “Welcome!” or “Thank You For Visiting!” simply will not do.

When surfing the net I often see plenty of pages where the title is “Untitled Document” or “Title Your Page Here” – the page owner hadn’t even specified a title at all. It’s unfortunate because those pages are missing out on potential search engine ranking.

Your TITLE tag should clearly represent what your site is about. If you’re building a page that talks about your company’s products, the title should thoroughly reflect that topic. “Our Products” or “Product Listings” is a bad choice for a page title – people are probably going to be searching for your company by name or by the type of product you sell. Thus, using our website as an example: “Vancouver Web Design, SEO Vancouver, BC Web Design”. What ever business you are in, make sure your title tag reflects exactly who you are and what you do.

Also consider using keywords in your TITLE tag. For example, let’s say you’re selling real estate. You might want to make the title of your main page “Seattle Real Estate, Real Estate Agency in Seattle, Listing Homes, Property and Commercial listing for the Seattle Area!” As you can see, this title gets right to the point about the topic of the page. It also uses your keyword: “Seattle Real Estate,” and more specifically “Real Estate Listings in Seattle” (twice). Someone searching for “Real Estate” is more likely to find YOUR page than a page titled “Homes For Sale.”

Step 2: Keywords aren’t just for META tags

Over the years, META tags have been hawked as “the” way to get good listings in the search engines. Early on, this was true – when META tags were first created in the HTML specifications, search engines put a lot of weight on them. Several years ago you could literally boost yourself to the top of the search results by including repetitive keywords in your META tags.

However, META tags have now become the most abused part of web pages. People routinely add META keywords to their page which have no relevance to their site’s topic. For example, many webmasters use META keywords like “pics” or “mp3″ even if their site has nothing to do with those categories. They’re hoping that people who search for hot topics will stumble across their page and stop by.

Those tactics do not work anymore. META tags now carry a surprisingly low weight in all of the popular search engines. What is important now is the overall content of your page. Search engines have algorithms (methods) for determining what your web pages are really about. These algorithms are closely-guarded secrets, for obvious reasons. However, they all focus on one thing these days: the REAL content in your web page. If you create a web page about “The CompanyABC Business Opportunity” but include META keywords like “free pics” and “download music,” your site’s not going to be indexed under the topics you defined in your keywords. In fact, it might be rejected altogether!

Not only should you make sure that your META keywords tag appropriately reflects the content of your page, you should ensure that the text content of your page contains a good distribution of your keywords. Mention your company name often (and evenly) throughout your site.

For Example: “Our Company is the best company around. Imagine working at home and being your own boss – Our Company makes it possible! Your potential for earnings with Our Company is unlimited. Our Company allows you to sell as much as you want or as little as you want. The amount of money you make with Our Company depends on how much effort you put into your Our Company business.” Using your company name strategically and through out your web page is going to get you much higher rankings when someone performs a search for Our Company.

As you can see, the keyword (Our Company) is evenly distributed. Don’t try bunching up your keywords at the end of the page, that doesn’t work and may prevent you from being listed at all. You should concentrate on using keywords as part of your site’s content, and spreading them evenly throughout your text.

As you can see, these two steps are pretty simple. It’s all a matter of incorporating them into the design of your web pages – or redesigning your pages to fit, if your site is already live and submitted. There is never any guarantees that your website will end up #1 in the search results, but I do guarantee that if you follow these two steps you’ll achieve better overall rankings.

Above all else, avoid common spammer tactics like grouping keywords at the bottom of your page, or trying to “hide” keywords by making the text the same color as your page’s background. Search engines look for these methods and will often disqualify your page if they encounter what they think is spam.

Social media optimization (SMO) is the next level online marketing tool. In order to let the world know about the products and services of your company, social media optimization is increasingly being used these days. The term, social media optimization, refers to an online marketing tool and platform that can be used for sharing information in the form of texts, images, audio and video. Social Media Optimization has become the buzzword in the online marketing arena because of the adoption of modern day marketing trends and new marketing channels that it has opened. The concept behind using SMO is to implement changes to optimize a website through video or audio streaming. It also includes frequent postings on relevant blogs and social bookmarking sites all of which ultimately leads to improved search engine ranking. For a social media optimization campaign to be highly effective necessary components required are:

• Inclusion in social networking websites• Inclusion in social bookmarking websites• Releasing Press Releases of search engine optimized content• Websites where you can share your videos online• Blogs and forumsLeadZoomer, an experienced digital marketing company helps to increase your brand awareness and handles your overall marketing requirements through our Social Media Optimization service. Keeping in mind our customer’s best interests, we craft affordable and customized social marketing campaigns through which we drive maximum traffic to our client’s website. LeadZoomer’s team of experienced professionals develops attractive and media-rich content that will reach out to social networking communities and collect links back to your website. We work with online communities, networking groups, community websites and social media websites to run a social media optimization campaign for our clients in order to spread awareness about their company. We understand that content with self promoting sections are not accepted, thus we emphasis on writing content that will not be banned. With our professional social media campaign we focus on the best features of your business and design the most optimal online marketing campaign for you.To find out more about our social media optimization services please call on +91-9422301178 or email us at info@leadzoomer.com

What Is This Twitter You Speak Of?

So what is Twitter and how can it be of benefit to you or your business? Twitter is a free online micro-blogging application which gives you the ability to send out short messages (up to 140 characters) called “tweets” to people who are following you on Twitter. You can send tweets either through your computer or by using your cell phone via a text message. These tweets/messages can be about anything you want and they can include links, as well. Making Twitter even more useful is the ability to send a direct message to someone you are following (this is done by entering @username at the beginning of your message) or replying to someone’s tweet with your own. You would be surprised how common it is to reply to someone’s message then to have someone who is either following you or the person you sent the reply to reply to your initial message and so on.

People can follow you and your tweets by first signing-up for their own free Twitter account at the Twitter site then adding you to their list of people they are following. Once you have created your account, you can either check your Twitter page (your own personal page which appears after you sign-in at the Twitter home page) for any of your friend’s new messages or you can send out your own. But it is much easier, in my opinion, to use one of the many online or desktop applications which give you the ability to do all of this and more.

Twitter As A Communication Tool

Twitter is a quick and easy way to communicate with family, friends, business associates, and also within a company setting. Being an online service, Twitter is available to anyone with online access. All you have to do is login to your account through any number of third-party applications developed for Twitter or through the Twitter site and you are ready to go. Within a company setting, employees could have a Twitter account created for them with the option to have their messages protected. This means only people they (or you or the person in charge of creating the Twitter accounts) approve will be able to send and receive messages from them. The same thing could be done using an instant message program but with Twitter, there would be no software to install and it would be accessible from anywhere with an online connection. Additionally, the person who is in charge of the Twitter accounts will have the power to control who is and who isn’t part of this private Twitter network.

Even though there are tons of online communication applications available, Twitter can also be used as a way for people who are collaborating on a project to stay in touch with one another regardless of where they are. And depending on which third-party application they are using to Twitter with, these conversations can be saved for future reference. There are even some third-party apps which you can use to send files up to 10MB to anyone you are following as long as they are using the same application, that is. Still, a handy feature to have and one which may become a feature of Twitter if there’s a big enough demand for it.

Marketing With Twitter

Here in lies the great thing about Twitter from a business perspective: the marketing potential it offers users. Sure, it is great to send messages and chat using Twitter, but it can also be a great marketing tool if used correctly. Have some breaking news you want to get out quickly? Send it out as a Tweet. Made an important update to your blog or web site? Let people know about it instantly with a Tweet. Want to promote your project, book, movie, whatever by giving away a free download or preview? Send out a Tweet with a URL to the free download. Only want to market something to certain individuals you are following? Simply enter their username preceded by the “@” and you are set.

Another simple marketing tool available with Twitter is the ability to befriend people who are following someone you already follow. While this practice could backfire on you if you begin to add everyone you find following someone you are following, be picky and just befriend those who either share similar tastes that you do or work in the same field as you or already follow many of the same people you do. Otherwise, you could come off as a spammer which will be a hard image to shake.

Twitter Now And Beyond

Twitter represents a fundamental change in the way people communicate online. There have always been instant messengers and they have their place and purpose but they don’t offer the one thing which sets Twitter apart and that is the ability to instantly communicate with either a couple of people or potentially thousands without the need for proprietary software. No need to download this piece of software in order to communicate with this person or that organization.

Much like how blogging has become a staple of today’s society, Twitter and “twittering” is on the same path to becoming ingrained in today’s culture despite only being around for less than two years. So simple in its execution, powerful in the marketing opportunities it offers, and ease of use, Twitter will be one of the top web technologies to gain worldwide prominence in 2008.

The “Should I park my domain name and monetize it that way or should I develop a website?” is a pretty old debate among domainers. And I believe it’s proof that laziness will always win over sensibility.
There are a variety of ways to monetize a domain name. Most domainers who deal with a lot of domain names like to park their domains at Sedo, GoDaddy, or other services that help them monetize the name.
Others build made-for-adsense websites that have little real value, intending to get visitors to click the adsense ads. This is not much different from parking the domain names.Very few domain name sellers or speculators develop real websites or blogs on their domain names. Why?
Even though they intend to sell their domain names, they know that this usually takes a lot of time. Finding a buyer isn’t an overnight process in most cases. Most domains that are finally sold have been owned by the speculator for years.
Parking those domain names is the way they try to cover their costs of registering the names year after year. Most of their domain names will never sell because they want way more than they are worth. Most domain speculators are hoping for that one big sale, kind of like playing the lottery.
During all that time they are holding onto their domain names, they could be building websites, doing affiliate marketing, blogging, and more. The problem is that those things require work. And we all know how much people like work.
Most people who join MLM programs, get involved in domain speculation, or fall for get rich quick schemes do not want to work. They are hoping to fall into thousands of dollars without having to do any real work.
This article won’t win me any popularity contests among domainers. But if the truth hurts, too bad. It is not ALL domainers who are lazy. There are many who work very hard at their profession. They learn to master the traffic their domain name brings in and make a business out of it.
This article is more about those who just go out and register a bunch of domain names they believe are creative, hoping that someone is going to come along someday and give them a bunch of money for what they consider to be creativity.
For some it is their second job or hobby. For others it is a habit. I’ve known domainers who mortgaged their house to buy a lot of domain names they will likely never sell for enough to cover the loan.
In my opinion, the smart move is to develop those domain names into real online businesses. If you own one-word generic domain names that have type-in traffic, this doesn’t apply to you. But if you are like most domainers and you own a bunch of made up domain names, two and three word domain names, etc., then you should think about developing those domain names into a business.A domain name’s real value is in the traffic it generates and what that traffic may or may not buy based on the keywords that helped them find that domain or website in the first place.
Let me rephrase it again. Your domain name is not worth anything more than you registered it for when you first register the name. Once you analyze the traffic that domain gets, it may or may not increase in value.
If just parking the domain name gets very few clickthrus for the ads placed on it, then your domain name is not worth but a few pennies over the price of registration.
All it proves is that a few people who end up on that domain name will click an adsense ad. To a business, that means nothing. It doesn’t even prove that any of the traffic generated by that domain name will actually buy something.
However, if you create a business plan that matches the domain name, and you develop a website based on that business plan, and people do actually buy products, services, subscribe, join, or click through to your affiliates, you show that the domain name you own has business potential.A business owner is much more likely to buy your domain name if it has a proven profit potential than if they just think you have a cute catchy short domain name.
It can be as easy as installing free wordpress software and picking a free theme for your blog and writing to it daily with original content.
The bonus is that it may also rank well for your keywords if you do it right and know a little about seo and social bookmarking.
If you develop a business model that is just moderately successful and you add that it has a good ranking for some key phrases, the value of your domain name is quantifiable and much more appealing to anyone that may consider buying it from you.
My opinion is based on having developed hundreds of websites and blogs and having bought and sold over 500 domain names.
There are a few people around who have bought and sold more than I have.
There are domainers who have made a lot more money than I have by monetizing their domain names or by directing the traffic from their domain names directly to websites that are owned by businesses.
But, again, they have the right domains and tools to do that with. Making up domain names or owning a bunch of 2-3 word domain names does not mean you will be one of these. You won’t be. Those I referred to in this article should begin thinking about developing their domain names if they want them to have any actual value.

RSS is a family of web-feed formats that is used for web syndication. It can also be used by news websites, weblogs and podcasting, among others. The acronym can refer to various standards such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0), Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91 and RSS 1.0) and the RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and RSS 1.0)
RSS Backgrounder
Several similar formats already existed for syndication before RSS, but none was able to achieve widespread popularity or are still in common use today like it. This is primarily due to the fact that most were envisioned to work only within a single service. The RDF Site Summary which is the first version of RSS was created for use on the My Netscape portal. This eventually became known as RSS 0.9. A prototype that simplified the format and incorporated parts of a new scripting news format was produced in response to comments and suggestions made to the existing version. It was considered an interim measure as an RSS 1.0 like format was suggested through the so-called Futures Document.
The format was left without an owner when Netscape lost interest. Since it is becoming widely used, a working group and mailing list was set by various users and XML notables to continue its development. An RSS fork was created when two companies claimed ownership of the existing RSS.
A format grouped under an RSS 0.92 heading contained incremental changes to the existing format. Meanwhile, another group went on to produce RSS 1.0 which was based on RDF specifications but was more modular. When the RSS 0.92 was released, it contained minor and supposedly compatible set of changes to RSS 0.91. A subsequent draft was published for RSS 0.93 and RSS 0.94 by the same creator. RSS 0.93 was almost identical to 0.92 while the 0.94 reverted changes made in 0.93 and added a type attribute to the description element.
A final successor to the RSS 0.92 known as RSS 2.0 was released in September 2002 which emphasized “Really Simple Syndication” as the meaning of the three-letter acronym. It removed the type attribute added in RSS 0.94 and allowed users to add extension element using XML namespaces. Although several versions of it were released, the version number of the document model remained unchanged.
The adoption of the RSS format by New York Times became the starting point for such a format to becoming a standard. This format enabled it to offer its readers the ability to subscribe to RSS news feeds related to various topics. The RSS 2.0 specification was assigned ownership to Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. The creation of the new format and the raising of the version number were criticized and were answered with the creation of RSS 3.0, which is a non-XML textual format. It was only intended as a parody and very few implementations were made.
A preliminary draft of RSS 1.1 was produced to fix 1.0 by removing little-used features, simplifying the syntax and improving the specification based on the more recent RDF specifications. However, such work eventually became a mere academic exercise. RSS 1.1 never prospered.
Apple Computer, Inc. released Safari 2.0 with built-in RSS Feeds capabilities. It delivered the ability to read RSS feeds and bookmark them while having built-in search features. An independent project intended to create RSS 3 failed to gain backing from anyone in the industry.
Microsoft proposed its Simple Sharing Extensions to RSS, informally named Real Simple Synchronization. Together with the Outlook team, it eventually announced the adoption of the feed icon first used in the Mozilla Firefox browser. This effectively made the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for both RSS and related formats such as Atom. Opera followed suit when they added the orange square in the release of Opera 9. The start of 2006 saw the re-launching of the RSS Advisory Board to work for the further development of the RSS format.
Usability Problems and Solutions
One of the major problems in RSS usability is the absence of consistency in the manner of subscribing. Some sites use the RSS icon such as the orange XML icon but other sites don’t have any icon but instead use words such as subscribe, feed or web-feed. There are even sites that don’t have any icon or word with any link at all. Still there are sites that use different icons for RSS. One offered solution is putting a text link in very small type at the bottom of the page which may prove to be unsatisfying to say the least. Another is sticking out with the orange XML icon as it tends to stand-out and have a link next to it describing what the RSS is and how to use it.
It can be very difficult when a browser starts spewing undecipherable code after clicking an orange button with an unfamiliar acronym. Apple has recently come out with the Safari to handle RSS feeds or send it off to a chosen aggregator. A look into the Safari’s preferences at the RSS pane will reveal a dropdown menu for setting which application is desired as default news aggregator.
It is important to make software usable. Usability then was all about computer-human interaction and a lot of software remain as such. However, the Internet has given rise to new software that centers on the interaction between humans. This has been seen in discussion groups, social networking, on-line classified ads and of course, the e-mail which are all softwares that mediate between people. In this case, social interface is equally important.
RSS or news feeds in general, is like getting a subscription to a magazine except that there is no need to regularly check for new issues to come out. Through RSS, the user is informed about sites which are particularly being watched instead of checking a dozen or hundred of websites everyday. This technology is very useful but there seems to be an information overload prevailing in the system.
Some suggested solutions include visualization or collaborative filtering through smart search terms. The solution is about identifying the echoes and grouping them. When RSS readers collect updates, these results to so many unread items which make it very difficult to determine which one to read first. There are a few things to remember when subscribing to feeds. It is impossible to read everything even if all your time is devoted to reading. Even contents of a limited number of feeds may involve a lot of reading. It is important to know how to use the RSS technology before it manages to drown the user and render it useless.

India SEO a Professional Internet marketing Firm located in Chandigarh, northern part of India, since 1999 has launched anoutsourcing of organic search marketing services at economical rates to its strategic SEO partners and customers  in UK, US, Canada,Australia, and other Europeans countries with the beginning of 2009.IndiaBook CEO says “Recent recession in financial market has open a new door of opportunity for the Indian SEO agencies to provided SEO services world wide because of advantage of cost-effective services,increased efficiency, increased productivity, shared risks, reduced operating costs, increased quality, better services and more time to focus on core competencies.”IndiaBook CEO further says “In these days SEO approach is not only important but crucial in any marketing mix. We cannot depends upon on our in house SEO consulting team, the pace of change has been obviously too fast for any company that is not dedicated to SEO as its core competency. We have also established our position as a major SEO authority in last 9 years. If any body see our portfolio of more than 500 sites, couldn’t possibly doubt our knowledge and expertise in thesubject”IndiaBook is already into natural search engine positioning service since 1999 and already successfully completed website optimization of more than 500 websites. IndiaBook has more than 50 work station for search engine optimizers and team leader of SEO division has more than 10 year of search service expertise.India Book SEO company India offers all type of Internet search engine optimization services including competitor analysis, keyword research,on page optimization, link building, directory submission, blog reviews, social book marking, SEO content writing, article writing,article submission and press release distribution services to its outsourcing customers in UK, US, Canada, Australia and Europeans countries.IndiaBook SEO services India ensures highly qualitative, timely delivered and competitive affordable SEO rates to outsourcing customers because of location advantage in India, low labor cost, high volumes and 9 years of our search marketing expertise. We sign Non-Disclosure Agreements and understand secrecy better because of been already into SEO outsourcing services .We also offer customized SEO solutions even at customer sites to make complete secrecy and workonly at back end. Our global SEO optimization services outsourcing model makes sure we deliver maximum targeted result to you.

Search Engine Marketing: Drawing traffic to your real estate website

What is search engine marketing (SEM)? and why it’s important for getting ahead of your competition in real estate marketing.

Time and time again, it has been said that affiliate marketing is, without a doubt, the quickest and most efficient way of earning a living online. There are a variety of reasons for this. For starters, most affiliate programs do not require any enrollment fees. There is no financial investment on the part of the affiliate. Secondly, the affiliate is only tasked with pre-selling the affiliate merchant’s products. The sales page, the payment processing, the digital delivery, and the post sales services shall be borne by the affiliate merchant.These shouldn’t mean that the affiliate should want in commitment, however. As a matter of fact, an affiliate’s success wholly depends on how much commitment he could give the program, and how much effort he could invest to pursue such commitment. Sometimes, this requires some monetary expenses. Getting a web host, for example, as well as a domain name, would necessitate some cash to be laid out. Getting professionally made graphics to make his website attractive can also cost some dough, in the event that the affiliate cannot do this for himself. PPC advertising can equally be just as costly, if not even more, if the affiliate would ever decide to utilize this option.But not everything needs to come at a price. There are vital tools that would help ensure the affiliate’s success, and they can be availed of for free.Here are the top five tools under this category. Knowing them would give you the edge you need. Using them would give you the head start that would push your online enterprise to the next level.WordPress. WordPress is a movable-type blog. It is a software program you could download and use to create your own blogs which you could upload in your own server. You won’t have to settle for the words “blogspot” or “livejournal” or “xanga” to be attached to your URL. You could host your blog under its own domain name, or as another page in your main website. Blogs are great marketing tools. They get indexed quite quickly by the search engines, and often, the figure prominently well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They could also give your main website the backlinks it needs to boost its own page rank. Additionally, a blog can be customized to become your main website. The primary advantage of this approach is the convenience you’ll receive when it comes to publishing content. Download the WordPress client for free from www.wordpress.com .NVU Website Creator. Macromedia Dreamweaver is too expensive? Microsoft Front Page is too complicated? Then the NVU Website Creator is the program for you. This software program streamlines the website creation process through an interface that is easy to use, but powerful enough to make professional-looking web pages. Download the client for free from www.nvu.com .Backlink Builder. If you’re maintaining your own website, either as a review center for your affiliate program’s products, or as an affiliate mall for the same, or even as a blog which promotes the aforementioned digital items, you will need to build a thorough list of backlinks to increase your page rank. The higher your page rank is, the better chances it will have of appearing in the first few pages of search engine results. Don’t know where to start? Use the free tool available at www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php to discover all the places where you could leave some links to your website.Keyword Selector Tool. Keywords are the primary ingredients of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. You will use them for your meta tags, your h1 tags, your ALT tags, your page title, and your content. You will even use them for the articles you will submit to the many article directories in the World Wide Web. The proper use of keywords would result in the more efficient documentation of your website so that the search engine spiders will have an easier time finding your web pages for any relevant query. And since 80% of the traffic that you will be able to generate for your website would come from the search engines, keywords become the most essential aspects of your site building efforts. Need to find the right keywords? Go to www.nichebot.com and use their powerful tool to determine the profitability of the keywords related to the affiliate products you will be promoting.Statcounter. You will need to study your website’s statistics so that you’ll know what you’re doing wrong, as well as replicate what you’re doing correctly. For this purpose, simply copy and paste the code that will be provided by www.statcounter.com to get in-depth reports about the performance of your website.All of these tools would improve your performance as an affiliate. And the fact that they all come without charge just makes the deal even sweeter. Try them out. Chances are, you will realize that the best things in life can be free after all.

The one who wants to enter in this web world and desires for a long time survival, then he/she should be familiar with each and every terminology used in this field. If user considers all the important factors before choosing a hosting plan then only he/she will be able to have a successful future in this world .User should not choose any of the plan, rather he/she should opt the best and most suitable one and this can only be made possible by fetching more and more informations and also by studying properly all the requirements. New comers should start from the basics .They should learn the meaning of each and every term used and also in addition those factors that can affect his/her selection.

Web Host

Web host refers to a computer connected to the internet. Web host can also be termed as ‘web server’. The computer that is playing the role of the web server needs to be more powerful than normal PCs and the function of this web server is to serve up websites.

The website content of the user will remain will on this computer, so as the people who are surfing on the internet can get a way to access his/her website.

There can be three main categories in which the web host can be classified based on the economic factor and common features:

1. Free Hosts:

The users who are not professional but are making website only as a hobby then for them free hosting can be a good option. In free hosting space, bandwidth and other features provided are very limited. With free web hosting one can not only make his/her website successful but is also suitable for personal websites or for temporary usage. Generally free hosting enforces pop-up, text or banner ads. Reliability, best performance and customer support lacks in case of free hosting as well. When a user registers for a free host then the word free host gets added with the user’s domain name that gives an adverse effect in the eye of the visitors.

2. Shared Hosts:

The next type of the web hosting to be discussed is shared hosting. This hosting service is used by many of the web sites .This type of hosting service is Suitable for personal, small and medium businesses. This service can be used by paying $1 to $25 per month. The features provided by this service vary from very limited space/bandwidth to semi-dedicated servers. The users host their website by this type of hosting service and it has its own top level domain facility. No doubt that shared web hosting is quite better than free hosting but still it does not provide 100% satisfactory services. In case of shared hosting one server is shared by the number of websites so its performance and availability gets affected. More websites usually means less performance. If less number of websites are hosted by one server then it will be more expensive, but in this case there are more chances of reliability. There are many companies allowing customers to host multiple websites with different domains under a single account.

3. Dedicated Hosts:

The next type of hosting is dedicated hosting. This type of hosting is most reliable hosting. In this type of hosting a full server is dedicated to a single customer. Generally this type of hosting is used by large businesses, professionals and very active websites dealing with thousands of visitors daily. The customers having dedicated hosting can have their total control over the server as well as able to create as many websites as they like. Customers can run their own hosting company on a rented dedicated server. Payment module is mentioned according to specifications and services provided with the server, which varies from $100 up to about $800 dollars per month.

4. Collocated Hosts:

Now the other type of hosting service to be discussed is collocated hosting. This service is very much similar to dedicated hosting. The difference between collocated hosting and dedicated hosting is that in collocated hosting the customer owns the server hardware instead of renting it. In this service the server will be placed in provider’s data center. This service is more expensive than dedicated hosting.

5. Reseller Hosts:

In reseller hosting the providers offers web server storage to their customers, and resells the web server storage to them. Generally providers offer resellers a discount price.

6. Other Hosts:

Including the above type of hosts there are also many other hosts such as email hosts, media hosts, data hosts, etc but these hosts will not be discussed in this article.

Domain Name

Domain name is the name which shows the place where one’s website is located. The actual address of the website is a set of numbers. Each and every web server has its own unique address. Domain name indicates the real addresses of every websites. One can easily remember the domain name of any of the website. Remembering domain name is easier than recalling the IP addresses.

Space / Storage

Space is one of the services provided by the web host. It plays a very important role in the website development. It happens many times that the customer requires more space but the host fails to provide it, so customer should be very careful while choosing the web host. Storage is the amount of web server’s disk space available for customer’s website files, images and databases. Space can be according to the requirement; it can be as small as 5MB in some free hosts and as big as 300GB for some dedicated servers. Earlier prices of the space were very high but prices reduced significantly during the last few years. The hosting plans offering 3GB of space for less than $10 a month can be easily available.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth can be defined as the amount of data transferred from web server to clients’ internet browsers. When ever a person outlook a page the data is transmitted from the server to that person’ PC. If any one is having audio, video and images in his/her website then the bandwidth consumed is more in comparison of the website having only text contents. The bandwidth available in free hosting can be as low as 100MB per month where as in some dedicated servers the bandwidth available is as high as 2000GB a month. The customers who don’t want to pay more for bandwidth can easily find hosting plans offering 75GB of monthly data transfer for less than $10.

Server Type

Generally server means the operating system than runs the web server. Some common types are Windows, Linux and UNIX. Server type refers the server side scripting and database types. The difference between Windows server and Linux/UNIX is that Windows runs ASP and ASP.NET with Access or SQL Server databases where as Linux/UNIX servers usually runs CGI, PHP or JSP with MySQL or Oracle databases. The other difference is that Windows servers are more expensive than Linux/UNIX servers.

Databases

As server type is discussed earlier also, we are able to know that there are different types of databases available. The mostly used is MySQL as it is open source GPL (free) software and can serve a lot of online applications’ requirements such as forums, content management, mailing lists, etc. MySQL, rather its features are limited. MySQL is sufficient for small concern but it is not powerful for the complicated large business sites. Large business requires more powerful databases such as Oracle or SQL Server.

.

Server Side Scripting

Usually the new comers prefer to use PHP as server side scripting. The reason behind this is that there are hundreds of open source (GPL) PHP scripts that are able to fulfill the webmaster’s requirements. However PHP also has some limitations in features required by advanced websites same as in the case of MySQL, due to this limitation some professional web developers prefer to use ASP.NET or JSP. Some other developers still prefer to use Cold Fusion, CGI, ASP or PERL.

Email

Now the next very important aspect to be talked about is Email. At present no one can move further in this computer world with having his/her Email account. The one who is planning to do any kind of activity through computer such as to run a business or to provide any kind of service, then the first thing he/she need to do is to open an Email account. There are many hosting plans that include the feature of having some email accounts with customer’s domain. The availability of number and size of email accounts totally depends on the hosting plan one opted. Generally this feature is not included in free hosting. Small plans provide only about 10 accounts where as big plans do not have the limited number. Usually those email accounts are web based and accessible through POP3 clients as well.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

The other service is FTP. File Transfer Protocol is a usual way of transferring files across the Internet. Most of the webmasters used to upload and download their websites contents through FTP. The process of uploading or downloading is performed by using FTP client software. Webmasters require FTP username and password so as to access their web server. There are any hosts who use to provide more than one FTP account to their customers as per their requirement. Rather FTP is unspecified; it is not advisable as per the security reasons.

Control Panel

Control panel is the service available by many of the web hosting companies to their customers. It is a web based application that helps in managing websites. Some important functions performed by the control panel are that it used to manage email accounts, providing statistics, managing FTP accounts, managing domains and sub-domains and managing databases. The control panel application that is mostly used by the user is cPanel. There are many companies who use to develop their own control panel application.

Uptime

Now after having all the services, the thing of concern which remains is how the user keeps his/her website uptime most of the time. If anyone is having a website with excellent features but it remains down most of the time it will be of no use, as when ever the visitors visit his/her website and found it down then later on they will think twice before visiting it. In result he/she will suffer the loss of visitors. Uptime is very important feature of web hosts and that is usually measured in percentage. If a server remains down near about 30 minutes a day will have an uptime percentage of about 99.98%, which is acceptable for most small to medium business websites. If any of the business website is not having at least this percentage of uptime then that website is not suitable for a business website. Mission critical sites cannot tolerate frequent outages, thus they may use web monitoring services to notify web administrators immediately when an outage happens.

Price

Finally the factor left is price. In this option also there is a great variability found like for example customer is having option to choose between the prices ranging from 0 to $1000 per month. For most personal, small and medium websites the total amount of cost involved is just $15 per month. Thus its not at all advisable for business website owners to select very cheap plans let say less than $5 because this price can lead to huge cost indirectly afterwards.