SEO known as search engine optimization is one of the well known marketing tools that enable the website to get listed at major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn. SEO involves link building, link exchange, and other methods which could lead to a higher rank at major search engines.
The process of increasing link popularity of a page by submitting your site on other domains is known as Link Building. When looking to increase the page rank of a website, using SEO link building services is one of the best options available. The amount of knowledge going into search engine optimization is quite vast and fast, and very few individuals can keep up with the constant changes. Using a link building service can help in getting all the latest advances in SEO, and also a higher page rank and more site traffic.

Link building ameliorates the popularity of your website in search engines. It means number of sites pointing towards your site. Search engines not only look at the numbers of sites pointing but also the quality of the sites. It is one of the most important factors for a website to be successful in the online world.

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You might be an advertising company or a website owner; you must be looking to get best online presence over the Internet if you wish to do business over Internet. And If you have good online presence over the Internet then there are huge chances to get a successful online business because majority of customers and even you and me login to Internet to perform a sell or a purchase.

And when it comes to online presence then there are thousand of methods to make your presence over the Internet. Some of these are SEO, Pay Per Click, Social Media Optimization, Text Advertising, Banner Advertising, Affiliates etc.

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I have been to every major launch of Windows since Windows 3.1, and I must say I was looking forward to this the latest incarnation of Windows, Windows 7. To be fair I have had a beta copy for a few months now, and I like it, Windows 7 is less fussy I can upgrade my old PC running Windows XP even though I have to do a clean install. Listing to my journalist colleges yesterday the biggest drawback they could come up with was the fact that you can’t upgrade directly from Windows XP, which is a huge contrast to the list of Vista failings presented by industry hacks at launch of Vista.

Windows 7 feels slick and while many computer users stayed with Windows XP, I don’t see any obstacles to then finally making the move just as long as they are prepared to upgrade their applications as well.

.I would recommend Windows 7 Ultimate to website developers as there are several useful new features like automatic windows placement allowing you to easily compare to windows. You could have source code and preview windows side by side.  Furthermore, BitLocker and Bitlocker to go will make sure your website source files cannot fall into the wrong hands, even if you lose your laptop on a train or have it stolen as I did.

.When Windows Vista replaced XP, I did not recommend an upgrade, rather I recommend to my readers that they wait and when they upgraded to a new PC/Laptop it would come with Vista.

.This time around I would recommend an upgrade, this is because you can speed up your old computer, it improves portable battery life and feels easier to use without all thoughts annoying popup messages. In conclusion, Windows 7 feels familiar enough not to require a learning curve, it looks and feels fresh with some fresh ideas that work well this time around, I won’t be joining the Windows bashing team.

Finally, Microsoft has listened and produced the goods.

The majority of social media analysts admit that the most popular social medias for business are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Yes, they are the biggest and the best. However MySpace should also not be forgotten. What can you do in MySpace if you are not music or movie producer (let’s admit music promotion is one of MySpace’s strongest features)? From the first impression of colorful and full of useless stuff personal profiles – nothing. Well, that is not really correct attitude to second largest social network in the World. People are allowed to create their space as colorful as they want, but business has some other resources to make their MySpace profile useful for branding.
In the first place let’s check the two biggest competitor Facebook and MySpace statistics. September social network usage stats shows us some nice numbers.

As we can see People stay longer in MySpace than Facebook in US. It is really strange that 45 – 54 years old visitors make 19% of all MySpace visitors. Teens are main audience while in Facebook people up to 17 years old are only third group of users. From business perspective the target audience of various services and sales companies is 18-65 years old, because these people are financially independent and can easily buy, hire, pay for services etc.. That’s 77% of Facebook’s users and 64% of MySpace users. Is it enough audience for your business? If yes, you can definitely invest more or less time to presence in both giants.

Facebook has business page feature and that makes this social network much more attractive for branding, however MySpace can be used for branding as well. Let’s see what can be done in MySpace in order to present your business spending up to 10 minutes a day in this social network.

In the 1st place you should open a new account naming it like your company or product, not personally. This account will be like your business profile. I am not a big fan of profile design generators, but you can definitely try doing some with the colors of your business brand. I would recommend to stick to MySpace Themes, which are customizable, because if you generate a code, you will always have to deal with HTML in case you’ll need to edit some fields in your profile.

2nd step is information about your business. MySpace provides lots of fields with personal interests which can be used to describe your business, provide short list of services with the hyperlinks to your company website, contacts. Please be aware, that all external links in MySpace are redirected using their internal URL shortener which opens new page and only then you can click the link.

3rd step is getting some friends. Try using people search and the keywords of your business. When you will have few friends, you will see suggested contacts and will be able to add them to friends. It is recommended to add 10-20 contacts as friends daily. Not all of them will approve you, so you will collect around 100 friends per month.

4th step is adding some extra information about your business to your profile. Of course, you can always   add the craziest moments from your company Christmas party, but will it help to promote your business? If you have your website or corporate blog, you can always add the RSS feed. MySpace has only 3 RSS Feed applications News Merger, RSS Reader and SpringWidgets RSS Reader. Choose one of them and add your blog RSS feed to your profile. Also you can add some news from your business using some trustworthy sources, magazines or simply Google News service.

If your company already uses Twitter, you can easily synchronize it with MySpace. Every Twitter update will go to your MySpace account and vice versa. If you use FriendFeed, there is also a nice application for displaying your FriendFeed updates. In general all these widgets works on the base of RSS feed technology, so if you participate in some social network and your activity can be subscribes via RSS, you can add it to your MySpace profile easily.

5th step is setting your MySpace Blog. It can be customized to your brand colors. If you write a press release, you can easily publish it in your blog. Even if you do not write anything, you still can share some interesting articles, which uses sharing buttons as AddThis, ShareThis etc. The blog activity is shown in your Friends’ activity feeds and may create an illusion, that you are very active in your MySpace profile.

Once everything is set, it takes up to 10 minutes per day to post some links to a blog, request and approve new Friends, post some picture of your product or website screenshot. It is also recommended to allow sending statuses to one of your emails you can check 1 time a day, so you will be able to see all the new requests and friends coming and will be able to react quickly.

There are some more useful parts of MySpace which can also be used for your business. For example, MySpace provides email service. Every person who is active in various social medias needs to register in various forums, social networks, in order to comment in any blog one needs to provide the email. I doubt you want using your main email for such semi-spam messages, therefore MySpace email is perfect for that as it is secondary one.

MySpace has a huge Forum, where you can search for your area and sometimes write few posts. Do not forget to set a signature with the link to your website.

If you sell something, you can give your products or services a try in MySpace Classifieds section where people sell and exchange goods and services.

Of course if you have some video ads of your products and services, you should be adding them to MySpace Video section.

The MySpace application gallery has started not so long ago, therefore there is still a lack of come really useful applications, such as Digg or Delicious Favorites updates or post to Tumblr and vice versa feature. Hopefully there will be more useful solutions for business in MySpace as a result of competition with Facebook. Now all analysts admit that MySpace looses the competition, however some services are much more popular in MySpace than Facebook. While waiting for such improvements in second biggest social network in the world, every business should take a warm place in MySpace and remain there with some basic branding activity.

About the author: Marius Kuitniauskas is a social media manager in PokerNews group of poker information websites in more than 25 languages. Also he works as community manager for poker blog community my.pokernews.com. Marius has got expertise in the fields of SEO, gambling related internet marketing, social media and blogging. He has education in journalism and works in online media market for more than 10 years.

Top web hosting service Host1Plus is looking for:
Digital marketing manager (part-time job)

Want to become part of Host1Plus top web hosting service and get the opportunity to show and improve your skills?
Have experience in digital marketing and really know how to drive an attract people to any product?
Have you got innovative solutions and ideas how to get them working?
Are you interested in website creation, web hosting trends, online media, etc?

Do you know?

How to attract people from Community forum websites?
How to write useful review to blogs?
Which website is the best for advertisement for Host1Plus?
How to involve people in social networks?
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Therefore you don’t have to worry if you don’t know some of mentioned criteria.
If you feel confident and you are ready to take this opportunity, then this job is just for you!

Every person plays key role in our company. This job will let you to communicate with good known persons worldwide, expand yourself to the limits, and become a real team player.

Key skills overview

Mother tongue languages: Spanish, German, Dutch;
Quality forum review posting;
Blog comment tracking and posting;
Local Directory Maintenance;
Website content writing;
Online ad placement;
Negotiating deals with web masters;
Promoting Host1Plus affiliate program;
Article posting and maintenance;
Social media activity;

If you don’t have any of these key skills…Don’t worry you still can apply for any position you feel you will be good in. Therefore your CV will be carefully reviewed and all information sent to us is strictly confident.

For more information contact Andrius via e-mail jobs@host1plus.com, or phone 0 808 101 2277 (UK)

Make Money advertising Amazon Products

Want to add something to your web page that stands out, provides rich content and an interactive experience to people visiting your web page, costs nothing and has the potential to make you a little money at the same time?

Amazon started out as an on-line book store which also sells CDs, DVDs and Videos but these days they sell anything and everything. Amazons’ well established affiliate scheme will not make you rich but it will provide you with a small revenue stream.

To join you need to have a website and fill out a short form to become an Affiliate member. (It may take day or two to have your membership confirmed).

You make money from referral fees generated when products actually purchased as a result of a link from your site.

In this guide we show you one method of adding these links using Amazon Widgets. Fees are paid at the rate of 5% -15% of the selling price for each product purchased.

Links to specific products can earn the highest rate of 15% whilst general links to Amazon earn the lower rate of 5%.

Amazon will keep you informed of how you are doing via your online account or you can opt for a weekly email. Payments are made quarterly providing you have earned more than the minimum (in the UK it is £10).

Note: in the UK book vouchers are also available instead of a cheque payment.

Our tip for making money is to ensure your referrals are relevant to your site and your users interests. It is possible for you to make decent money if the people you refer buy the more expensive items such has digital cameras or computers etc.  Amazon have many attractive deals that can offer your visitors genuine bargains.

Step 1

You can click this and all the following images to enlarge them

First you need to point your browser towards the Amazon affiliate website. To do this type https://affiliate-program.amazon.com into your browser as shown above. Click the Join Now for Free button.

Step 2

You will now need to apply to become an amazon associate by filling in the Your Contact Information form as shown above.

Step 3

You are now given a unique ID and the first page of the Associates Central site is displayed. You need to tell Amazon how to pay you. To do this click the Specify Payment Method button.

Step 4

The Payment method page is now displayed. Click one of the three radio buttons to select a payment method and then click the Continue button to move on.

Step 5

You are now taken to the Associates Central Home page. Here you can find out what’s new and what offers are available. To add an Amazon element to your site click the Get Started Now button.

Step 6

The Associates program is now explained. Once you have read this page all you need to do is click the Continue button.

Step 7

Amazon will now explain the different ways that you can add links to your site. You can add Banners, a whole store, s single Widget or multiple Widgets. In this example we will add a widget. Click the Continue button.

Step 8

The Build Links and Banners page is now displayed explaining the different types of link available. At this stage just click the Continue button.

Step 9

The Create an aStore page is now displayed, as we are not creating an aStore in this guide just click the Continue button again. The Create Widget page is now displayed. In this example we will add a Deals widget. To do this click the Learn More link shown above.

Step 10

Once the Deals Widget page is displayed you need to select a format. In this case we select a side bar.  To add Lightning Deal and Our best Deal click the check boxes to place a tick in them. Next select the size of widget to be displayed on your page and finally click the Add to my web page button.

Step 11

If your web site is hosted by any of the companies in the links list above, then click that link and you will be taken to a step by step tutorial for that host.

Step 12

If for example you wish to add a widget to a WordPress blog. First open another browser window and logon to your blog and then click the Write tab.

Step 13

When the Write Post page is displayed click the /code tag.

Step 14

Now switch back to Amazon Central. If you are going to add the code directly to your site click the Copy button.

Step 15

A message may now be displayed asking you if you want the web page to access your clipboard. As you launched the action just click the Allow access button.

Step 16

Now switch back to your Wordpress blog and click inside the text box to place the text cursor inside. Now Paste the code by pressing the Ctrl key and the V  key together on your keyboard. When you’re done click the Publish button.

Step 17

To view your Blog click the View blog link or type your blog address into your browser. You will see an Amazon Widget has been added to your blog.

RSS, CSS, SEO and Web 2.0… Confused? Perhaps you have already heard of these terms but you may still be wondering what they have to do with you. The quick answer to that question – as Steve Raubenstine President and CEO of  of NetObjects Inc tells John Taylor – is “quite a lot…”

Our increasingly competitive world with progressively more sophisticated means of communication has led to a condition amongst the general population of heightened expectations and shorter attention spans. This sharpened sense of anticipation at being entertained at every moment means that those brands or companies that fail to make an impact will lose customers. Fast.

In the world of web design, this means that just having a website is not enough. Now, it is an integral element of your communications that must continually compete with the vast array of other information on the Internet in an engaging, interactive or entertaining way. The WWW is saturated with millions of blogs, networking facilities and online shops that constantly vie for browser attention, consumer traffic and consistently high unique visitor figures.

For the small business, this level of competition can be daunting. With limited access to the big budgets needed to pay for online marketing campaigns and expensive web design consultancies, it can be difficult to create ‘traffic’, let alone hang on to visitors once they are on your site. There are, however, several ways to ensure that your online presence is worthwhile. I recently had a chance to talk to Steve Raubenstine Vice President of NetObjectsand ask him for his to give us his advice on building a small business website.

Looking The Part

For those businesses creating their own website, it is essential to ensure your website looks the part. That means doing the basics well, for example ensuring you have a professional looking template design with simple and effective site navigation. Your homepage needs to look appealing and contain the key information whilst not looking cluttered. Once on the site, guests need to be able to navigate easily and find the information they need quickly. If not, they’ll leave in an instant.

Think of your homepage as a shop window, designed with the intention of inviting customers through the front door. Make sure you keep the information as up to date as possible to avoid user frustration; present the information in a lucid and concise way with pictures, pricing or the ‘benefits’ clearly identified. This will help your visitors to find the information they need quickly, which in turn encourages a response, increases user ‘delight’ and improves the probability of a return visit.

A professional looking website is a sure way of projecting a genuine and trustworthy image, but what really counts is how you market your site to acquire and retain customers.

Marketing

Search Engine Optimisation is the term used to describe your site’s visibility on search engines such as Google. Whilst you can pay to have your site optimised there are several methods to do this yourself. Firstly, ensure your site is developed using clean, industry accepted code (Semantic XHTML); include lots of ‘key words’ in your script as this is what the search spiders are looking for when someone types an enquiry into the search engine; finally, try to link with lots of complementary partner sites to increase the chances of being seen.

Optimising your web site in this way should help to increase your traffic and unique visitor figures. At this point, if you’ve addressed some of the issues I referred to in ‘Looking the Part,’ you are on your way to turning that visitor into a customer. At that stage, you need to think about ways to retain those customers and encourage them to return. Email marketing is a way of telling your customers about new products, the latest offers and site updates. For this you will need their email address and authorisation as well as a database linked to your website to collect the information.

The next steps

There are many packages out there that can help make web design simple but prices and quality vary dramatically. Here are a few tips on the tools to look out for when looking to purchase a web design package:

WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) – This helps to simplify the process of web design and means you don’t have to learn the languages of web design (HTML, CSS, Java, Flash, etc.). What appears in your site editor is what will appear online.

Content management – Select a package that allows for simple content management. This will enable you to update your website so that users will always get the latest information.

Clean code (Semantic XHTML) – This is the industry recognised standard web code – cleaner code is more accessible and search engine friendly.

Capability levels – Buy a package that will ‘grow’ and offer advanced functionality as your skills increase. Beginners will want a WYSIWYG, drag and drop, wizard-driven environment whilst more advanced users may look for a built in coding environment and advanced tools.

Database integration – Your site will need to integrate with databases as you start to collect visitor data and customer contact details. This will also assist with your ongoing email marketing and RSS feeds. Look for one that offers data source XML binding.

E-commerce and site traffic tools – A strong online presence provides access to a worldwide market place for direct trading. If you’re looking to sell, you’ll need a package that can help with e-commerce and site traffic.

Golbal Presence – Companies like Host1plus can give your company a global presence by allowing you to choose where in the world the hosting of your site will be bringing you your site closer to your target market.

Additional components – A component framework suite can be used for easily adding photo galleries, Flash video content, forums, guest books and site maps, allowing users to interact with a site to increase their interest and improve ‘stickiness’ (making visitors want to return).

NetObjects Fusion 11 is a leading and award-winning website design application for both novice and experienced designers and developers. It has earned critical praise and worldwide recognition as one of the fastest, easiest ways to build, manage and update websites.

For further information about NetObjects and to try their web development software, visit www.NetObjects.com.

For most web-savvy users, RSS subscriptions are self-evident, like email or instant messaging. And for some, catching up with latest news and entertainment via RSS readers has become part of the daily routine. As effectiveness and time management are the bywords of the productive user, the question arises: how to use RSS effectively? In this article, I’ll try to give a simple and concise overview of what you can do to answer the question.

First of all, you need to sit back for a while and think what you’re really interested in and can spare time to read about. A list of topics or categories, so to say. This is harder than it sounds. After all, you are a creature of the internet, with horizons broader than that of an average bear. However, you can’t afford to read about everything from Astronomy to Zen. Unless you make a living reading RSS feeds, in which case, where can I apply? For the rest of us, priorities are very important.

Once you have decided on what you want to spend time reading about, you need to pick a reader. There are two main options: desktop and web. This Lifehacker article discusses the pros and cons of each, but what it’s really down to is personal preference and habit. If you’re an avid Google fan and your computer is perpetually online, you’ll probably pick Google Reader. If you’re not romantically involved with any big name and enjoy offline capabilities in an application, you might decide to go with any one of the several desktop readers (e.g. NewsGator suite or GreatNews). The possibilities are endless, really, and a well-configured, customized reader will greatly increase effectiveness. Don’t be afraid to experiment.

Now, with the topics and reader chosen, it’s time to pick the feeds. This is a trial-and-error moment for most people. What you shouldn’t hesitate to do is to unsubscribe from feeds: inactive feeds, overly-active feeds, feeds of blogs and websites you don’t reallyenjoy, etc. Popular, large sites and blogs usually offer feeds for separate tags or topics, or Top Ten / Most Popular / Weekly / Biweekly / Monthly feeds, which, frankly, are a blessing. 100+ new articles a day from one feed alone is an intimidating sight.

With topics, reader, and feeds in place, you can increase effectiveness even more. One of the ways is even greater emphasis on priorities. Some readers, like Mac-only NetNewsWire lets you move folders up or down, depending on how important their content is. Another very helpful tip is to learn the keyboard shortcuts for your reader. Almost every major reader has them. That includes, but is not limited to: Google Reader, NetNewsWire, and FeedDemon.

Finally, don’t try to catch up. If you’ve come home after a week-long camping trip, just think about the fact that you’ve spent the last week in a far better manner than sitting in front of a screen reading your RSS feeds. If you’ve missed a few wonderful posts by accident, well, that’s just life.

For more great tips, you can read web worker daily article.

Blogging, blogging, blogging. Nowadays, it seems like everybody blogs. It should be simple then, shouldn’t it? Well, somehow most blogs die after a post or two…

What’s the matter? Well, it could be that people focus on their blog rather than on the blogging!

Most wannabe bloggers start by looking for a platform. They check out dozens of them. Once they settle on a particular platform, the tuning starts. Trying tons of shiny themes, installing billions of plugins and widgets… After a while, they finally write the legendary “Hello World” post. Sometimes, a second post gets published as well.

Isn’t this Blogging? No!

Blogging is about writing, not about outlook. The value of a blog is in its content. Visitors rarely come to look at a nice theme, seen in thousands of other blogs. However, they will stick to good content as bees to honey.

A good blog should be started way before a Blogger account is created. Since its heart is content, the first job should be to make Content. Just imagine that the blog already exists. Now, try to write few posts. By “post” I mean a real, long post, not some ‘Hello World’ quickie. That would let you feel the real blogging spirit.

Writing-before-launching helps to prevent many common problems in the field. First of all, it would let you make sure that you can write and enjoy it. Furthermore, you can test yourself if you have anything to say on a chosen topic. There’s nothing worse than running out of ideas after a few articles. Also, it will help you to post regularly from the start.

So, now you have a blog with a few nice posts and a dozen (or even more if you’re lucky) readers. What’s the next step? More good posts, some backlinks. It is more important what the next step should NOT be. One of the worst things that can happen to a blogger is the “Shiny-Thing” syndrome. Some people get into theming and installing widgets so much, that they literally don’t have time for actual blogging.

The best way to stay away from upgrading your blog to chaos is to have an unupgradeable blog! All those widgets and themes look so compelling, don’t they? But, hey, if it’s impossible to install them, you won’t even try. All while having much more time for actual blogging.

That’s why I love ultra simple weblog platforms like Posterous and Tubmlr. They simply won’t allow you to get distracted by shinyware. On the other hand, simple blogging tools give you all features that you’d ever really need – attaching media, accepting comments, gathering statistics and, well, writing.

Sometimes you may feel a little bit limited with such a small feature set. But in virtually all cases you won’t need anything else. If known companies and brands can use those platforms, so can you.

Get writing and enjoy real blogging!

[Image credit: Kristina B]

Social media gurus keep speaking about corporate blogs all the time — CEOs should have one or at least assign the task of running a blog to their subordinates. Great! But what should a CEO write about and how should they do it? These questions are not discussed widely. However, I have my own opinion about the corporate blogs I would like to share it with you.

First of all one should not concentrate one the text alone. Video converts much better than any text! A single picture can tell more than 15 tutorial pages. Writing articles also takes a lot of time. In many cases CEOs don’t even have time to write a paragraph, not to mention doing research and collecting data for a full article. It’s quite suspicious if a CEO can write a 2 pages post about their company, views, strategy, services, products, plans for the future; also answer readers’ questions, criticize the competitors, curse the government for the imperfect laws, analyze the industry, etc. Most likely such person is not a very good CEO and should probably seek a different career path.

CEO’s blog should be short, irregular, interesting, live and organic. How is this possible? It’s easy if you use a mini-blogging platform and a sharing bookmarklet – a special link in your browser’s bookmarks section, which can get the information from the page you are viewing.

A mini-blogging platform is almost the same as a blog, only it makes sharing the media much easier. Of course no one restricts you from writing a 5 pages-long article, but the name mini-blog implies that you should keep it simple and concise. In many cases mini-blogging is considered to be the same as micro-blogging (e.g. twitter). However, micro-blogging has a lot more limits. Text and comment length is limited, the links must be as short as possible, therefore a URL shortener is necessary. Other media cannot be embedded into the text. In other words, micro-blogging is a collection of different services and in most cases it is based on conversation. Mini-blog, however, is more of a discussion-based means of communication, where all kinds of media can be embedded easily. Whereas in regular blogs, one will usually need some HTML knowledge just to embed the video.

Company’s CEO should choose an easy to understand and manage tool with basic features, which would not take a lot of valuable CEO’s time. It takes some time to learn how to use a platform such as WordPress; there are way too many tools for twitter; while Tumblr seems to be the best option. It only takes a couple clicks to post some quotes from various websites and comment them or to post a video from YouTube. You can also easily integrate twitter stream.

There are many more nice and useful features on Tumblr to be mentioned. For example, Facebook application, iPhone app, mobile publishing via text message or email, desktop widget for Mac users. Voice post is also an incredible feature < you can call to an international phone number and leave a voice message. Tumblr also has a third party application directory full of useful tools.

Posterous and Publr are some of the known Tumblr competitors, but they do not have that many users probably due to the lack of features. One other thing to know about Tumblr is that they care about the content quality, so it is not advisable to try and sell your products or services on Tumblr blog, as you might get banned. Unless of course your content is in the language other than English.

The most important feature in mini-blogging platforms is the internal subscription to other users’ blogs (but you can also use RSS). Building the network of followers is very important, because they will be the ones to spread your information to their networks. Re-posting someone else’s posts is as easy as it is in Twitter, except you have many more possibilities.

CEO blogs should use services like Tumblr to save time while remaining interactive and innovative. There are other benefits of choosing Tumblr too.

Here are some of the companies that already chose Tumblr:

* Big Champagne Media Measurement
* Bickbot
* Wave Tribe