F.Y.I. For Your Information
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How Search Engines Work
When you want to find something on the Internet you will do a search on one of the major search engines, such as Yahoo, or Google. All search engine has there own way of conducting the search, basically looking for keywords or phrases imbedded in your site. Make sure you use words in your title, metatags, and text that your site visitors are likely to think of in a search for you. is a search engine designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Information may consist of web pages, images and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in newsgroups, databases, or open directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input.If you want to see what works, select a few appropriate keywords and do a search. See who comes up on the first page and see how they are using those keywords in their site.
Submit to Search Engines
Alot people think that search engines spyer all the Internet and if you're out there they will find you. Wrong! If you go to a search engine homepage you will find a link for submitting URL's for inclusion in their searches. That's the first step. Submit your website to any and all you are aware of. The biggest search engine, Yahoo accounts for over half of all web searches. Follow their guidelines carefully as they are notoriously difficult to get accepted to, but it's well worth it if you can pull it off. There are also "pay for placement" services like FindWhat.com where you can bid on the keywords that best describe your site, and the #1 position goes to the highest bidder. They're worth checking into because they can send you considerable amounts of traffic for as little as a penny per click. The best part is you can get traffic to your site fast, it only takes about 10 minutes to open an account. For more on these types of services.
Spread Your Web Site
Search engines account for much of your new traffic, make sure you take advantage of all other avenues. Other websites with similar content and exchange links with them. You can place your web address on every printed piece you produce. Make sure it's on your business cards, your letterhead and anywhere else you can get it. If you have unique site content, let your local newspaper know and you'll probably get a free article. The Internet is a big interest area right now.
What is an Affiliate Program?
An affiliate program is any type of revenue sharing program where a web site receives a portion of income for generating leads, traffic, or sales through a graphic or text link to a merchant web site. They specify how much affiliates will be paid and under what payment structure, how sales will be tracked, how long referrals from their site will be counted between the time the customer visits the site and actually purchases (cookies), minimum pay-out amounts, and when checks will be sent.
Who Can Be an Affiliate?
Merchants can sign up with Affiliate Networks to manage the program for purchase software to track sales.
Any business that sells products or services online can offer an affiliate program as a method of enticing and compensating advertisers to promote their product.
Affiliate Marketing?
Bis a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques like publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Meta Tags
While it is true that in the past meta tags were sorely abused by greedy webmasters and thus discounted by major search engines, you’ll find that meta tags, the bits of text in the header tags invisible to viewers, are still important in smaller search engines and gaining relevancy again in search engines like Google, and the comeback kid, Yahoo. Newcomers and those who have ignored Meta tags for so long they forgot the best methods for using them, here are some essentials on utilizing meta tags.
Meta Descriptions
The Meta description, are not seen on the actual web page, but is seen as the link description in search engine results pages. The description is vital for convincing viewers to click on the link. Think of it is your one-chance sales pitch. Make sure the keywords appear at the beginning.
Meta Keywords
Indexable character cap for engines on the keyword tag so pick your best words. Do not keyword stuff! Your site could be banned from search engines for filling your Meta keyword tag with senseless repetition of keywords or the inclusion of irrelevant words. The object of the keyword tag is to summarize what is on the page with a list of keywords.
Robots
A robots tag look like this: [meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”]. The robots tag speaks specifically to search engine spiders to tell it whether or not to index a page. If you have web pages that you don’t want to be spidered, then you need to use a “no follow” tag in your Meta robots tag.
Meta Name Tags
Meta name tags; “author” “copyright” “rating” and “distribution” tags.
Title Tags
Title tags are not Meta tags, they are included with Meta tags in the HTML head tags. Title tags are important for search engine optimization. Title tag on a web page is displayed as the link on search engine results pages.
What is DMOZ?
Dmoz.org is a volunteer directory that lists submitted internet web sites by category. The categories has a volunteer editor that accepts sites for their respective category. Open Directory Projec.,
DMOZ
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.
Submitting to DMOZ
- Sites Using ODP Data - Category listing of all sites, search engines, portals, etc. using the ODP RDF dump.
- Linking to the ODP - Show your support of the ODP by linking to us from your site.
- Downloading ODP Data - Get the Definitive Directory of the Web for your site. It's free and available to everyone.
- Free Use License - License governing use of ODP data.
- Social Contract - Our commitment and promise to all net-citizens to keep the ODP a free and open resource.
- Awards - Our site has won a number of awards.
- General FAQ - Want more info? Check out some general FAQs about us in our Help area.
Shared IP Address
Web server all over are assigned an IP address. IP address might look something like this: 248.57.240.83. The server’s IP address generally stays the same all the time. All websites on the internet are hosted on shared IP addresses, which means that one server with one IP address holds multiple domain names.
It used to be that every domain name had a different IP address, but with the rapid increase of domains needed and the finite number of IP addresses they began to share IPs. Servers are able to determine by the domain entered in a user’s browser which domain is being requested, even though it may send a request for an IP with hundreds of domains.
Dedicated IP Address
Dedicated IP address is set aside specifically for one domain, like in the old days. If someone types in the numeric form of the IP address the same domain will always appear in the browser. Dedicated IP addresses are no longer the norm and it usually costs more to get one.
Who Needs a Dedicated IP Address?
Dedicated IP addresses are used for large web sites or secure e-commerce web sites.
Benefits of a Dedicated IP Address
Shared IP is usually easier and cheaper, there are a few advantages to having a dedicated IP address. A dedicated IP is needed for three specific reasons:
Using Private SSL Certificate. Only if you need to have your own SSL certificate. SSL certificates are needed for accepting credit cards online. Web sites that are hosted that offer SSL usually offer a shared SSL certificate where users can share the web host’s SSL. You are using your web host’s SSL you don’t need a dedicated IP.
Anonymous FTP.
Is a method of sharing files on the Internet. Anonymous FTP means a computer will allow anyone using the FTP software access a special directory for files on its disk drive. The service is called Anonymous FTP because the user name used to sign in is "anonymous." To enable anonymous FTP certain web hosts require dedicated IP for the anonymous FTP function to work properly. Your web host if this is an issue for you.
Setting up your own Domain Name Server.
Since all web hosts provide you with their DNS servers, you don't need to have your own, but if you choose to have your own name server you will need to have a dedicated IP address to do so.
Search Engines Ban Shared IP Users
Recent rumors suggested that search engines have blocked spam activity, by blocking ip addresses. Since shared IP address users are bundled together on the same IP address with many others, innocent sites would be banned from search engines if this were the case. The rumor, however, is false. Alot web hosting services use an IP sharing environment. Using modern name-based technology a search engine is able to ban anything on a domain name instead of an entire IP neighborhood. So it continues to be search engine safe to host a site on a shared IP environment. To sum up- serious webmasters who would like total control over their server and space, and e-commerce web sites who need their own SSL certificates are the best candidates for dedicated IP addresses. The rest of us can just happily coexist on the cheaper shared IP’s