Latest Articles by zenite

Free Web Content

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

You are starting a new website, have designed and developed the layout and now waiting to add in new content. You need fresh content, good quality content. Now comes the question: where can I get quality content fast

The most basic way to get content is by writing them yourself. This takes time and skills, to write effective articles and you might want to learn copywriting. This is time consuming and the end result might not be good. What next? Well, you can always use other people's content

Articles Directory
Start by searching for 'articles directory' in Google and find a website with articles catering to your niche.
Use whichever article/s listed there for free on your own website.
You must not remove the Article Resource section though. This part states the original website and author of this article,
which is 1 drawback to this method as you are losing traffic to this author website.

Public Domain
Another method is to search for public domain works. Public domain
means work that has no copyright (expired or the authors release it into the public domain). That means you can use
them freely for your website, with no need to state the source of origin.

Such free content is harder to find though. One good place to get public domain works is

RSS Feed
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is basically a snippet of content from the host website that can be feeded to your own website. What does that mean? Any RSS Feed you place on your site will have content from another website appearing
in your own for free! Again, this links back to the host website. However, RSS Feed have fresh content and is
automated (for you at least), so you just have to place a piece of code provided by the host and viola!
Fresh and free content. Be sure to check that the content is not feed to you through JavaScript
(remember #6 of Top 10 Mistakes People Make?).

Contact the Author
Contact the author and inform him that he writes good articles and you want to place them on your own site.
Remember to offer something in exchange, like another article of yours or a free link to his website.

Product Information
If you already have an affiliate or are selling products for someone else, you can use the product information for these products provided by the manufacturers or affiliates. This is usually allowed since you are earning money for them too, but do clarify with them to save yourself on future trouble.

Copyright Issues
You should never copy content from other people without their permission if you are not following any of the
above methods I told you of. Not even if you state the source! This applies to textual and graphical content.
Even if the website does not have a copyright statement does not mean their work is not copyrighted.
They are not required to do so anymore as any work released is copyrighted automatically.

Drawback to using Unoriginal Content
If you want to rank your website high on Search Engine results page (SERP), you should use original content. Either write it yourself or pay someone to do it. Duplicated content can get your website into the supplemental index, which is not a good thing.

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Alvin Ng is a webmaster experienced in Internet marketing, making money online and monetizing websites. He shares his techniques to work from home at his website: Make Money Online.

Read original article: Free Web Content

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Understanding Web Hosting Package

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Before you set out to find a web host, you must know what you are dealing with in the future, and what are your requirements. I will now tell you some of the basic features you should have in the web packages.
There are many more features, depending on the package, but here are the core ones.

Shared or Dedicated Hosting
Go for shared hosting. It is slower but cheaper. You will need to learn how to manage a dedicated hosting account, not recommended for beginners.

Uptime
uptime per month is minimum. Nothing less.

Disk Space
Assuming each webpage, including images, are at around 20KB in size, you will need 200MB at least. If you are paying for
a web host, go for at least 1GB, depending on your budget.

Bandwidth
This determines how much data transfer is allowed for your site. 15GB/month should be enough for a small website.
Be careful of the unmetered/unlimited bandwidth. Its not 'unlimited', email the support team of the web host to ask them
what is the actual bandwidth.

Price/month
Small websites should look for the range of USD$2 to 8. These are usually good enough.

Discount Coupons
A code that when entered, gives you discounts, freebies etc. Usually found somewhere in the host website, in web hosting forums, or just do a search in Google.

Add-on domain
Host more than 1 domain (or website) in 1 account with no extra charge! You need to pay for the additional domain name too.

Park domain
These are for parking domain names not in use.

Privacy Whois
Not really important, protects your identity from others when they do a search (domain whois) on the domain name.

Email Accounts
Get your own email@mydomain.com email account. Get at least 4 of these, the more the better of course.
This is very important as some webmasters/web directories requires you to contact them with your own website email account.

mySQL Database
Required if you are installing some sort of application on your web site, such as WordPress, osCommerce, etc.
Around 4-10 of these will be good enough.

Web Stats
A must have if you want to monitor your website traffic, where your visitors come from, and which page they went to.
Alternatively, you can use a free tracker, like Google Analytics.

Fantastico
A script that installs applications on your website with a click of the button. You can install a shopping
cart easily with this, or even a forum.

SiteBuilder
Create a website even if you do not know HTML. Perfect for beginners.

Control Panel
The members page where you manage your website and access web tools like Fantastico.
The most commonly used is the cPanel.

PHP 5, phpMyAdmin
PHP is a scripting language that is really important to web building nowadays. Get at least PHP 5 supported packages. phpmyadmin
is a web based tool to manage your PHP. More for advance users who knows the language. You might need to use it for some
application installations by following the manual.

.htaccess supported
.htaccess is 1 of the most critical part of your website, allowing you to password protect your files, deny certain IP
from accessing your website, redirecting users, custom 404 error page and many more. Most free web hosts do not provide this.

FrontPage supported
Only needed if you are using FrontPage.

Backups
Make sure your web host provide regular backups of your website. Paid web hosts mostly do this. Added bonus if you can find a free host that does this too.

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Alvin Ng has been actively engaging in the webmaster community since 2000 and shares his techniques to making money online with fellow Internet users.
Read original article: Understanding Web Hosting Package

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Choosing Popular, Low Competition Niches

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The first thing that comes to your mind when brainstorming for a new website is 'What subject should I use?'.
This is one of the most brain-wrecking situation you may encounter if you have absolutely no ideas where to start from.
I, too, encounter this problem and I will now share with you the step-by-step how I choose my niches.

Step 1: Popular Trends & Keywords
Start by going to established websites that provide trends, search patterns, popular searches and such.
These websites usually have a list of topics (read: niches) that are searched regularly by users.
Here are some websites I use:
Google Zeitgeist
Google Trends
Google Hot Trends
Yahoo! Buzz
eBay Hot Products

Browse through the searches done and copy down any niche that you deemed feasible into a list. Remember to choose niches that you are interested in or have some level of expertise in, else writing content for such niches will be diffcult.

If you are looking to monetize your website with Google Adsense, look for a niche that is highly profitable but competitive.

Step 2: Refine and Expand your List of Niches
You should now have a list of niches, probably around 5-10 for a start. What you are going to do now is to refine the list. What do I mean? Take for example, I found the term 'NBA' in Yahoo! Buzz as a popular search term. Now, I don't know about you but NBA is a very wide term. It can mean anything, 'NBA seasons', 'NBA players, 'NBA teams', etc.

When facing a niche this wide, you might be at a loss on what to focus. And such niches are usually very competitive. Not what you want, right? Use these 2 free tools Keyword Discovery and MIVA to generate a list of related sub-niches, with the search volumes included.

The higher the search volumes, the more popular the search term is. Of course, the sub-niches are usually less popular than the main one. For the term 'NBA', using MIVA tool, I got 'NBA' at 70405 searches and 'NBA tickets' 33693.

At first glance, NBA seems better than NBA tickets. I then googled both terms and got a search results of 197,000,000 for 'NBA' and 4,110,000 for 'NBA tickets'.

A whole 197,000,000 results for NBA! Thats alot of competition, especially for novices. 'NBA tickets' seems like a much better niche now. Almost half the popularity of NBA, but more than 40 times lower the competition. Another term 'authentic nba jersey' seems like a good niche too. Refine and expand your list of niches to less competitive ones or keep them if you want. You can also use the tools to look for niches related to those on your list.

Step 3: Analyse your Niches
Ok, this is rather trickly, analysing your niches. You will be looking for niches that are popular but have little competition. This is similiar to Step 2 but way more in-depth. You will want to look at the top competitors for your niches. Check out how strong your competitors are by looking at their websites.
Some of the things you should look at are their:
Number of Backlinks
Backlinks from Authority Sites
PageRank
Alexa Rank
Onpage Optimization

There are some tools that you can use to check on all these. I recommend SEO for Firefox and SearchStatus. The Google Toolbar can be used to check for backlinks, PR and the last cached version of the webpage. These are all free add-ons for the web browser Firefox.

Researching all these takes time and you won't get all the in-depths. After analysing your competition, remove niches from your list that you deemed too tough for you. Your list of niche should now be smaller, maybe 1-5. Keep this list of niche and whenever you have time to start a new website, look back at it and see if you can work something out of these niches.

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Alvin Ng has been actively engaging in the webmaster community since 2000 and shares his techniques to making money online with fellow Internet users.
Read original article: Choosing Popular, Low Competition Niches

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Top 10 Mistakes of Web Building

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

These are the top 10 mistakes that are very common, DO NOT use them or your website will not be a very successful one.
They are ranked from the most common ones to the least.

1) Images for Text
Never ever use a splash page with huge graphics or flash animation for your website homepage. This is very bad and can reduce a huge amount of the potential traffic you can get from search engines. Instead, have a content rich homepage in text. YES, text, not graphics. It is best if you do not use those niffy graphical headers for navigation too. In short: never use excessive images as representation of text.

2) Using Iframes or Frames
The number one most common reason why some websites just don't get any traffic. Heres why... frames are highly search engine unfriendly. Search engines just don't see websites the same way as human users. They treat each frame as a separate webpage, which is bad, if you have navigation links in 1 frame, and content in the other. The webbots cannot crawl from 1 page to the other since some frames will not have any navigation links. Read more on PageRank distribution here.

3) Where is that link again?
Bad navigation can drive your visitors away when they can't find a webpage they just visited. A common practise is to have links at the top under the banner, at the left hand side, sometimes at the right hand side, and finally, at the footer. Make sure to diffentiate them, have them linked to different parts if possible. See Good Navigation Design.

4) Long scrolling pages
Overwhelming your visitors with information is not a good thing. Cut your webpage short with around 400-800 words each. Most people hate using a long webpage and scrolling around to search for the information they want.

5) URL Cloaking, URL Shortening
These url shortening techniques might help your visitor to remember your shorter url, but is another of the deadly search engine unfriendly features. Use a easy to remember url right at the start or start your website at a new url.

6) Javascript generated content
Again, search engines cannot read them. You can use Javascript for web forms, guestbooks, etc.
But do not use them to generate content. Use HTML instead, or if you want a database driven dynamic content, use PHP.

7) Open in new browsers
Unless you are linking to another website, always have links loaded in the current browser. It is annoying to work with so many browsers and is not user friendly.

8) Flashy backgrounds, bright text, pixelated images
These speak of bad design, bad taste, bad website. A simple 1 colour background is usually good, or a gradient type background, moving from 1 colour at the top to another at the bottom.

Make sure your text is easy to read. It is annoying to see text against a large colourful picture/photo as background. What works on your desktop doesn't work online. Blend your colours well, you have to know contrasting and complementing colours if you want to design a site.

If you are making pixelated images using MS Paint, save it for yourself. It puts people off seeing poor quality pictures. Get better quality free ones if you can't make them yourself.

9) Design Consistency
Alway use the same template/design throughout your website, unless you have a subsection that has to be different (like forums). Keep the link colours the same so visitors know what to click. This is common for websites that do not operate with a web template, and just throw every content inside, hoping it turns out good.

10) Animated mouse cursor, anyone?
Cramming free Javascripts into your website, doing those unnecessary effects like animated mouse cursors, scrolling status bar, swirly calenders, disabling right clicks (worse of them all) slows your site to a crawl.

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Alvin Ng has been actively engaging in the webmaster community since 2000 and shares his techniques to making money online with fellow Internet users.
Read original article: Top 10 Mistakes of Web Building

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

Google PageRank Explained

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

PageRank (PR) is one of the many factors Google use to rank your webpage. Yes, webpage. Each of your webpage can
have different PR. PR is determined by calculating the number of links to the webpage.

Each link is considered as a vote for that webpage, so the more votes it gets, the higher the PR it will have.

There are 2 ways to increase your PR. The easiest way is to have a good internal linking structure (navigation)
so that PR is spreaded around your own webpages. If you link to an external website, you leak your own PR to that website, but you can minimise this by having many links to your own webpages.

Confused? Lets take a look at the formula for calculating PR. Note that this is not the actual formula (only Google knows it) but a rather close estimate.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

where...
A is your webpage
T1 to Tn is the webpages that links to webpage A
PR(x) is the PageRank of a webpage
d is a damping factor between 0 and 1
C(x) is the number of outbound links on a webpage

As you can see, by having more links (represented by C) in a webpage, the PR is divided among them equally, resulting in lesser PR boost for each of them.
So if a webpage has a PR5 and have 5 links to 5 different webpages, each of them will get a spill over PR of 1.

Generally, a link from a PR7 webpage is equal to 6 links from a PR6, assuming the outbound links are the same.
So a high PR link will benefit you more than a low PR link. Note that even a PR0 link is still valuable, as it may
not be 0, but 0.4 for example.

Now, back to issue of linking to other websites. By increasing the number of links to your own webpage, it can reduce the PR spill over to each of the webpage it links. Ahem... the external website, remember?

An alternative is to use the nofollow attribute in your HTML code by adding rel="nofollow" to your anchor link (a href="url" rel="nofollow").

This practise is not allowed when you are exchanging links with other websites!
Though unspoken, it is accepted that you do not use nofollow when you are required to link to a website.
On the other hand, if you are placing a link out of your own will with no obligations, go ahead and use it.

Another issue at hand happens if you do not have good internal linking.
The potential PR boost from a webpage is not spreaded to your other webpages, resulting in wastage.
Your website will not have reached its maximum possible PageRank.
Just use any of the navigation types as suggested in Good Web Navgiation
and you can't go wrong. Remember not to have too many links (internal and external) on a single webpage
or it might be banned by search engines. As a rule of thumb, have less than 80 links.

More on the maximum PR I just mentioned. By having more webpages, you actually increase
the maximum PageRank of your website.
Do bear in mind that creating many poor content webpages will make matters worst!
Only create original content rich webpages, and you can increase the maximum PR for the good.

Increase in maximum PR does not mean that your webpages will increase in PR.
In fact, it will drop since new webpages are fighting for the PR distribution.
By intelligiently placing more links to important webpages and reducing those for less important ones,
you can control your PR distribution.

You can view a PageRank of a webpage by downloading the Google Toolbar or using a free online service such as PR Checker.
Be aware that the PR for your viewing is updated every 3 months or so by Google, so you will not see any immediate increase or decrease until the next update.

Much to the confusion of many, PR acutally differs from each of the Google datacenters, resulting in a different PR of your website in different regions. This is normal, so do not worry about it.

The best way to increase your PR significantly is to get others to link to your website.
But why will people link to my website, you ask?
You will find out in my lesson on how to build backlinks.

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Alvin Ng has been actively engaging in the webmaster community since 2000 and shares his techniques to making money online with fellow Internet users.

Read original article: Google PageRank Explained

Source: http://www.articletrader.com

SEO - Offpage Optimization

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Offpage optimization involves the building of backlinks. Backlinks are basically a link from another webpage to your own webpage. Read Google PageRank Explained, you will know that this increases your PR.
Not only that, by having large amount of backlinks, your website might be recognised by search engines as an authority website, websites that are generally well regarded to rank high for their keywords.

Don't be happy just too soon, by large amount, I am looking at the region of maybe few hundreds to thousands of
backlinks from different IP addresses. Backlinks from different IP (meaning websites) are considered more valuable than from the same IP.

Backlinks do not just increase PR, its far more valuable than that. In fact, the most highly regarded factor
to rank high is backlinks.

You should be looking for backlinks from websites in your own niche that have high PR. Make sure the website is
search engine friendly. Having a link that cannot be read by spiders is not really useful, unless that website
has high traffic that will click on your link.

Here is one more aspect to backlinks: the title of the webpage and the anchor text used. Having a
a backlink containing your keywords as anchor text is a must. If the webpage linking to yours have a title containing your keywords, it will be even more powerful. Thats why you should always seek backlinks from related sites.

So how do you make sure the anchor text is what you want? Usually, when you build backlinks by doing reciprocal or directory submissions, you can choose the anchor text. In reciprocal, just provide the HTML code with the desired anchor text
in it to the webmaster. For directory listings, place your keywords in your website name when filling the form.
This will be your anchor text.

Read more about building backlinks. Now, I will talk a little about having people link to you by will. This is extremely powerful and is highly effective if you can do it.
So how do you make people link to you without asking?

By giving them something in return! This can be in the form of valuable, free knowledge, where people make
references to your content and provide a link for their visitors. Or you can make a website
that provides a unique, free service that is highly popular, such as the PR Checker website. Another example is Smart FTP, a free FTP tool for webmasters.

Notice the word 'free' used in the examples. People love free stuff and by giving them that,
you have a high chance of getting free one-way backlinks, which is more valuable than reciprocal!

Alternatively, you can make it a rule for visitors who use your services to provide a link to your website. Either way, provide them with the HTML code to do so, because you will want to
control the anchor text used.

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Alvin Ng has been actively engaging in the webmaster community since 2000 and shares his techniques to making money online with fellow Internet users.
Read original article: SEO - Offpage Optimization

Source: http://www.articletrader.com