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BOOMER eZINE
The Online Entrepreneur Magazine |
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Volume 1 - Issue 16 7-28-06 For those who would like to read this in HTML format, this
issue of Boomer eZine is posted on the Boomer eZine website at http://www.boomer-zine.com/V1I16_072806.htm
and on the Boomer eZine Blog at http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com. Please pass Boomer eZine on to a friend. They will thank you for it. Table of Contents for this issue..... 1. Author’s Comments 2.
Inexpensive Website Hosts 3.
Sam’s Club is in the Web
Hosting Business 4. Google and Yahoo Site Maps
Author's
Comments One
busy weekend after another! We had a
great time with our English friends. Their
seven years old twins reminded us of many years ago when our boys were that age.
We were younger then and I guess the energy that our sons had then did
not make as much of an impression then as the twins did now. This
weekend is a very special one as Linda and I celebrate our 40th
wedding anniversary. On Inexpensive
Website Hosts I used Google to randomly
research five lists of the top inexpensive web hosting sites on the Net.
I developed a table of the results showing the ranking position for each
survey and then compiled the results. The
results are shown as how many times the site appeared out of the five lists
(Count), the highest rank in the five lists, lowest rank in the five lists, and
monthly price.
It appears that
StartLogic is a favorite of the web hosting lists with LunarPages close behind.
I had not heard of Dot 5 Hosting before, so that was a new one for me.
BlueHost is a popular hosting site. I do not profess to be
really current on this subject since I have used two web hosts for a long time.
Only HostExcellence.com which is one
of my hosts appeared on one of the lists, but it did not make the top group in
my summary. I must caution you on
using what is advertised as an “inexpensive web host”.
These prices are driven by competition to get you hooked so you will buy
more services from the site. These
are the old “lost leaders” in the website business. These sites are really
VERY EXPENSIVE. You will spend time
and money developing a great looking site on these hosts.
You will work hard and after about a year, you will quit because you do
not get the traffic you needed to be successful.
The “build it and they will come” adage does not work on the Net. I know that this sounds
like a commercial, but Site Build It (SBI), while seeming very expensive is a
good value for the money when you truly understand all of the benefits that you
get for the annual fee. I hate to
see people waste a year of their Net careers trying to “poor boy” their
Internet businesses and fail. I encourage you to follow
this link to go Site Build It for a detailed comparison of SBI and the other
leading web hosts. Click here now to
compare. http://compare.sitesell.com/boomer.html The reason that I can
write with such conviction is that I wasted a lot of valuable time building
websites and trying to use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to get
traffic with very low success. I
decided to experiment with Site Build It so I could report on it in this eZine,
and I discovered how powerful it is. I
am not yet finished building my www.retirement-jobs-online.com
(RJO) site and already my traffic has increased significantly.
I started the site on May 30 and in May, I had 3 visits by 3 unique
visitors who looked at 3 individual pages. During
the month of July (as of July 28), I had 372 visits by 182 unique visitors who
looked at 934 individual pages. I
expect the traffic to continue to increase as I add more pages and learn how to
better use SBI. The RJO site already has
four keywords in the top 10 ranking with MSN, three with Yahoo, and two with
Google. I am starting to see traffic
come to the site from the search engines. (Site Build It reports this for you).
This is free traffic that is looking for a solution to a problem.
It is open to what the site offers since the searcher found it
himself/herself. To really understand Site
Build It, go to this link http://buildit.sitesell.com/boomer.html
and spend the time reading all the details about SBI.
Get ready to do a If you have any questions
about SBI, send me an email, and I will answer you.
If I do not know the answer, I will get it for you. I hope you can see that I am excited over what I know SBI will do for Linda and me in our retirement. I know it can help you too. Sam’s
Club is in the Web Hosting Business I thought I had seen it
all, but I was wrong. Sam’s Club
is now in the web hosting business. If
you are a business member of Sam’s Club, you can get a five page website for
no charge. It is a template driven
site since it says that you can bring it up and be live in less than five
minutes. There are two higher
levels of service. One is for $10
per month or $5 per month if you are a Sam’s Club Plus member.
The next level is $15 per month or $10 per month if you are a Sam’s
Club Plus member. For more information the
link is http://samsbiz.com/pages/google. Again, remember this is
an “inexpensive web site host”! Google
and Yahoo Site Maps Let’s discuss a site
map (sometimes called a site index). To
start, let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about it. “A site map (or sitemap) is a web page that lists the
pages on a web site site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This
helps visitors, and search engine bots, to find pages on the site. Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site
by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if
a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML
links.Site maps do have limitations. Most search engines will only follow a
finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large, additional
strategies besides the site map may be required that search engines, and
visitors, can access all content on the site. While some developers argue that site index is a more appropriately used term to relay page
function, web visitors are used to seeing each term and generally associate both
as one in the same.” The important topic that I want to address is the one
about search enginge bots (robots or spiders) that crawl your website.
It is very important to make it as easy as possible for the spider to
search your site. The easier it is
for the spider, the more likely you will improve your ranking with the search
engine. Both Google and Yahoo have sitemap features associated
with them. The requirements of each
are a little different so if you maintain your site maps yourself, you will need
to know about the differences. When
you add a page to your site, you will need to update your site map and notify
Google and Yahoo of the change so it can schedule a spider to come check your
site for the new information. You can also go to Google and log on to add your site map
to their database. Once it is added,
you can log in and see when your site was last checked by the spider and if the
spider encountered any problems in crawling your site.
This is just another of the many functions that you need to perform in
order to have a first class website. Guess what! Site
Build It does this automatically each time that you add a page or modify a page
to your SBI website. To get the
process started. you do have to manually add the site to both Google and Yahoo,
but SBI leads you through the procedure. SBI
will handle the following updates or addition of with Google and Yahoo. To read the Google explanation about site maps follow this
link. https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html. To log onto Yahoo and submit your site to the index, go to
http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. There are some packages
for developing and maintaining site maps. You
can use Google or Yahoo to find some of these.
I have not researched any of these so I will not make any
recommendations. Don’t forget to
maintain your site map on your site and notify Google and Yahoo when you make
changes or additions to your site. That wraps up our issue
for this week. We need to spend time
visiting with our family and getting ready for the surprise that they have in
store for us. Until next week, stay
tuned. John and Linda Howe http://boomer-ezine.blogspot.com http://stores.ebay.com/BOOMER-RETIREMENT-STORE
If you are changing email addresses in the future, put a note on your calendar to send us a blank email after you have changed your address. Send the blank email to: boomerezine001@aweber.com. We want you to remain a subscriber to our newsletter! It is OK to go ahead and join our
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email will be blocked these days. The SPAM filters are getting tighter and
tighter and are blocking many legitimate emails. Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc.
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