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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 40^th wedding anniversary.  On July 30, 1966 , I made the best move of my life when I married Linda Jeanette Anderson.  I assume she feels the same way about me.  Our three children, our grand daughter, and Linda’s mother are coming to celebrate with us.  They say they have a surprise for us so we will see what it is.  More on that next week.  

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 LOT of reading, but it will be the best time that you spend on the Net.  At the end, you will be offered the opportunity to test drive Site Build It.  SBI offers a free test drive and a money back guarantee if you find that it is really not what you expect.  

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

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