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Table of Contents for this issue.....

1.    Authors Comments

2.    Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

3.    Social Bookmarking Sites

4.    LAMP - What is it?

Author's Comments

Well, Christmas has come and gone.  I am taking vacation most of this week.  I go by the office for a few minutes each day to check on things, but for the most part I am a man of leisure.

On Tuesday, I went on my first quail hunt of the season with my friend Conley and my daughter Susanna.  It was the usual “shake down hunt” where we discovered what equipment was not on the hunting car, what needed repair since last year, etc.  Out of that first hunt, Conley and I spent Wednesday evening repairing the front locking hubs of his jeep.

We got in another hunt on Thursday morning and proved our repair had worked well.  I have posted pictures of his jeep and our hunt on my www.quail-hunter.com site.

Linda and I join to wish you a Happy New Year.  May it be a great year for online entrepreneurs.

Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

My thanks to Ana Young for this item.

“Sorry John, not a suggestion, a question (I was confused about where to post one): I recently heard in a teleseminar that in the end, Google and the other search engines really, really prefer websites built from scratch, because of something like extra coding often included in ready-made templates provided by FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and I guess that would include SBI. I've always thought this was true. Let's face it -- a site using some "form" template provided by someone could have God-knows-what built into it; it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Google had to sift through extra code with those "beginner" sites. Whereas, a site custom-built to an owner's specifications ... well, it's like anything else custom made, right? Like a custom-made suit, it just fits better and is classier. I realize now you're an affiliate of SBI, so I'm probably addressing this in the wrong place. But it's important.”

Reply from John Howe

Yes, Ana, I am an affiliate of SBI, but I will give you the most unbiased answer I can.

I do not know the intent of the teleseminar where you got the information about web page content, but I question it.

I do not use Dreamweaver so I cannot comment on it.  However, a significant number of websites are built with it.  I can comment on Microsoft Front Page since it is the WYSIWYG HTML editor that I use.  The fact that all major web hosts have Front Page extensions as part of their offering indicates that Front Page is a major HTML editor on the Internet.  Hence, I feel that Google has the programming to spider web pages built with it very well.

If you look at the code generated by Front Page, the only things that Front Page inserts is the following code (the XML tags are mine to make your browser print the HTML as text rather than execute it):

<XML>

<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">

<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">

<meta name="Microsoft Theme" content="sumipntg 011, default">

<meta name="Microsoft Border" content="tb, default">

</XML>

These tags are in the HEAD section at the top of the webpage and the rest of the page is only what I have created.  These tags tell the browser that this is a Front Page developed page and how to handle the theme and borders of the page.

Obviously, I cannot speak for Google, but with so many Front Page sites out there, I expect that Google has the programming to handle them with no problems.

Your comments about a custom built site have merit when you consider the appearance of the site to the human viewer, but you must remember that the Google spider cannot not see your pictures or your fancy design.  It studies your keyword content and page content structure.  The fancy design with all the bells and whistles will please your human viewer, but the viewer will never see that beautiful website that you envision unless your site appears high on the first page of the search engine results.  This is not done with fancy design and bells and whistles, but with basic, well written content pages that are search engine friendly.

On the subject of how Google handles SBI sites.  I can only cite the success stories of SBI sites on the Net.

This data comes from an independent study that SBI commissioned.  35% of SBI sites are in the top one percent of Alexa rated sites, 53% are in the top two percent on Alexa, and 62% are in the top three percent on the Alexa site rating.  You can see this information at http://compare.sitesell.com/boomer.html.

If you want to study additional successful SBI sites, go to http://results.sitesell.com/boomer.html.

Google may not like the construction of the SBI web pages as well as non-SBI sites.  However, the fact that SBI sites consistently rank high on Alexa indicates that Google and the other search engines are ranking them high on search engine results pages since most of the traffic to the sites comes from the search engines.

In summary, my vote is to use SBI for your web hosting and site building assistance.  (From my research and experience, I would make the same recommendation if I were not an SBI affiliate)  To back up my vote, I am just starting my next SBI site which will be an affiliate site to sell a specific product.

The results that I have achieved with www.retirement-jobs-online.com have convinced me that SBI delivers.  You know that I have been an entrepreneur for 37 years.  I would not embark on what will involve many hours of my work on this new site without being convinced that it will pay me an acceptable return for my efforts.

I feel that perhaps you are too deeply involved in the technical research of web hosting and site building.  Your ultimate goal is to make money. The amount of solid, qualified traffic to your site will determine your success or failure.  I suggest that you concentrate your research on which web site host will help you generate traffic more than the nuts and bolts of how to build web pages.

Ana, thanks again for your question.  As usual, your questions are thoughtful, and I appreciate your participation.

If you have anything for this section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article, please go to http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Suggestion_Form1.htm and give us your input.  With your input, we can improve the Boomer Video eZine.  

Social Bookmarking Sites  

How many of you have an account on http://del.icio.us?  

What! You say to yourself, that is a crazy name and it does not even look like a valid name for a website.  Well, it is a real site with an Alexa rank of 123 which is in the stratosphere for web site rankings.  

Let’s use old, dependable Wikipedia for a definition of del.icio.us:  

“The website del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site came online in late 2003 and was founded by Joshua Schachter, co-maintainer of Memepool. It is now part of Yahoo!”  

A social bookmarking site is one where you can establish an account and store your favorites.  You can make these bookmarks private for your own use, or make them available to anyone on the Web.  

You have your favorites listed in folders on your browser, but that information is available only to you on your home computer.  If you open a bookmark site (and there are many others in addition to del.icio.us), you can share these bookmarks with any reader on the Web.  

Why do this?  One reason is that you can access your bookmarks from any computer with an Internet connection so you can get to your bookmarks when you are traveling.  

However, the major reason is to help build traffic to your websites.  Use of bookmarking sites is a way to create links back to your websites and help generate traffic.  There are numerous bookmark sites and you can set up bookmark files on as many as you want, all of which create the links back to your websites.  

We will discuss social bookmarking more in our next issue.  We will introduce “tagging” and talk about page rank (PR).  In the meantime, I recommend that you go to http://del.icio.us/about to learn about the site.  Open an account so you can start playing with social bookmarking.  You definitely need to know about it and how to use it to your advantage.  

Here are a few sites to read about the subject:  

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_bookmarking_faceoff.php  

http://www.consultantcommons.org/node/239  

LAMP – What is it?  

I do not know if you have run into the term “LAMP” on the Internet, but it stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.  

Let’s look at the Wikipedia definition:  

“The acronym LAMP (or L.A.M.P.) refers to a set of free software programs commonly used together to run dynamic Web sites or servers:  

Linux, (more precisely GNU/Linux) the operating system  

Apache, the Web server  

MySQL, the database management system (or database server)  

PHP (Sometimes Perl or Python), the programming language.  

The combination of these technologies is used primarily to define a web server infrastructure, define a programming paradigm of developing software, and establish a software distribution package.  

Though the originators of these open source programs did not design them all to work specifically with each other, the combination has become popular because of its low acquisition cost and because of the ubiquity of its components (which come bundled with most current Linux distributions particularly as deployed by ISPs). When used in combination they represent a solution stack of technologies that support application servers. Other such stacks include unified application development environments such as Apple Computer's WebObjects, Java/Java EE, Grails, and Microsoft's .NET architecture.”  

End of definition.  

This is for your information so you will understand what is offered when you see that a web host offers LAMP hosting.  

That wraps up our issue for this week.  Until next week, stay tuned.  

John and Linda Howe

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