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BOOMER eZINE
The Online Entrepreneur Magazine |
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Please pass Boomer eZine on to a friend. They will thank you for it. If
a friend passed this to you, you
can start your own subscription at www.boomer-ezine.com.
Complete the subscription form and you will receive
a free copy of “How
to Choose The Best Web Host for YOUR
Website”. Table of
Contents for this issue..... 2.
Q & A,
Suggestions and Comments 4.
Things
to include on your home page 5.
Web
tool-www.marketleap.com This
has been a busy week. I
(John) have been spending my Internet time working on a new
classified
ad for eBay, working on a sales page for
retirement-jobs-online.com,
expanding my affiliate campaigns on AdCenter, and
writing this
eZine. By
the way, I do have a full time day job so you understand why I am
asleep
before my head hits the pillow. And
I celebrated my 64th birthday on August 23. When
I'm Sixty-Four (The
Beatles) When I heard that song many years ago, I thought I would never be 64.
Now
I am glad that I am! Q &
A,
Suggestions and Comments If you have anything for this
section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article,
please send us an email with your suggestions or your input.
With your help, we can improve the Boomer Video
eZine. Previously, we wrote
an article about Google Alerts at http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V2I10_061507.htm#UGA. Side
Bar: We recommend
you follow
the link and read the article. It
is short and very worthwhile. The link will open a new window.
To return back here just close the window. Since then I have had alerts
posted for the keywords
“retirement jobs”, “SBI”, and “Site Build It”. I have these alerts set to
arrive once per day.
You can set the frequencies in your options when you
set up your
alerts on Google. I scan the alerts to
see if there is anything that I
need to check further. I
have been alerted to posts on blogs about Site Build It that have
proven
helpful. The SBI alert is not as
helpful since it brings up
many entries for the State Bank of India (SBI), information about a
soccer team (SBI), State Bureau of Investigation ( The “retirement jobs” alert
allows me to watch
the competition for the keyword for our retirement-jobs-online.com site
and see what is happening on the Net. Another very valuable
function of Google Alerts is
checking that your own blog posts are picked up by Google. I post the Boomer eZine each
Friday night or Saturday
morning. The next
Google
alert for retirement jobs will show the post that I made on the
Retirement Jobs Online (RJO) blog advertising that the latest issue was
posted on the Boomer eZine website. Each time I update a page on RJO, SBI automatically makes a post to the RJO blog and pings the search engines. This post is crawled very quickly. If I make the change to RJO
one evening, I will
receive a Google alert the next morning of the change.
This is a great way to monitor the effectiveness of
your blog
posts to know that Google is really paying attention to you.
It is easy to set up.
Open an account on Google.
Go
to My Account and click on Google Alerts.
Follow the instructions to set up the alerts for the
keywords
that you want to follow. Things to
include on your home page When you design the home page of your website, there are certain items that you must include to get the best response from your viewer and/or from the search engines (SE’s). Let’s discuss these important items. Page
Title The
most obvious one is a good page
title. This
is important
since it needs to be a “grabber” and attract attention.
Also, the title shows up in the search engine
listings. I know from
experience that if you use
Front Page HTML editor to create your page, it automatically inserts
the
title “New Page1” in the title tag.
I have posted live pages and seen the title listed
by the SE’s
as “New Page1”. Red
faced, I quickly edited and reposted the page.
Problem is the page gets posted quicker when it is
new and first
crawled by the SE’s than when it is edited so this mistake lasted
longer than I wanted. Description Enter a
brief description of the page.
This is picked up by the SE’s and used in the search
engine
description of the page on the SE search results. Logo
(Optional) If you have a
logo for your site, it
should be in a prominent location on the page.
This becomes the visual identity of your site. Header
(HTML H1 – H2 code) Your
header should contain your keyword
in the first few words.
It
should tell the reader what the page is about.
This is more for the SE’s than the human reader. Tag
line or first paragraph This should tell
the reader what the
page is about so she/he will not have any doubt about what to expect
from the content on the page. Search
Capability You
should have a search function set up
for your site.
This can be
accomplished by installing a Google site search (see http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I22_090806.htm
for information about how to do this).
If you do not put the search box on the home page,
put a link on
the page pointing to the page where the search is located. Link
to your privacy policy Google
likes to see a link to a privacy
policy on the home page.
I
learned this listening to an interview of a man who quit Google to
start
his own Internet business. Remember,
we had an article on privacy policies in our last issue. About
Me (Us) Page Your reader
should be able to check who
created the website to see if the person(s) is qualified. Contact
Page You
should not hide from your readers
and should be easily accessible.
If
you post your email address, spam miner robots will pick it up. I recommend a small script we posted in the article entitled “How to Defeat the Email SPAM Robots” in http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I50_032307.htm. When you insert
the script in your web page, it will show your
name and when clicked, it will open an email box.
It will not show your email address as yourname@yourdomain.com
for the spam miner robots to find. You can
also use a response form for
communication instead of a direct email.
SBI has a neat feature that let’s you set up a
contact form
that requires authentication so robots can’t fill it out and load up
your forms with “form spam”. Link
to Site Map (Optional) If you have a
site map, a link to it
from your home page is helpful for your viewer to use to navigate your
website. Navigation
Bar All the
major links to the content on
your site should be prominently displayed in your Nav Bar.
Make it easy for the viewer to find anything on your
site. Link
to shopping cart If you are
selling items on your site,
make it easy for your viewer to find your shopping cart and purchase
your wares. Opt-in
Form If you
are building a mailing list,
display the form in the high “eye traffic” area of the page.
See http://www.boomer-ezine.com/V1I26_100606.htm
of Boomer eZine for more about how a web page is viewed by a reader. Log
In Box If you
have a member’s only site or
require registration for someone to view the site, make certain that
the
sign in form is easy to find and is in the high visibility area of the
page. Review
your home page to see how it does
against this list.
Some of
these are optional, but the ones that are not specified as optioinal
are
musts for a home page to meet the needs of the human reader and please
the search engines. This
is a neat tool that I found this week.
It shows the total inbound links to your website.
It will show historical link popularity for a
website in
graphical form. You
can enter a URL and a keyword and it will show you where in the search
engines the URL ranks for the entered keyword.
Here is the report for www.retirement-jobs-online.com
for keyword “retirement jobs”.
As
you can see, RJO ranks on pages one or two with all SE’s except Yahoo.
I do not know what we did to Yahoo to make them mad
at us. We are not
rated at all
on Yahoo. Bookmark
this tool for future use. I
know that I will definitely come back to it. That wraps up our
issue for this week. Until
next week, stay tuned. John and Linda
Howe http://www.entrepreneur-ezine.com (http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Amazon_Page.htm)
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Copyright 2010 John Howe, Inc.
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