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.....
1.
Authors
Comments
2.
Q & A,
Suggestions and Comments
3.
Website
Organization
4.
Blocking
SPAM on your Blog
5.
Netscape
is no More
6.
Check Your
Site for Broken Links
Author's Comments
January
has flown by for us.
Linda
spent two weeks in
Lake Jackson
,
TX
helping her Mother recover from a
knee replacement.
I
was busy with work which included a fast trip to the
Peoples
Republic
of
China
. I flew from
Corpus Christi
,
TX
to
Houston
(one hour flight).
From there, I flew directly to
Tokyo
(14 hours).
After a three hour layover, I flew to
Shanghai
, PR China (2.5 hour flight).
China
is amazing.
I was amazed at how modern and progressive the area around
Shanghai
is.
The Chinese discovered that communism did not work and that
capitalism does. Believe me,
the Chinese have learned capitalism very well.
My
company is considering starting a joint venture with a company in
China
so I expect that I will have a few
more
China
trips in my future.
Q &
A, Suggestions and Comments
Email from Louis
Suggest when you have a 2 for 1 sale that
you develop a list of people that would like to spit the 2 for 1 each
purchasing one.
Our answer
Louis,
I
have checked on this since I was thinking about coordinating Boomer
eZine readers so they could split the two for one special. The
problem is that one of the two people will own both sites. The
sites cannot be split on the sale of the special. If the owner of
the sites decides to not continue her/his site, the second site will
lapse.
I
decided not to get into this since it was too involved and had potential
legal liability.
Thanks
for sending me the email. If you have any more questions, let me
know.
If you have anything for this
section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article,
please use this suggestion
form to give us your suggestions or your input.
With your help, we can improve the Boomer eZine.
This link will open a new page.
Close the page to return to Boomer eZine.
Website
Organization
The
best web sites are organized in a pyramid fashion.
The home page (index.html page) is at the top of the pyramid.
Under it are located the tier 2 pages and logically, under the
tier 2 pages are the tier 3 pages.
Logic
would say that this could go on for many tiers, but it is best to not go
too deep in tiers since the search engine spiders only crawl a few tiers
deep in the website.
The
home page and the tier 2 pages are usually listed on the navigation bar.
The tier 3 pages are usually not on the nav bar.
This is not a hard and fast rule, so handle it as you see fit.
The
keyword for the home page will be the site theme keyword.
An example: the
keyword for www.retirement-jobs-online.com
(RJO) is “retirement jobs”.
The
keywords for the tier 2 pages should be the keywords that have the
highest demand and the least supply.
These will get indexed by the search engines and viewers will
land directly on these pages without coming through the home page.
There
are several of these on the RJO site.
Some of these are not in the nav bar and are designed as landing
pages to attract niche traffic to the site.
The page then directs the viewer to the Study Guide page which
leads the viewer through the site in an orderly manner.
Some
of these pages are:
Blocking SPAM on your Blog
Do you have a blog and everyone dumps SPAM in it?
This is really aggravating, but unfortunately, it is a fact of life on the Net. SPAM bots automatically roam the Net dumping SPAM in unprotected blogs.
I am a subscriber to Barbra Ling’s newsletter and I read a helpful article recently about preventing SPAM in blogs.
If you use WordPress for publishing your blog, Barbra Ling’s article “7 Ways to Block SPAM on WordPress Blogs” might be of interest to you.
You can read it at:
http://tinyurl.com/2o3od9 or at
http://www.fabfitmom.com/journal/2008/02/01/how-to-stop-spam-in-wordpress-blogs/
Barbara,
thanks for sharing this with us.
Netscape is
no More
What
was the first Internet browser that you used?
For me it was Netscape.
Netscape
is now the responsibility of AOL / Time Warner and as of February 1, the
company has discontinued support for it.
Here
is a article that I found interesting about Netscape and its history.
If you are still using Netscape, consider switching to another browser.
RIP: Netscape
browser, 13
ANICK
JESDANUN
Associated
Press
December 31, 2007
at 11:00 AM EST
NEW YORK —
Netscape Navigator, the world's first commercial Web browser and the
launch pad of the Internet boom, will be pulled off life support Feb. 1
after a 13-year run.
Its current
caretakers, Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, decided to kill further development
and technical support to focus on growing the company as an advertising
business. Netscape's usage
dwindled with Microsoft
Corp.'s entry into the browser business, and Netscape all but faded away
following the birth of its open-source cousin, Firefox.
"While
internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy
in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been
successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet
Explorer," Netscape Director Tom Drapeau wrote in a blog entry
Friday.
In recent years,
Netscape has been little more than a repackaged version of the more
popular Firefox, which commands about 10 per cent of the Web browser
market, with almost all of the rest going to Internet Explorer.
Enlarge
Image
Netscape founder
Marc Andreeson: In recent years, Netscape has been little more than a
repackaged version of the more popular Firefox (Richard Drew/AP)
People will still
be able to download and use the Netscape browser indefinitely, but AOL
will stop releasing security and other updates on Feb. 1. Drapeau
recommended that the small pool of Netscape users download Firefox
instead.
A separate
Netscape Web portal, which has had several incarnations in recent years,
will continue to operate.
The World Wide Web
was but a few years old when in April 1993 a team at the
University
of
Illinois
'
National
Center
for Supercomputing
Applications released Mosaic, the first Web browser to integrate images
and sound with words. Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the Web
was largely limited to text, with any graphics displayed in separate
windows.
Marc Andreessen
and many of his university colleagues soon left to form a company tasked
with commercializing the browser. The first version of Netscape came out
in late 1994.
Netscape fed the
gold-rush atmosphere with a landmark initial public offering of stock in
August 1995. Netscape's stock carried a then-steep IPO price of $28 per
share, a price that doubled on opening day to give the startup a
$2-billion market value even though it had only $20-million in sales.
But Netscape's
success also drew the attention of Microsoft, which quickly won market
share by giving away its Internet Explorer browser for free with its
flagship Windows operating system. The bundling prompted a Justice
Department antitrust lawsuit and later a settlement with Microsoft.
Netscape
eventually dropped fees for the software, but it was too late. Undone by
IE, Netscape sold itself to AOL in a $10-billion deal completed in early
1999.
Netscape spawned
an open-source project called Mozilla, in which developers from around
the world freely contribute to writing and testing the software. Mozilla
released its standalone browser, Firefox, and Netscape was never able to
regain its former footing.
End
of Associated Press Netscape article
Check Your
Site for Broken Links
When
you have created a 40 plus page website, how do you find any broken
links in it? You say, “I
don’t have any broken links since I checked them all as I was building
the pages”. That may have
been true at the time the page was built, but what about now?
The internal links are your responsibility, but what about links
to external sites?
Other
webmasters change their pages and this might break your link.
Nothing worse that the dreaded 404 message coming from your site.
The
most obvious way to check links is to conduct a link audit and
systematically test each link on your website.
You know how thrilling a prospect that is.
Another
way is to use Google Webmaster tools.
If
you have verified your website with Google, you can see what Google
found when it last crawled your site.
Here
is the Dashboard on Google for the sites I have registered:
Let’s use www.retirement-jobs-online.com
as the example. If we click
on it, we get the following:
This
picture shows there were three (3) “Not Found” errors which indicate
broken links. If we click on
the “Details” link, here are the links that Google found broken.
The
first link is bad since the extension on any SBI site must be
“.html” and this link is “.htm”.
The
second link is bad since the period “.” at the end is included in
the link. This is a common
problem to watch for since sometimes the period is included in the
highlight when you specify the link.
The
last broken link has some garbage that was included with it.
Google
does not like broken links since it indicates sloppy work or it
indicates that you are not keeping your site current.
It is best to check the Google stats periodically and fix the
broken links.
Now,
if you are using Site Build It, SBI is kind enough to send you an email
telling you that you have broken links and which ones are broken.
I keep bragging on SBI and the extra services that you
automatically get from it. Well,
this is just another one.
Here
is the latest broken link email from SBI
Hi
John,
LinkFixIt!
here. I've just finished
checking your site for broken links. I check your site for both...
1)
Outgoing links -- links from each page on your site,
whose
destination is a page that is NOT at your domain.
2)
Internal links -- links within your site.
In other
words,
these links go from one of
YOUR pages to another of YOUR pages, and NOT to another site.
I
check all pages that are within 2 TIERs of your home page.
-----SIDEBAR-----
This
program has nothing to do with the Value
Exchange
program. If you have not yet
signed
up
for that and if your site has reached 20
pages,
you really should login to Site Central,
click
to Value Exchange HQ and register.
-----SIDEBAR-----
Oh,
one more thing. I only send
you the report for each
broken
link ONCE, so fix it right away because I won't
bug
you week after week about the same broken link.
OK,
here's your report...
----------
I)
Outgoing Links
The
following pages have outgoing links which are broken and which should be
fixed (either link to the correct URL or delete the link).
The
first URL is the page with the broken link and the following URL(s)
is/are the destination of the broken link on that page...
1)
http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com/Service_Sellers_Download.html
Broken...
-- http://www.stuffit.com/expander/download.html
--
II)
Internal Links
No
broken links.
----------
I
suggest you fix ALL broken links. They
are frowned upon
by
Search Engine spiders when they can't follow them, by
human
directory editors, and of course by your visitors.
I'll
let you know weekly when I find new broken links. If
you
don't hear from me, it means that you have no NEW breaks.
Yes...
"no news IS good news."
Your
faithful SBI! bot,
LinkFixIt!
I
checked the link, and sure enough, the webmaster at www.stuffit changed
the download link for to:
http://my.smithmicro.com/win/stuffitexpander/download.html
I
made the change so I will not get the nastygram from SBI anymore.
If
you have not registered your site with Google, you really need to do so.
It alerts Google to go crawl your site, and you can get some
really good information from the Google stats.
For
more information about Site Build It, I invite you to visit my website
www.the-best-web-host.com
That wraps up
this issue. Until next
month, stay tuned.
John and
Linda Howe
