BOOMER eZINE

The Online Entrepreneur Magazine

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:  

Let’s talk about a few of these.  I found the keyword “teacher retirement” has too much competition.  This keyword is used by all the teacher retirement systems of all the states so there are 50 strong websites ahead of RJO.  However, the keyword “retirement jobs teacher” is number one on Google.  

The keyword “retirement planning” is used by all the major investment firms and they have full time webmasters working to be number one on the search engines.  Again, too much competition.  

Several of these pages were developed in response to the keywords that Google used to sent people to the website.  SBI has a Traffic Stats page that tells how many times a certain keyword is used by the search engines to send traffic to your site.  Some of these keywords were not declared keywords on the site, but the search engines found the words on a page and liked them.  When I saw this, I created a page that focused on those keywords.  This page usually rose to the number 1 – 5 position for the new keyword once the page was optimized for search engine optimization.  

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  

I had a page for the keyword “retirement jobs home handyman”.  It was rated number one or number two on Google.  I got the bright idea to create a page for the keyword “home handyman” thinking I could attract more traffic.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  It is not rated on Google.  

Organizing the website  

Some people have a problem understanding how to organize their websites in this fashion.  If you want a very good explanation of this, Site Build It has a good free video that explains it.  You can also download an Excel workbook that SBI has developed to help SBI’ers organize and plan their websites.  

Before you go watch it, let me define and explain a little about some terms used in the video and how they relate.  

When you first start developing your SBI website, you will use the SBI brainstorming tool to check your theme keyword to see if it is right for you. You want a keyword that has enough searches to be profitable and one that does not have too much competition.  Once you verify your theme keyword, you will brainstorm to develop keywords related to your site theme keyword.  The output from the brainstorming is the master keyword list (MKL).  This is where you search, sort, manipulate, and compare keywords to find the best ones to bring traffic to your site.   The brainstorming tool and the MKL tool are included in your SBI.

Now to view the SBI video, follow this link:  

http://demo.sitesell.com/tier/tierf.html
 

This is just another example of the support and tools that SBI provides. 

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