Quick Easy Web Services

Email Links

2011-01-17T10:17:00.000-08:00

I still see people who everyday lose there email to spam due to stupid ways they go about there everyday life. Don't write someone@noreply.com. There is no reason to ever do this. There is also never a reason to make it a link. Instead write your link like someone (at) noreply (dot) com, or something similar to this. Or even better, just make it an image. A user will be able to tell the difference between the two, and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble from spam.

Easy way to make money online

2011-01-07T13:02:00.000-08:00

Their are several ways to make money online. Several of these ways people will claim will make you "rich." The reality a very small percentage actually make money, and an even smaller group actually get "rich." Their are some ways that are bullet proof and you are sure you to make money. Will you become rich, well that is determined by how much effort you put into it. Below are two ways which one could get rich online.

Drop shipping - Drop shipping is when you sell a product to a customer, then order it from your supplier and get it dropped shipped to the buyers location. This way you don't actually have to have an inventory on hand. The best way to approach this way is using a personal site, with the addition of eBay. The more listings, and sites you have the more likely you are to sell something. To find drop shippers start with sites like dealextreme.com and focalprice.com. These two sites send you things from Hong Kong with free shipping and free drop shipping.
Ads - AdSense and sponsors are one way people are making a lot of money online. The thing that drives this is CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT. If you don't have content you won't get search engines finding you. The more content and the more pages of content you have, the more likely you are to be found. Every click matters, and the more impressions you have the more likely you have with people clicking on your ads. Build up lots of blogs, sites etc with as much relevant content content as you can within these sites. Make sure you read up on the market first and it would be best if there isn't as much information about the market yet.

The bottom line is, go out there and try it. Try several different things and try not to spend much money on it. It might fail and you might be out everything you put into it.

Website Demographics and site Optimization

2011-01-06T22:41:00.000-08:00

One of the most common things I hate about websites that I run into is that the webmaster didn't design it properly for his audience. I often see sites where the ads will cover up links. Or the ads will enlarge and virtually make it impossible to get around. This is often frustrating enough that I give up and leave the site. Their are other times when it all works and runs properly but they are sticking a narrow width when most people have huge LCDs. Besides these mistakes, their are still people out there that don't understand that not everyone uses Internet Explorer, in fact news was just released today stating that FireFox is more widely used in Europe and Google Chrome is starting to catch up.

Things to look at while designing your site

Look in all browsers including, FireFox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Safari
If your site relies on mobile phones, try a few.
Test all links and drop down navigation's with all of your ads enabled within each browser. You might be surprised by some of the things you find.

Install a few scripts that might help you out

Statcounter.com offers a free useful hit counter which will give you a lot of information. This includes the users OS, resolution, area, search terms. After given this information, take the top few picks and see how your site views in the "Users" eye.
Google Analytic s - This tool is useful to tell things about optimizing your site for the search engines.

Optimization

2011-01-03T00:09:00.000-08:00

Website optimization is important to any web page you create. It cant not only help out those people who are still unfortunate to have high speed Internet (still people who have dial up) but it can also help to keep your bandwidth down if you are getting close to your limits.

Images - Optimize all pictures using your favorite photo editor. Scale all of your images down to the size you are going to use them and not in some ridiculous size your fancy camera shoots your photos in. Also, convert your images to either a gif of png. It's true, they are better for the Internet and load much faster than a jpg of bmp. Plus, png are more easily editable at a later date and time when you decide to do so.
Logos/Navigation bars - Not very many people do this but I feel like it is true. Even though I have never tested this make any navigation bars and logos backgrounds of div tags instead. You can go ahead and try to do this yourself, but I can almost guarantee you that it will load faster. The unfortunate thing about this is that when a user decides to print your site, these things often don't show up. There are ways to get around this but I won't get into it in this article.
Mobile Version - Many sites, including a lot of my own, have been seeing in their sites an increase in the amount of page loads from smart phones. If you see your site is starting to lean this way check it out on a mobile phone. You might be surprised by how much of a pain it is to navigate. Instead, fix it and make sure it loads on those quickly and good looking.
Auto expanding backgrounds - If you have backgrounds that auto expand and repeat make sure that they are only 1 pixel wide. Why create something that is bigger then that, its going to look the same anyway. This will speed up your backgrounds tremendously in your optimization effort.
Clean up inefficient script queries - No one likes waiting around for a script to finish each time a page loads on your site. Instead clean up that query that loops 40,000 times each time a page loads. This will also allow more people to connect to your website at a given time.

Website optimization will improve the speed of your site tremendously. It is also something that cant be learned overnight, but it shouldn't be taken lightly either. Fix your webpage day by day and eventually you'll have a site that even an ancient dial-up modem can handle.

PHP Syntax for Header/footer and other simple things.

2011-01-02T00:42:00.000-08:00

I often hear that people find it hard to learn PHP as they are also learning html, graphic design javascript and probably a dozen other things at a time. Instead they decide to put it off and not use it at all. Rather than learning all of PHP I have listed below some of simple PHP syntax that any website designer cant live without. PHP is very easy to learn and once you get the hang of it you won't be able to live a day without it.

*For all of my tips, make sure you change all your pages to a .php extension rather than a .html extension . Don't worry, all of your HTML will continue to work*

Tired of changing the header and footer on every page of your site. Use the below syntax.

<?php
require_once("headertemplate.php"); //path to your header template html file
?>
Your html content goes here

<?php
require_once("footertemplate.php"); //path to your footer template html file
?>

This is pretty straight forward. Whenever you have a require_once(); that puts that file in its place. To make this a little more useful I will also show you how to put the title into your HTML file.

MyPage.php

<?php
$title = "This is the title";
require_once("headertemplate.php"); //path to your header template html file

?>
Your html content goes here

<?php
require_once("footertemplate.php"); //path to your footer template html file

?>

headertemplate.php

<html>
<header><title><?php echo $title; ?></title>...

As you can see I set the title variable in MyPage.php and the I outputted it in my template.

The last thing I think an HTML developer cant live without is the following for updating your copyright notices.

<?php
$time = time();
$year = date("Y", $time);
echo "Copyright 2001 - $year";
?>

Now you no longer have to edit the year on all of your copyright notices. In addition, you won't have to change every page to change a link or a color on your site.

Start off the new year with a change

2011-01-01T01:33:00.000-08:00

It's that time of the year again to dust off your old websites and make them shine again. There are several things that you can do to make sure your site stays at the top of the list. Without these preventive measures your site will eventually drop its ranking. I recommend that you do the following more often than once a year, but its never to late to begin.

Update Content and add new content to your website - It never hurts to add or update content on your website. In fact, in almost all cases it will only help. Add a few new pages in about a new product. Spice up your about us page because you have recently merged with a company, in addition to editing the years in business because you have edited your website.
Update your copyright notices and other time marked stamps- Google and other search engines like to see new content and easy way to tell it hasn't been updated is by looking at the timestamps. Make sure these are up to date with your edits.
Submit your sites to directories and search engines - If your site hasn't been around much this is vital. Even older sites can benefit from this by getting there site out there more. It can never hurt to resubmit your site. The only time it hurts is if you want to get listed in DMOZ. This is because it actually resets your place in line.
HTML Validation - Make sure your site is up to date on the new standards for HTML. If you know that your old website has tables still being used everywhere and the word CSS does not show up anymore, it is the year to finally change your site. Convert all your sites to use Cascade Style Sheets and try to avoid using tables. I still believe that tables are still acceptable to use for tabular data. That is data that should be represented in a table, for instance statistics. Also everywhere more and more HTML tags are becoming deprecated. Eventually the <font></font> tag will no longer work on most web browsers. It is time to remove this tag and many others.
Spam prevention and Cleanup - It's time to stop those spammers from bombarding your forums, comment sections and email with spam messages. Turn off your catchall email addresses and add captchas. Catchall email address, catch all email address (joe@example.com, joe1@example.com, joe3@example.com, etc) and direct it to a single address. Than a spammer randomly sends a message to support@example.com and it gets directed to you. If you turn off catchall you'll most likely get rid of most of these emails. Also, use a captcha in your forms. A captcha is a validation to make sure the user is indeed a human and not a robot. Most spammers are lazy and use robots to search and submit there forums. Fix those forums, and forms for emails.

This is the year to fix all of the things you have been putting off regarding your website. Why put it off another day or year. Everyday you put it off is another missed sale, or a missed advertisement. Don't hurt yourself anymore and put a couple hours to your site for the next few days. You are sure to improve your websites performances for both your new and old clients, in addition to the robots searching your website. Good luck and may the new year bring you increased website hits.

Making money with blogs

2010-12-31T00:45:00.000-08:00

Making money with blogs is one of the oldest ways people have been making some money on the Internet. It is also one of the hardest ways to make money. This is because it requires constant work and is a never ending process. Creating a blog is easy but making it generate money is another story. Here are 5 tips in starting up your blog to make sure it is a success.

Write about something you enjoy. You'll be writing a lot of content so it's best that you write about something you.
Content Content Content - Content is key to making any site a success. Whether you are trying to make site for your business or a blog to make money off AdSense. Content is crucial in improving your search engine results. With more people finding your site your more likely to get clicks from AdSense.
Create Multiple Blogs - Some blogs have higher competition because there are already a lot of people in that particular market. Instead make multiple blogs and you'll be more likely to find results within a particular market, or even within several markets. It is all a number game. If you have have 20 blogs each making a dollar a day. Than its 20(blogs)*1(dollar a day)*30(days in a month) = $600/month.
Post content regularly - Post content on a daily basis. You might think this is a hassle but its the only way to succeed. If you thought making money through blogs was going to be easy you were very confused. Blogs involve a lot of work, but it is completely doable with proper discipline. Maintaining 20 blogs is going to be hard, but if all it takes is writing 20 articles that you already know stuff about then it isn't that hard. You already like the topic so it isn't a chore at all. Its something you enjoy.
Google Forecast - This a is a new tool I have been running into that I think is also a key to making a blog a success. The forecaster or ad competition tool (don't remember what exactly its called) is found when using Google AdWords. It tells you how many people search for a particular phrase a day, in addition to the advertiser competition. You want to find something that gets a high search value and a lower competition. This means that people will be paying less to click on your ads. But it also means it will be easier to compete with other people. If you do this effectively, you'll be making less per click but be getting a lot more clicks.

These 5 tips to blog success are a start to making money with your blogs. Making money with blogs takes practice and time. If you keep to it on a daily basis and continue to grow your blog content you will be sure to make money eventually with your blogs. At the end make sure you enjoy it. If you don't enjoy writing content and maintaining your blog, then don't do it. There are millions of ways to make money but at the end you have to enjoy what you are doing.

Social Networking Sites

2010-12-30T00:52:00.000-08:00

Social networking sites are becoming more and more popular day by day. It is now becoming a norm to log onto these sites on a daily basis and read up on what your friends are doing. With this in mind, websites are now becoming to use these sames sites as well. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are some of these social networking sites these businesses are starting to use.

But why would you use social networking sites?

Keep customers informed with new products
Quickly put out updates, whether it is a sale, or site construction etc.
Collaborate with customers and find new ideas, by using their feedback from comments
Promote new products and ideas
Advertising

As you can see, there are already several reasons why web site developers should now use these important social networking sites. Even though you might not want to be involved with some of these tactics, other sites are doing it, which frankly means you have to be doing it. Website SEO you have to go with the norm and more, no more of not giving into peer pressure. There is a trick though to using Social Networking Sites, better and more efficiently than others. Here is one trick that your sure to succeed with.

I have only came across this idea only once in the past and I thought it was a great idea, and it appeared to be working for the business tremendously. A representative from the Snuggy company creating several fan pages for almost every college in the United States. They than invited a few people for each fan page and this soon started a swarm of people to help support the school. The titles were called things like, support your vikings, support your ducks, support your beavers etc. There was actually a ranking involved with each fan page that said how your school was competing with other schools in the number of fans were following thus causing people to want to invite more people.

Your probably wondering why these fan pages matters and it is really the key to the entire process. The snuggy representative than sent a message to each of the fan pages he created, hundreds of them, and told people to buy their college snuggy in order to support the school. Coincidentally, their is a snuggy for almost every school so this representative knew exactly what they were doing. He was able to create a market that was demographically perfect for his product in a particular city.

As you can see, this might not work perfectly for what your trying to market but it is a great idea which isn't being done that much. With some modifications and other ideas, you can easily turn Social Networking sites into a marketing alternative you cant leave without. Not only will you be following the norm than, but you'll also be doing it better than your competition which will quickly lead into better success.

More Complex Security in Webpages

2010-12-28T15:18:00.000-08:00

Websites are getting much more complex and the way people are attacking sites are both complex and simple. Some of the most basic things can lead into very complex attacks.

SQL Injection
This is one of the simplest to prevent but can easily be overlooked and lead to extensive damage in your website. An SQL Injection is when a user types into a form things they are not suppose to and instead submit SQL queries. For instance if you have an form that accepts a persons name and inserts it into a table of names, a user might instead type in something like "; DELETE * FROM names". If your input isn't validated and escaped, this might run on your database and delete all the names. This can easily be fixed by validating your input and escaping your variables in your SQL query.

Brute-force-attack
A brute force attack isn't very complicated at all, its fairly simple. In this attack an attacker will repeatdly attempt to get onto your sites with a computer alogrithm until they can do something on your site. For instance, if they know johndoe@noreply.com is the username, they might try a database of passwords over and over until they are successful. This can be repeated with several different things. This can be fixed by checking how often the user submits.

The CMS issue
This is a new issue I am starting to run into more and more often with newer websites using widely used content management sites, such as Drupal. Attackers are starting to notice it is easy to find sites like this and attack them because they are all the same and consistent. I have found that attackers search for things like "node" when using Drupal. Once they have a list of sites, assuming the user has the default install, they might be able to post several comments because there is no captcha or any other interface to catch this. This same procedure can be used across the board for several different CMS.

DoS Attack - Denial of Service
A denial of service attack is when an attacker repeatdly does a procedure that caues your server to lock up. For instance this might be as simple as submitting a form repeatdly for ever, thus causing no one else to be able to use your site. There are several reasons why people will do this, from grudges to stopping your site from running because of competition issues. This can be stopped by monitoring how often a user submits forms or other services on your site.

Of course this is not an exhaustive list of security attacks but hopefully it will get your started on some complex security issues that you may encounter. Be careful and make sure you think what an attacker may do. Make sure you create backups of your data, in addition to hashing all important information so it is more difficult for an attacker to use.

Simple Security Things

2010-12-27T01:48:00.000-08:00

There are several simple things that one can do on their site to stop a lot of headaces down the road. For simple sites, the majority of it is around email addresses.

Even though I hate to admit it, back in the day I would find target email addresses by doing things search engine searches like reservations@ and inquiries@. This would than pop up hundreds of emails that were specifically targeted to my target market of tourism. This allowed me to quickly find email addressees. Even though you cant do this on Google anymore, you can still do this on several other search engines. There are three simple ways to fix this which each have their own benefit.

Image
Instead of posting a link, post an image that shows your email address. Don't make the link a link to your email address because this will make it easy to find using a search engine. Make sure when you view the source you cant view the email address at all.

Change the text
This is a simple an easy quick fix that can be looked at as a temporary fix. Instead of writing support@noreply.com write, support (at) noreply (dot) com. Any human who reads this, understands that you have to replace the (at) with an @ and a (dot) with a . . Any search engine won't distinguish this from other text since these are normal symbols that are used.

Create an email form
Even though this involves the most work, it is also the most beneficial. A form allows you to hide your contact information, but it also allows you to ask for additional information, like the customers name and phone number. This key information, will allow you to cut off some communication time later on during your communication with them. The only problem you'll run into this way is bots automatically spamming your form. This can easily be stopped by adding a captcha into your email form. A captcha is an validation that the user has to type into the form in order to prove they are a human. If you think you won't run into this issue, your mistaken. You will most definitely get attacked by these bots eventually.

Search Engine Submission

2010-12-26T01:27:00.000-08:00

Search engine submission doesn't matter that much if you have a lot of quality incoming links. The reason why most sites need it, is because there site doesn't exist yet. In addition, they want the search engine spiders to find there site faster. This way they don't have to wait as long for their site to get indexed to get started on maintaining their site. The truth is, if you have quality incoming links, your site will get found very quickly.

I keep mentioning "quality incoming links" and this might not be clear to everyone. What I mean by quality is that the links not only are relevant to your site, but also come from highly ranked pages. If both are true, the spiders will index the incoming site on a regular basis and therefore will find your links on a regular basis and come to your site.

There are several sites that exist that allow you to submit to over a hundred search engines at once. Obviously, they submit to all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Alta Vista, but they also submit to scrub the web and several other smaller search engines. You might be asking, why would I care if I submit to small search engines. The truth is everything helps, if you can get ten hits to your site a day, this could be the difference between a sale or not. It's also a lot easier to fill out one form and it does all the work for you.

A simple trick that I use is http://10minutemail.com/. For those of you not familiar with this, it allows you to create a email address temporarily for ten minutes. This allows you enough time to receive validation email links as well as other stupid emails. This cuts out tremendously on the amount of spam email you might of received otherwise. Another good idea is to create a new email address, such as marketing@mydomain.com, just for the SEO process. I made the mistake of not doing this on my first site, and now my main email address webmaster@mydomain.com gets tons of spam email. This could have easily of been avoided by creating another email or using the 10 minute mail site. You can always shut off your temporary email, and stop the spam email you may run into.

Link Exchange

2010-12-25T01:21:00.000-08:00

Link exchange is an important concept in improving your page rank level in addition to improving your search engine position. For those of you who don't know what page rank is, it is the numeric value of 0-10 that google gives to website in how important it views them. Link exchange is a way for search engines to tell how important other website view your site.

Trade with ranked sites
This is one of the most important things. When trading with a site, make sure you view the rank of link page of the site your trading with. The website might be high ranked but they might be purposely causing there reciprocal link page to not be ranked. For example they might be telling the robots to not got there via the no-follow html tag.

Don't trade links with link farms
Only trade links with sites that have less then 50 outgoing links. Also make sure you don't link to over 50 sites. Search engines don't like to see sites with lots of outgoing links.

Change Title
When trading links, don't use the same title in all of your link exchange. A better way to describe the importance of this is to show you what search engines are looking for. If people were to just normally link to your site because they like it and find it a good source they wouldn't all use the same tag for the link. Each person would use something unique. The search engines know this, which is why they weed out things that have the same link.

Change Description
The description is not as important in changing as the title is, but the same philosophy follows. Search engines don't want to see the same thing over and over so don't do this.

Link with similar sites
Although it is easy to get Viagra, and prescription sites to link to your site don't do it unless your in that business. Links from similar sites are some of the most important sites out there. If you get irrelevant links your ranking will drop. Don't do it as your just wasting your time.

Don't go after the big dog
This is one of the first mistakes I made in my first attempts for link exchange. I was trying to trade links with my vacation rental site. http://www.fastvacationrentals.com but I was trying to trade links with very highly ranked websites. To my surprise, not really, I didn't get one response from this. I had a little bit more luck trying to trade links with less popular sites that weren't as important. What I found out that worked best was trading links with sites that are related in the tourist business or personal sites from individual people. Even though these sites aren't as popular, they are still ranked very high in there niche. This is a vital and very important link exchange.

Check links afterwards
Unfortunately, there are still people that cheat there way in link exchange. They don't keep your link up, or they use the tag no-follow. This causes a lot of problems and doesn't benefit you at all. Usually I keep an excel sheet that I keep track of when I last checked to make sure it existed.

Post in blogs and Forums
This is still a good easy way to get links back to your site but you have to be careful. An example of doing this is posting in a travel related forum. Eventually those forums get higher ranked and you in return will have a link back to your site. The thing is, you have to be careful to make sure there isn't a no-follow tag on your link

Write articles
Articles are another quick an easy way to get links back to your site. There are several sites that keep track of content. This content is than free to use if you keep a link back to the owner. In addition to making this an easy link exchange it also allows you to create content which is also vital in the SEO process.

As you can see, there are a lot of things that go into SEO. I can't possibly cover everything because it is changing on an everyday process, and by the time you read this it will probably be outdated. A smart thing to keep in mind is to act like a search engine. They are scripting the spiders to be smarter and smarter and to act like a human to find relevant material. When working on your site keep this in mind. If you do your sure to keep your site ideal for SEO.

The Web Design Process

2010-12-23T01:38:00.000-08:00

Creating an effective an attractive website is an acquired skill over years of practice. Even someone who thinks they are know everything about search engine optimization truly doesn't know everything.

The Web Design Process

This is because the Internet is always changing and the way search engines find content is consistently changing. Because of this, no one is truly an expert.

Content

There are several things that web designers take into account to create effective websites. One of the first and most important things is content. In order to get high rankings, you have to have a lot of content that is relevant to your information. This doesn't mean to go out and pack keywords into your current sites content but to effectively use it within your content. If you do go out and pack in the keywords, your ranking will most definitely go down. This is known as keyword stuffing.

Title

Rather than putting "home page" or "my site name" for the title, create a descriptive title that sums up the pages information. Make sure to use the meta tag, title to your advantage.

Description

The description meta tag isn't used much, but it is still very important that you use it. The reason being, some search engines still specifically use it. Especially if you don't have any content.

Keywords

Now I know your probably thinking that the keywords tag is pretty much useless and for the most part you are correct. The reason why I still use it, is because I believe that everything together matters. Making sure you include this might not make much of a difference, but it doesn't really hurt you to have it. Make sure you don't stuff keywords in this tag, try to keep it under 25 words.

HTML Validation

Make sure you have coded your site to use the most up to date standards for the HTML type you are using. There are several tools online you can use to do this. Make sure you don't use deprecated tags or anything else that isn't a standard.

Source Files

Take advantage of being able to link to a cascade style sheet file, JavaScript file, or any other scripting file. The smaller you can make your source code the better. Get rid of extra white space and remove anything that can be linked with a simple file. When viewing the source file, it is better to see more content than coding. Don't confuse the search engines with extra coding.

Alt Tags

Alt tags are a simple and effective way to make sure search engines find your site. Make sure you use descriptive tags that describe the link or image.

Don't try to write content for search engines!

If you try to write your content and meta tags for the search engines your site is sure to fail in website optimization. Rather than thinking about what you want the search engines to find, instead try to describe your site to effectively communicate to your customers who you are and what you want to do. Just write whats going on, use captions, use alt tags, use effective titles. Keep what the search engines are looking for in the back of your head, while you create your sites content that describes your websites goal.