Did you see a Twitter background somewhere that you liked and want something similar? Have your own idea for a custom Twitter background and need someone to create it for you? Email me at and I’ll see what I can put together for you.

Here’s a sample of some of the custom Twitter backgrounds I’ve done so far:

Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live Search, all use different criteria to determine your placement in search results. And to make it even more difficult, they generally won’t tell you what that criteria is. But there are a few things that you MUST do to have a chance at getting listed in a good position in the search results. By using these techniques, I have gotten several of my client’s websites listed on the first page of Google search results for their desired keyword phrase.

Keyword Selection

A keyword is a word or phrase that is used to describe your web page and that you want the search engines to find you with. This is the most important decision you will make regarding your search engine strategy. If you choose a phrase that is too popular/competitive in your market, you will have a poor chance of getting good results. Don’t choose a keyword that 5 billion other websites are using. Choose something unique, but in demand. Try the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find ideas that have plenty of searches and lower keyword competition.

For example, on HeavenlyCrosses.com, I recommended a keyword phrase of “Disciple’s Cross Necklaces”. Why? Because no one was going to search on “Heavenly Crosses” unless they already knew about the website. “Disciple’s Cross” was way too competitive and so was “cross necklaces”. But combining them together gave the website a better chance of being found. And it worked! Google it and see!

Title Tag

The title is the information that shows up at the top of your website browser when you are viewing a website and on the page tabs if you have more than one window open. This is also the title line and link at the top of the individual search results. You MUST put your keywords in the title! The title is created by using the “title” tag in your web page’s HTML code. I recommend limiting your title to a maximum of 64 characters.

Using this web page as an example, the title tag would look like this:
<title>First Page of Google Search Results</title>

Description Meta Tag

The description is just that; a description of your web page. This is placed in your HTML code in a “meta” tag, but does not show up anywhere on your actual website. It shows up as the website description in the search engine results. You MUST put your keywords in the description! I recommend limiting your description to a maximum of 160 characters.

Using this web page as an example, the description tag might look like this:
<meta content=”What you need to have on your page and in your website code to help boost your placement in Google search results and other search engines.” name=”description” />

Keyword Meta Tag

It is debatable whether or not the search engines still use the keyword meta tag, but I say, when in doubt, include it. It certainly can’t hurt.

The keyword meta tag is HTML code that gets inserted into your web page. It doesn’t show up anywhere, but the search engine spiders might read it. So put your keywords in that code just for safe measure. I recommend limiting your keywords to a maximum of 20 words.

Here is an example keyword meta tag:
<meta content=”Google search results, first page of Google, search engine optimization, keyword meta tag, keyword meta tag, title tag” name=”keywords” />

Keyword Relevancy: Content is King

Your selected keywords should be what your web page is about. Therefore you must have your keywords in your web page content. Put them in headings (using H1 and H2 tags). Put them in picture descriptions. Put them in your paragraphs. If your keywords are relevant to your web page, this should come naturally. Just don’t over-do it or the search engines might get upset with you for trying to manipulate them.

Domain Name/URL

Putting your keywords in your website’s domain name and/or URL is another one of those debatable search engines techniques. Some say it isn’t used, but I say it is. After all, if you search on something and the words you searched on are in the URL, they are highlighted in the Google search results. That says to me that it is being noticed and counted. If you already have your domain name, don’t worry. It’s just another suggestion. No one thing will make or break your search engine results.

Incoming Links

The more links you have coming to your website from other quality, related websites, the better your search result placement will be. Make sure you ask those linking to you to use your keywords in the link text whenever possible. For example, use a link like affordable website solutions instead of using the website URL or your company name.

Getting incoming links to your website is part of what is called “off-page search engine optimization”. The code that links to your website is on someone else’s website, not yours, thus “off-page”.

Hopefully these tips will help you get better placement in the search engines! Good luck with your quest to reach the first page of Google search results.

I’m here to help if you need me!

At this point in time, the backgrounds are designed to work on Blogger blogs. (Drat!)

If you have a blog on Blogger, this is a MUST SEE website! Especially if you like to change your Blogger background with the seasons. They have some really nice holiday backgrounds.

Go to The Cutest Blog On The Block and see for yourself.

P.S. For those of you as loyal to WordPress as I am, they have have plans to make these backgrounds compatible with WordPress soon. I’ve also contacted the website owner to see how much of the free designs we can tweak for use with our hosted WordPress blogs. In the meantime, there are some cute “accessories” we can use now.

Now imagine that your website developer has gotten angry with you for some reason and has gone into your hosting account and DELETED your entire website!!! You don’t have a backup of your website and your hosting company is going to charge you $150 to restore the site. Now you owe your former website developer money for a website that doesn’t even exist or you’re out money to have it restored. What do you do? Obviously, you pay the $150 and get your website back, fire your website developer and change all your passwords (and PINs) so it doesn’t happen again.

Guess what? This story did not happen in my imagination. It is all true. And it just happened over the weekend to one of my new clients.

Could this happen to you???

This true story brings up many questions, comments and concerns, some of which I’m still trying to find the answers to. (Please feel free to share your experience and knowledge.)

 
Who Owns Your Website?

I’ve posted this scenario on a legal website asking who owns website files? No answer yet.

If you have hired someone to develop your website and had them purchase the domain name and hosting account, they probably own it. Not you! Make sure you are the master of your domain.

I also read somewhere that if you hire an independent contractor to create something for you, unless it is declared that you own the purchased creation and they have given you the files, the contractor actually owns the rights to the creation, even though you paid for it to be created. Go figure! (As a website developer, my rule is clear: You pay for it, you own it! And yes, I’ll put that in writing and give you the files!)

 
Do You Really Trust Your Website Developer?

Make sure you own your website accounts and files. Have your own website backups just in case. Keep in touch and don’t make assumptions. (You don’t want to end up with a huge invoice for a website you don’t like.)

You never know what can go wrong with a business relationship. Make sure you are covered in case something does.

I just finished creating the custom business card design for two of my websites. Here’s what they look like:

     

(Of course the resolution for the actual design is better than shown here.)

I created my custom business card designs in Adobe Photoshop starting with a template I got from VistaPrint.  I uploaded my completed design and ordered my cards.  I ordered 250 of each card.  With the design upload and the printing, my product total after discount was only $12.96. 

Do you have a custom design or logo to put on your business cards?  (If not, I hope you know who to ask for help. Hint. Hint.) Give VistaPrint a try.  It’s a great deal.  Here’s the link I used:

75% Off Premium “Custom” Business Cards at VistaPrint.com!

But did you know that most blogging software (like WordPress) automatically prevents your comment links from being followed by search engines? The software puts a tag rel=”nofollow” on your link telling the search engines not to count your link. NO comment link love!

I don’t know about you, but I like getting some link love for commenting on other blogs. And since I try not to be a hypocrite, I want to make sure that I am giving you plenty of comment link love when you comment here.

Therefore, I have activated two WordPress plugins on this blog:

1. The DoFollow WordPress plugin disables the automatic nofollow. Now all comment links on this blog will be followed by search engines and given incoming link credit.

2. The CommentLuv WordPress plugin gives bloggers double comment link love! This plugin will check your comment link for an RSS feed and, if it finds one, will add a automatically add a link to your latest blog post. Now you not only get a link to your website, but you get an internal page link to an individual blog post too!

Want to give some comment link love to your blog readers? Here are the links to the WordPress plugins mentioned above: DoFollow and CommentLuv. If you need any help installing these plugins, just let me know.

Preventing email spam for my clients’ websites is something that I try very hard to do now that I’ve learned what NOT to do with an email address. However, I learned these lessons the hard way and I’m still paying the price. I have corrected my ways and it has cut down on some of the spam, but obviously not enough. I wonder if I’m missing something and the spam programs are still finding me or if my email address is just floating around on some “spam me” email list somewhere that I’ll never get off of. Do I really have to change all of my business email addresses? (If you have an answer to that question, please comment and tell me.)

So, how did I end up with over 1000 spam emails in one week? Here’s a list of what NOT to do with your email address:

• Do NOT set up a catch-all/default email address for your domain.
• Do NOT directly publish your email address on your website using a mailto tag.
• Do NOT use your primary email address in the bio box of the articles you use for article marketing purposes. (DUH!)

 
Since there is no point in rewriting a good article on preventing email spam, here’s a link to some good tips:
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/hide-your-email-address-on-websites.html

Of course, the thing that I hate the most isn’t the 1500+ spam emails in my inbox. What bothers me is the fact that these rotten spammers are now using my email address to spam other people and I’m getting blamed for it! That is not how I do business!

If you have other tips on preventing email spam, please comment and leave your advice.

The standard View Cart button code is as follows:

To change the button into a text link, substitute the business value from the button code into this text link code:

I have this blog. I write to it on a regular basis. I think what I have to say is pretty interesting. Somebody else out there on the world wide web must think its interesting too. Right? This question sent me on a quest to find out about blog subscriptions. After all, what is the point of putting your “diary” out on the internet if it isn’t for people to read it?

I found buttons that said “XML” and “+ Yahoo!”. I heard things like “RSS”, “Atom” and “feed”. I also found a lot of people who didn’t know any more about these things than I did. Somebody just told those people that they needed them and where to get them.

So, I followed the crowds to http://www.feedburner.com, put in the URL of my blog and got some code to put up this cool looking graphic:

At least I was making progress. Now instead of just posting my text link someplace, I had an animated graphic link. I still didn’t understand what all that other stuff was.

The best way to learn about something is to try it out. If I wanted other people to subscribe to my blog and read it, I needed to figure out how to subscribe to a blog myself. It was not easy for me, the novice blogger/reader, to solve that mystery. Therefore, I am writing this entry to help the next novice.

Sparing all of the other details that led me to the solutions, I will simply summarize the solutions I found. (I’m sure there are others too.)

If you want to read blogs:

• Determine where you want to read the blogs from. You can:
  • bookmark the blogs and visit each one at a time;
  • pool them all in one website with a blog reader such as My Yahoo, My MSN, BlogLines, NewsGator, Rojo or Newsburst;
  • or have them emailed to you.
• Find the blogs you want to subscribe to and, if the writer has made things easy for you, simply click the subscription button that corresponds to your chosen blog reader. If you want an email subscription and the blog doesn’t give you that option, try Bot a Blog.
• Visit your blog reader and start reading.

If you are writing the blog:

• Read the section above. Make subscribing easy for your reader! Include as many of the blog reader buttons and options as you can. The Publicize tab on Feedburner will provide you with the code for a majority of options. The buttons are under Chicklet Chooser and the email subscription form is under Email Subscriptions. Bot a Blog will give you code for their button and form, but Bot a Blog only works for RSS feeds.
• If you haven’t got a clue which type of feed your blog produces or even what a feed is, Feedburner will take your blog URL and provide you with an RSS feed.
• If you don’t know how to add these options to your blog, contact your friendly website consultant.
• Always PING the blog directories when you’ve updated your blog so they will notify the blog readers of your update. Your blog probably does this for you automatically, but check out Ping-o-Matic! just in case.
• If you are confused, be watching for an article that explains all of these terms.

Did I have a website backup of all my changes? Nope!

I immediately emailed my hosting company and asked them what they could restore for me. Unfortunately, they had just replaced some drives and the most recent backup for my site was three weeks ago. None of what I really needed was going to be on those backups. I had to redo all of my changes.

This prompted me to post an article by Lynette Chandler, “Website Backups and Why You Need to do Them”. The article reminded me of a time when one of my client’s websites was hacked. Most of her website was overwritten by malicious code and her web host didn’t have a complete backup for her either. (Luckily, I did.)

These things really do happen folks! And you need to protect yourself.

So, how do you backup your website?

(By the way, if this is all too techie for you and you are concerned about the security of your website data, contact me and I can probably do your backups for you.)

cPanel Backup Wizard

 
If your web host provides a cPanel type control panel, you can perform your website backups using the backup wizard in the files section of the control panel.

1. Access your cPanel by going to http://yourwebsiteurl.com/cpanel and logging in with your hosting username and password. (Page not found means either your don’t have cPanel or you forgot to replace the url in that link with your own website’s url.)

2. Find the Backup Wizard in the Files section and click on it.

3. Click on the Backup button.

4. Click on Home Directory under Select Partial Backup to back up your website files. (This type of backup makes it easier to restore later.)

5. Click on Home Directory to download your backup file.

6. Click Save when prompted and save the file to a folder on your computer where you can find it later if you need it.

7. If you have a database associated with your website (WordPress for example), you will want to repeat this process (Go Back button) and click on MySQL Databases to backup your database.

8. Log out of your control panel. You’re done.

FTP Website Backup

 
When I need to do just a file backup (no database) and the hosting company hasn’t provided an easy way to do website backups, I use FTP software. I personally use CuteFTP Pro, so I am including basic instructions for that here.

1. Open CuteFTP and connect to the desired account.

2. Navigate to and open the folder that you want to backup.

3. On the toolbar, click on Tools, then Folder Tools, then Backup Remote Folders.

4. Browse to find the local folder you want to store your backup in, ensure you have the remote folder listed that you want to backup, and click the Include subfolders box. Click Next.

5. Choose your compression type and click Next.

6. Either select Run Now or schedule reoccurring backups.

7. Click Finish and close CuteFTP. You’re done.

Other Website Backup Options

 
1. If your website is small and you don’t have a database to worry about, you can use your hosting file manager to copy all of your files to your computer.

2. If you have access to phpMyAdmin, you could export your database and save the exported file to your computer. (Beyond the scope of this article.)

3. Contact your web hosting provider and inquire about their website backup procedures.