Search engine optimization (or SEO) is clearly important in this day and age. An entire industry has arisen around the quest to get to the top of the search engines, with black and white hat SEO witches battling it out to stay in the top five positions.

It sounds like a scene out of dungeons and dragons doesn't it? However it's a serious business when hundreds of thousands of visitors are lost because rankings disappear, which equates to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

In a previous article I discussed how to select keywords to help you to start planning a targeted campaign. When you get to the end of this article I hope you should have a fair understanding of the importance of the HTML Title tag with regard to search engines and far more importantly with regards the humans, the people, the guys and gals that you want to get to your website so that they can buy your goods and services.

First... what is the title tag?

Using Title Tags to Improve SEO & Website ConversionThe title tag is an element in the header part of an HTML page denoted by two tags. For instance you might have . That would mean that the title would read (as a link on search engines like Google for instance "Using Title Tags to Improve SEO & Website Conversion". Setting yourself some simple guidelines to help you write your tags is a good idea.

Guidelines are good but not set in stone

There are no hard and fast rules for writing titles but there are some guidelines you might want to follow. W3C (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/TITLE.html) say on their website that ideally a title should be 64 characters or less and that titles may be truncated if it's longer than that. Google show 66 characters in their search results listing, Yahoo allow listings up to 120 long. What I would suggest is that you bear these sensible limits in mind when writing the contents of your title tags.

If you need a long title make the first 66 characters Google friendly and use the rest up for Yahoo. In order to learn how to effectively use these 66 characters you should know how titles are used online.

Online uses of titles

1) Titles are used by website resource librarians, directory editors (such as DMOZ), and other webmasters (such as strategic link partners) when they link to your website.

2) The title is displayed in web search results by the vast majority of search engines to help you target and attract your visitors.

3) Nearly all the major search engines use a title tag in order to rank your page. Search engines deem the title one of the most important pieces of information when determining what the content of your website is.

4) The title is displayed in the visitors browser window usually at the top of the viewable part of the browser screen.

Browser screens, search results, editors, why is this important?
Firstly, by carefully crafting your website title you make it more accessible to resource librarians, editors and webmasters. If you have a nice simple title link which they can add to their pages both relevant and understandable they are far more likely to link to your website. If they link to your website using a hyperlinked title relevant to your target audience, you get targeted traffic from simply writing a good title tag. More relevant traffic means much higher conversion.

Secondly if Google or Yahoo crawl your website and find that the title tags you've written are relevant to the page on which they are written it means there is a much greater chance of a good ranking on the engines. A good ranking on the engines for your selected keywords means that you're more likely to be found by your target audience. This again means that you attract the people that you want to your website, the people who are looking to buy your product or service. The title tag becomes your search engine listing. Think of it this way, in a similar way to the classified ad you write for a newspaper, the title tag listing is your online advert, so make it as attractive and relevant as possible to attract the right visitor.

Thirdly, the browser window is affected by the title and it's convenient for the visitor to your page. How many times have you had five or six Internet browser windows open? A good title tag means that a quick scan of these titles shows the reader which page is which. The first couple of words in the title it could be argued for this reason alone are the most important text you will ever write for a web page you want to be read.

In summary

You want your web page to be read by your desired audience.
That's all. Your title tag is the first step toward achieving that goal. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If you have eight hours to chop down a tree, spend 6 hours sharpening your axe." The title tag is your web pages axe, it's the part you should refine so that you get the most from the search engines. Of course there is more to SEO and website conversion than simply the title tag. In the next article we'll discuss the next important point to sharpen, the headline, or rather the tags that should be used in conjunction with titles to be even more search and conversion friendly.

Tags: Using Title Tags

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Google has recently made some pretty significant changes in its ranking algorithm.

The latest update, dubbed by Google forum users as "Allegra", has left some web sites in the dust and catapulted others to top positions. Major updates like this can happen a few times a year at Google, which is why picking the right search engine optimization company can be the difference between online success and failure. However, it becomes an increasingly difficult decision when SEO firms themselves are suffering from the Allegra update.

Over-optimization may have played the biggest part in the dropping of seo-guy.com from the top 50 Google results. Filtering out web sites that have had readability sacrificed for optimization is a growing trend at Google. It started with the Sandbox Effect in late 2004, where relatively new sites were not being seen at all in the Google results even with good keyword placement in content and incoming links. Many thought it was a deliberate effort by Google to penalize sites that had SEO work done. It's a few months later and we see many of the 'sandboxed' web sites finally appearing well for their targeted keywords.

With 44 occurrences of 'SEO' on the relatively short home page of seo-guy.com, and many of them in close proximity to each other, the content reads like a page designed for search engine robots, not the visitor. This ranking shift should come as no surprise to SEO professionals as people have been saying it for years now: Sites should be designed for visitors, not search engine robots. Alas, some of us don't listen and this is what happens when search engines finally make their move.

One aspect of search engine optimization that is also affected in a roundabout way is link popularity development. After observing the effects of strictly relevant link exchanges on many of our client's sites recently, we've noticed incredibly fast #1 rankings on Google. It seems Google may be looking out for links pages designed for the sole purpose of raising link popularity and devalues the relevance of the site. After all, if a links page on a real estate site has 100 outgoing links to pharmacy sites, there has to be a lot of content on that page completely unrelated to real estate. Not until now has that been so detrimental to a site's overall relevance to search terms. It goes back to the old rule of thumb: Make your visitors the top priority. Create a resources page that actually contains useful links for your site users. If you need to do reciprocal linking then keep it relevant and work those sites in with other good resources.

Keeping up with the online search world can be overwhelming for the average small business owner or corporate marketing department. Constant Google changes, MSN coming on the scene in a big way, and all the hype around the new Become.com shopping search function can make heads spin. But just keep things simple and follow the main rules that have been around for years. Google, as well as other search engines, won't ever be able to ignore informative, well written content along with good quality votes from other web sites.

Tags: Google's New SEO Rules

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-- Internet Marketing Determines Web Success --

Internet marketing is essential to the success of web sites. You can have a professional looking website but what good can it do if internet users are not able to find it when they need your products and services? That is where an internet marketing campaign comes into play.

"Your website has to magically appear before buyers when they need products and services."

Internet marketing is similar to designing websites- it does not require much experience to do a good job, just good knowledge and a keen eye for details. It is fundamentally important for a good internet marketer to constantly update himself weekly, if not monthly, of online markets. There are many ways to market your website .

-- Find A Competent and Reliable Internet Marketer --

Justify the costs of hiring an Internet Marketer - First of all, getting an internet marketer is not essential for every website. If your website is a business website or a website which you want to generate revenue from, it is good to seek a competent internet marketer to work on your website. The costs spent on your website for internet marketing has to be justified and often, they are justified by having more revenue and traffic to your web site.

Potential customers have to know that there are no guarrantees in SEO. Since everything is fundamentally based on search engines, SEO work is at the mercy of major search engines like Google. Many SEO companies tried to secure customers with guarrantees that they cannot fulfil, resulting in lawsuits or customers getting burned for hiring their SEO services.

In short, an Internet Marketer oversees that your website is built properly for visibility and promoted with the best dollar spent on your internet marketing campaign. It is no good having a website and not appearing in internet searches. Your website has to magically appear before buyers when they need products and services. Internet Marketers deploy search engine optimisation techniques to make your website visible and targetted to internet users.

Internet marketing requires research and analysis effort for individual website, followed by optimisation of website. Hundreds of hours may be spent on each website, depending on the size of your targetted market. You are essentially paying for the amount of effort involved, effectiveness of your internet marketer and daily sales tracking of your website.

How to choose an Internet Marketer- Internet marketing requires constant updating of skills and knowledge. One crude way to test if your internet marketer is a genuine or fake- Ask your internet marketer about recent events that happened in his field. If he cannot answer that, he must have a genuinely good reason to back himself as a good internet marketer! At times, it is easy to fall prey into the hands of bad internet marketing companies as happened in US and other parts of the world.

It is also important for you to feel comfortable with the amount of money you are spending on getting your site popular before committing yourself to a internet marketing campaign. Internet marketing campaigns typically last a few months and requires monthly tune-ups to your website. Include the costs of an internet marketing campaign when doing your company's advertising budget.

About the Author

Lester Boey works in an Australian SEO and Web Design company. http://www.definiteweb.com/ His life revolves around SEO; providing full-time and freelance seo services to US and Australian businesses.

Tags: Internet Marketing Company

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I have been around long enough to have seen a few pretty clever domain name scams. One of my favorites was the Domain registry of America (or a name similar to that) who sent domain name owners advertising in the mail that looked just like an invoice. Concerned website owners would eagerly fill out the form and post their cheque to make sure they didn't lose their domain name - of course the domain registrations cost 10x what they would normally through a reputable company.

We have a new winner

So yesterday I randomly stumbled upon Domains of course - they are able to sell you a .com domain name for the perfectly reasonable price of USD$100,000.00 per year. I had to refresh my browser to make sure that there wasn't a Javascript error, but no, that's what it says.

For those needing DNS services, you can also buy DNS hosting for "ONLY USD$1000 per year". Wow.

Just in case anyone doesn't see anything wrong with the above statement, Godaddy can do a .com domain name for less than 10 bucks, and DNS services are often bundled in for free with hosting accounts.

And then...

Today an email arrives concerning ragepank.com

Initially I'm wondering if this is serious, and if they are looking to assume control of ragepank.com (which would definitely spoil my afternoon). But then common sense prevailed, and I decided this was spam. So I googled for some exact text in the email, and sure enough, plenty of others have been getting a similar email.

Protect!

So, the intention of this email is to scare me into thinking that daxin Investment (China) Co., Ltd are about to buy some ragepank.xx domains, and that I should hurry and register them first to protect my brand - through them of course.

That's actually kinda clever - there are plenty of cases where people are too slack to register localized versions of their names - ragepank.co.nz sat around available for anyone to grab until I decided the name was worth more than $35 and I should probably own it myself. I guess this type of scam hits domain owners in a weak spot, and that's what makes it so clever.

Domain name scams

They are everywhere. It's best to find a good provider (I use Godaddy), and stick with them. And always apply common sense when reading mail from people you don't know.

Source

Tags: Domain Name Scams

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Experienced Web designers will tell you, "Just build it — and they won't come."

It's true. Simply putting up a Web site won't bring visitors. It takes work to entice customers to your site once, and even more work to make them come back.

One way that most people find Web sites is to use search engines such as Google.com. Google accounts for nearly half of all Internet searches. Yahoo! and MSN are the next most popular search sites.

Good rankings in search results are essential to helping people find your site. Many people don't go beyond the first page of the results pages. Furthermore, top is better than bottom on the list.

Search engines use sophisticated algorithms to order search results. Good page rankings do not happen by chance. Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the process of creating Web pages that will garner high rankings.

Each search engine uses a slightly different algorithm. Moreover, most adjust their algorithms regularly. However, the basics of SEO hold true for all search engines. Although SEO is tricky, a carefully planned approach can increase traffic to your site.

Here are eight steps to successful SEO.

1. Choose Keywords Wisely

Keywords are the words that customers use to find your site when using a search engine. The idea is to optimise your page for these words or phrases. You should choose keywords that accurately reflect your business. They should be specific enough to target potential customers, but not too narrow.

Of course, you'll probably have numerous keywords. The best approach is to pick different keywords for different pages. If the name of your business is well known, use it as a keyword for the About Us page. But most customers will be searching for your product or service, not your name.

For help with keywords, check your server logs to see what search terms have worked for your site. Also, try search terms to see what works on your competitors' sites.

2. Use Keywords Wisely

Your site's keywords should appear in each of your pages' "meta title." The "meta title" appears at the very top of the browser window, above the menu bar.

Also, the keywords should appear regularly throughout the opening Web page. It is especially important that they appear frequently in the opening paragraphs.

However, resist the temptation to overuse keywords. This is called "keyword stuffing." The search engines can spot it and will reduce your page rankings. Tools are available to help with optimal keyword density. However, avoid software that writes the site's pages. Search engines can sniff these out, too.

Here's the SEO golden rule: Never sacrifice quality of content for keyword placement. This will affect your page ranking. Most importantly, your site won't appeal to visitors.

3. Test Keywords with Pay-per-Click Advertising

Google's AdSense, MSN adCenter or another pay-per-click advertising program will test keyword effectiveness. You will see if your keywords will bring traffic to your site. Also, you will ensure your keywords target paying customers.

Pay-per-click can be expensive. However, used correctly, it will bring customers to your site.

Pay-per-click isn't a replacement for search engine optimisation. It should be used in conjunction with SEO to help you evaluate keywords. If your results are poor, consider changing keywords.

4. Build Up the Links to Your Site from Other Sites

Search engines view inbound links as a vote for your site. Therefore, the more incoming links, the higher your page will rank.

There are limits, though. The search engines must view the linking sites as quality addresses. Having disreputable sites link to yours can harm your rankings.

Offer to exchange links with sites that are related to your business. If they have a higher rank, all the better. Ask disreputable sites to remove any links to your site.

To pull up a list of sites that link to yours, try using a search engine. Simply type Link:yoursitename in the search box.

5. Keep Your SEO Campaign Ethical

Using deceptive techniques to boost page rank will have the opposite effect. It can even get your site banned from the search results. Once you're banned, it is virtually impossible to get back in. Therefore, it's important to avoid anything unethical.

Don't overuse keywords. Don't use hidden text such as small fonts or text the same colour as the background on your pages. Don't create mirror sites — identical sites linking to yours. Also, make sure content varies significantly from page to page. Having similar content on multiple pages may appear deceptive to search engines.

Cloaking, or hiding a page behind your page, is also not good. With cloaking, two pages are built. The search site spiders will see one page that is rich in keywords. Visitors see the other page, which might not be related to the keywords.

There is an exception: If you have a Flash site, it's almost impossible to optimise. Search spiders don't understand Flash. In this case, you can build an HTML site that opens behind it. Just make sure it contains the same content as the Flash site.

6. Submit Your Site to the Search Engines

You want to make sure your site is indexed by the search engines. If your site has numerous inbound links, the Web spiders will find it automatically. Web spiders "crawl" the Internet and update an engine's database of sites.

If your site doesn't appear automatically, you can submit it for indexing through a submission service or on your own. The big three search sites have forms for submitting Web addresses. Here are U.S. links to the submission pages:

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo!: http://tinyurl.com/5oclp (registration required)

MSN: http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

7. Monitor the Progress of Your SEO, But Be Patient

SEO doesn't happen overnight. It will take months to get good page rankings. Trying to rush your SEO campaign can lead to mistakes. And the consequences of these mistakes can be severe.

However, it is important to monitor your progress. Do searches with the major engines for your keywords to see how you rank. You might also be surprised to find you start popping up for related terms. That's a bonus.

Results will fluctuate. Rankings change daily or even hourly. Check frequently for an accurate gauge of where you stand. Don't worry about the minor ups and downs. But if you notice a downward trend, take action.

As your site traffic increases, so should sales. If sales aren't increasing, re-evaluate your site content and navigation. Good copywriting and pointers go a long way in increasing sales.

8. Consider Outsourcing

Search engine optimisation is an ongoing process, and can be a full-time job. Some companies specialise in SEO.

Hiring an SEO company to optimise your Web site will be expensive. Prices will vary depending on your site, services offered and length of time. However, the advantages might make it a wise investment. You are hiring experts who will achieve better results than you. And the increased business from good SEO hopefully will more than cover the costs.

Bad SEO can be more harmful than no SEO. So it is important to find the right company to handle your campaign. Ask to see the company's code of ethics. It should explicitly address deceptive SEO techniques.

Of course, the company should also have a good page ranking itself. But don't rely on this alone. Contact the references the company provides. Visit sites the company has worked on and note the quality of the copywriting.

Next, the company should be able to provide a detailed plan. It should include a variety of methods to improve your rankings. Of course, its methods — and pricing plan — should be clear.

Watch for companies that create unrealistic expectations. For example, if it guarantees a top spot in Google for a popular term, avoid it. Also, if it promises fast results, it could be using deceptive techniques.

Before you consider outsourcing, however, you might want to try SEO management software that can help find keywords, submit pages, and track results. It's less expensive than outsourcing.

Remember, though, search engine optimisation can only do so much. Well-optimised pages might bring visitors, but only a good product will convert visitors to customers.

Tags: Help People Find Your Web Site

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Tags: Man Gets 25 To Life

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Disaster can strike quickly and without warning. It can force you to evacuate your neighborhood or confine you to your home. What would you do if basic services — water, gas, electricity or telephones — were cut off? Local officials and relief workers will be on the scene after a disaster, but they cannot reach everyone right away.

Families can — and do — cope with disaster by preparing in advance and working together as a team. Follow the steps listed below to create your family’s disaster plan. Knowing what to do is your best protection and YOUR responsibility.

YOUR FAMILY DISASTER PLAN

Four steps to safety

1. Find Out What Could Happen to You

Contact the American Red Cross or your county emergency management agency. Be prepared to take notes:

* Ask what types of disasters are most likely to happen. Request information on how to prepare for each.
* Learn about your community’s warning signals: what they sound like and what you should do when you hear them.
* Ask about animal care after disaster. Animals may not be allowed inside emergency shelters due to health regulations.
* Find out how to help elderly or disabled persons, if needed.
* Find out about the disaster plans at your workplace, your children’s school or day-care center and other places where your family spends time.

Read More

Tags: DISASTER PREPAREDNESS GUIDE

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You know things are bad when even lawyers are getting laid off.

In downturns of years past, law firms exploited corporate failures and bitter, protracted lawsuits to keep busy and keep billing. But in this still-unfolding crisis, the embittered and the bankrupt have been relatively slow to appear, at least in court.

Law firms in turn are feeling the strain. Thelen and Heller Ehrman, two firms whose deep San Francisco roots extend back decades, have collapsed outright, in part because of the business slowdown. Each firm left several hundred lawyers out in the cold. Many others, including Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and Katten Muchin Rosenman, two Chicago firms ranked among the nation’s hundred most profitable by American Lawyer magazine, and the international giant Clifford Chance have jettisoned dozens of associates.

Still others, like Powell Goldstein, a firm based in Atlanta with more than 200 lawyers, are merging with larger rivals in deals that may be bids for stability. Over all, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday that the legal services industry lost more than 1,000 jobs in October.

This is not how it is supposed to work; businesses are supposed to need lawyers in good times and bad alike.

A few big companies are in dire straits or well beyond, including the collapsed Lehman Brothers and Circuit City, and the number of corporate bankruptcies is beginning to rise, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute. The group reported there were 18,456 bankruptcies in the first half of this year, compared with 12,985 during the same period of last year. But because the financial crisis damaged Wall Street first, corporate collapses in many other sectors — automobiles, airlines and the like — have not happened, at least not yet.

A wave of big company litigation — those suits that pit armies of associates against each other — has also not materialized. A recent survey by one big firm, Fulbright & Jaworski, found fewer large companies reporting new lawsuits against them this year. Although executives may desperately want to sue one another over recent losses, they may not know how big those losses are or want to know how big they are. In any event, cash is precious in this downturn, and litigation is both costly and risky.

“You have to wait and see if you have any damages and, if so, what they are,” said Ward Bower, a principal at Altman Weil, a consultant in Newtown Square, Pa., to law firms. “That tends to cause a lag.”

The number of lawyers affected at big firms is tiny when measured against the thousands of jobs disappearing at brokerage firms and banks. But in the rarefied world of corporate law, layoffs are unusual. It is striking to have just 20 associates sent packing — as a spokesman confirmed had happened at Clifford Chance, which has 3,900 lawyers worldwide.

Lawyers at firms that have taken such drastic steps say that the problem is simply that they have too many people with the wrong kinds of expertise at the wrong time.

Sonnenschein, for example, cut about 24 of its 700 lawyers last month, mostly people who worked on real estate deals or related transactions, said Linda Butler, a spokeswoman for the firm. The layoffs were the second round for Sonnenschein, which cut more than 30 earlier in the year.

McKee Nelson, a New York firm, announced last week that it had shaved 17 corporate and finance associates, reducing its complement of lawyers to 174. In a statement, the firm cited the “devastation that befell the credit markets.” Bell Boyd & Lloyd, a Chicago-based firm with about 260 lawyers, cut loose 10 associates, also blaming “unprecedented market conditions.”

Beyond the current crisis, corporate clients are trying to rein in spending on law firms. Now that firms are increasingly desperate for business, some corporate general counsels say, the firms are more willing to accept less profitable payment arrangements that do not reward the firms for simply assigning more lawyers to spend more time on a project.

A survey of about 600 corporate executives by Acritas, a London-based research firm, found that 32 percent expected billing practices to change over the next two years.

“Rather than having hourly rates, we are increasingly negotiating flat fees or fixed fees, or success fees,” which include a premium based on predetermined conditions, said Ivan K. Fong, chief legal officer and secretary at Cardinal Health in Dublin, Ohio, and chairman of the Association of Corporate Counsel. Some law firms have resisted those changes, he continued, but may find they have to accept clients’ wishes.

“It’s a pretty significant change,” Mr. Fong said, and it is occurring as companies use internal lawyers for more work, to control costs and take advantage of the broader expertise of their own legal staffs.

Lawyer departures, whether voluntary or through layoffs, pose special risks to firms. Layoffs scare off law school recruits, who crave security and wealth.

Tags: Law Firms Feel Strain

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A list of the amount of bail that is recommended for different charges. In criminal cases, the court decides how much bail a defendant has to pay to be released.The bail schedule is reviewed each year by the judges of each county. The Schedule is then given to the jails, the Courts and the D.A. and Public Defenders. Judges have the right to raise or lower bail amounts in individual cases. If the police obtain a warrant for arrest they may request the Judge to set a higher amount than the Schedule calls for.

The following documents are available in Adobe Reader (.pdf) Format:

Updates 2008 Bail Schedule for Souther California - COMPLETE

Felony Bail Schedule - Los Angeles County
Uniform Bail and Penalty Schedule - County of Marin
Uniform Bail Schedule - Orange County
Bail Schedule - Riverside County
Felony Bail Schedule - San Bernardino County
Superior Court Bail Schdedule - San Francisco County
Superior Court of California - Santa Clara County.
Superior Court criminal Bail Scedule- Sonoma County

Tags: Bail Bond Schedules

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