Tips & tricks

Search engine rankings are the bread and butter of every webmaster in the world. Unless we are found in search engines, most likely traffic is non existent. Of course, we could have a word of mouth site hoping this will continue to bring traffic, but in reality it is the snippets of your site showing in the SERPS that will get you found.

What many don’t know is they can actually control these snippets to a certain degree. A site display in Google is like a map. Showing all kinds of information, it is helpful to us as webmasters to know what they mean and how and whether we can influence them.

Google is the queen bee of online search engines, no questions asked. While other engines have gained good recognition, such as Yahoo or Live Search by MSN, Google is still and will most likely always be number one.

The thing with Google is that unless you are indexed with them, nobody will ever know that your site even exists. Indexing drives a lot of people insane. They worry why their site hasn’t been indexed yet and they do the worst thing ever, namely to submit their site to the various search engines by hand.

While this does work, it is the worst thing you can do if speed is of the essence. Hand submissions take up to 3 months (and sometimes even longer) until they are being reviewed by Google or other engines.

Don’t waste your time.

A modern by product of the digital age is the collection of digital dust that clutters up our hard drives. Here we are, buying external hard drive after hard drive only to store our junk somewhere safe.

The thing is, there is no need to spend hundreds of dollars to keep your desktop clean of fluff. You can do this conveniently by using an online document sharing place. Some of them are private and others are public.

Personally I prefer private, because I can upload all my past client work, knowing that it won’t clutter up my hard disk and slow down my computer.

Inserting YouTube videos is still a huge issue for some bloggers and hopefully after reading this you will know exactly what to do. To start off, you will need to know which video you want to showcase before you can go to the next step. To find an applicable video, go to YouTube and search for a keyword to bring up related videos.

With the popularity of videos on blogs, more and more bloggers will want to take part in this trend and if you knew how easy it really was, you would be laughing right now.

Most bloggers are concerned about SEO and how they can rank on the first page of Google for their chosen keyword. Naturally, when you first come on board as a brand new blogger, you have no clue about all this geek talk, but soon enough you will start to grasp the more finer points of SEO and why it matters so much to your online income.

In my previous posts about backing up your web sites, I mentioned why it is important to do a backup and what you should backup. In this part, let’s cover how and where to backup.

There are many ways you can backup your data. Here are just a few that I myself use.

Computer Hard Drive
The easiest and most obvious would be to make backup copies on your own computer. The problem with making backup copies on your computer is if something were to happen to it. If your computer “dies” or gets stolen, you lose all your data including your backups. So, why even bother?

There are several reasons why you should.

To begin with, it’s so easy … why not. It’s as easy as creating a “My Backup” folder and dumping your data there. Just keep in mind that this shouldn’t be your only backup source.

That dreaded time in a DIY webmaster’s life is back. It’s time to do an upgrade !straight! WordPress 2.3 “Dexter” has been released.

In a nutshell
Upgrading WordPress is fairly simple. Just delete your current files - AFTER you have made a backup that is - then upload the new files. Upload …

In the first part of this series, we discussed what to consider when preparing a website survival plan, just in case a disaster were to strike.

In this part, we’ll cover the minimum that you need to backup as part of that preparation.

Web pages
Well, the obvious would be your web …

Small changes to a website can often result in big changes in your ROI (return on investment). Check out how the following examples can make a big difference in your traffic, clicks and sales.

Simple Site, Tight Focus

Your site needs to load fast. So don’t add large image and other files …

Natural and unnatural or man-made disasters happen every day, around the clock, somewhere. They can come in the forms of hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, flooding, fire, power surges and failure, destructive computer attacks and viruses / bugs, etc. And regardless of the cause, the results can be the same – devastating.

In the online world, this devastation could literally happen within seconds. One second you can have a web site and the next … zilch, nada, nothing, all gone. If you don’t make necessary backups, you can wave goodbye to your websites, your databases, your scripts, your video clips and everything else that you’ve spent so much time building, amassing, perfecting.

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