http://www.articlealley.com en-us editorial@articlealley.com How Directories Help Search Engines At the beginning of the web era, users would go to directories to find sites relevant to their interests. In fact, Yahoo!, the web's number one destination, started as a directory. Nowadays, most users rely on search... http://www.articlealley.com/article_227_5.html 18th December 2004 Link Building and Pagerank Links from other pages help increase your site's Pagerank™. There are several ways to get inbound links. What follows is a checklist of the most important ways you can get links to your page: Internal linking Since Pagera... http://www.articlealley.com/article_226_6.html 18th December 2004 Marketing with Articles in High Quality Ezines Some time ago, I talked about the technique of writing articles to drive traffic to your site. The basic idea behind it was that, by allowing ezine publishers to reprint your articles for free (and by incl... http://www.articlealley.com/article_225_3.html 18th December 2004 Turn Your Links Page Into a Topical Directory To rank well in the search engines you need incoming links. Search engines consider an incoming link a vote for your page. That link will be more valuable if it comes from a site that is somehow related to... http://www.articlealley.com/article_224_5.html 18th December 2004 "About Us" Pages in Small Business Websites The Internet has been heralded as "the great equalizer": on a browser window, any company, no matter how small, can look as good as a large company with a long history of quality and service. This situation ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_223_4.html 18th December 2004 Selling Online Using Google Adwords and Affiliate Networks Selling online with minimal investment is now possible thanks to affiliate networks (like Commission Junction or Clickbank) and pay per click advertisers (like Google Adwords). The intention of... http://www.articlealley.com/article_222_6.html 18th December 2004 June 30, 2004 Ebook Marketing Ideas Selling ebooks is one of the most lucrative on-line businesses. Electronic delivery means zero logistics costs. Furthermore, tools like autoresponders, shopping cart software, merchant or third party payment servic... http://www.articlealley.com/article_221_3.html 18th December 2004 Do You Really Need To Be In The Search Engines? Before you spend time and money on search engine optimization, you need to decide if your small business really needs to be in the search engines. It all boils down to answering one basic question: how do... http://www.articlealley.com/article_220_6.html 18th December 2004 How to Name and Organize Your Website's URLs One of the main challenges confronting web developers is how to name web pages. Ultimately, naming web pages will depend on the website's architecture (the way individual pages are organized within the site)... http://www.articlealley.com/article_219_1.html 18th December 2004 Content Rich, Keyword-Focused Pages: Your Key to Search Engine Success An often overlooked fact in search engine optimization is that internal pages can have a dramatic effect in boosting traffic to your site. More often than not, efforts are concentra... http://www.articlealley.com/article_218_4.html 18th December 2004 Email Newsletter Format: HTML or Text An email newsletter is probably the most effective way to communicate with your target audience. One of the main considerations before you create and deliver an email newsletter is what format to use: HTML or Text... http://www.articlealley.com/article_217_3.html 18th December 2004 Flash Web Design: Pros and Cons Flash is a powerful web technology that achieves a high level of visual impact from the graphical point of view. Unfortunately, it is widely misused in web design. There are still many problems with Flash, especially rel... http://www.articlealley.com/article_215_4.html 18th December 2004 The Case for Minimalist Web Page Design With the increased affordability of web space and bandwidth, the growing use of high speed modems, and the abundance of implementation technologies like Flash, audio and video, comes the temptation to overuse the... http://www.articlealley.com/article_214_4.html 18th December 2004 Automatic Responders (Autoresponders) Basics What is an autoresponder? An autoresponder is simply an automated email program that responds to an incoming email automatically, with a pre-written message. One-time autoresponders At the beginning, a... http://www.articlealley.com/article_213_4.html 18th December 2004 Permission Email Marketing: Single vs. Double Opt-In The best and most profitable way you can use Email Marketing is to develop personal one-on-one relationships with your clients and prospects. These personal relationships are the key to the long-term s... http://www.articlealley.com/article_212_3.html 18th December 2004 Accepting Payments Online: Merchant Accounts vs. Third Party If you want to sell online, you need to be able to accept credit card payments. The traditional way is to open a merchant account. However, opening a merchant account is expensive, especiall... http://www.articlealley.com/article_211_4.html 18th December 2004 Website Navigation: The Shopping Mall Analogy Your website's navigation tools and techniques should basically give users the answer to three questions: Where am I? Where have I been? and Where can I go? To better explain how to answer those q... http://www.articlealley.com/article_210_4.html 18th December 2004 Web Space or Bandwidth: Finding the Right Balance Before you choose a hosting plan, there are many things to consider. Two of the most important are the Web Server Space and the Data Transfer Allowance (also called bandwidth) that you will need. Web h... http://www.articlealley.com/article_209_2.html 18th December 2004 Google Cracks Down on the SEO Industry As this week comes to a close, there is no doubt that the most significant development in the Internet marketing world was Google's latest update and algorithm change, undergone around the third week of November, ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_208_6.html 18th December 2004 Google AdSense Program Review Google AdSense, Google's advertising program that lets webmasters display ads from Google's extensive list of advertisers, has taken the Internet by storm. Through this successful program, unobtrusive text-based ads are se... http://www.articlealley.com/article_207_6.html 18th December 2004 Cascading Style Sheets Basics If you're not a web designer, but have nevertheless experimented with HTML or popular editors like FrontPage to try to build a website, if you didn't use cascading style sheets you probably came across most of the common p... http://www.articlealley.com/article_206_4.html 18th December 2004 Link Anchor Text and Search Engine Optimization For quite some time, it has been a well known fact that in order to rank well with the search engines, a page must have a large number of inbound links (link popularity). However, a not so well known fact... http://www.articlealley.com/article_205_6.html 18th December 2004 Get Your Branded Email Address Even Without a Website If you own a small business and don't have your own domain name, you are probably still using the email address provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or one of the free email services on ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_204_1.html 18th December 2004 Understanding Your Website's Traffic Statistics If you want to know how much traffic is coming to your site, which pages are bringing the most traffic, where are your visitors coming from, and when is traffic coming in, you just have to analyze your w... http://www.articlealley.com/article_203_4.html 18th December 2004 Get Listed in Google Without Submitting Your Site With Google delivering so much traffic, it is only normal to be eager to submit your page and have it indexed as soon as possible. However, submitting your page is not your only option, and it's not the... http://www.articlealley.com/article_202_6.html 18th December 2004 How to Create Good Custom '404 Error' Pages When visitors to your site misspell your URLs, or follow broken links to your pages, their browser will display a '404 Error' page that will tell them that the page they were trying to access does not exist. ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_201_4.html 18th December 2004 Goggle PageRank™ 101 PageRank™ is Google's proprietary system for ranking web pages according to importance. PageRank (PR from now on) is a grade (on a scale from one to ten) that Google gives a page after performing a series of elaborate calculations... http://www.articlealley.com/article_200_6.html 18th December 2004 How to Increase Your Newsletter Subscription Rate You've finally launched your free newsletter. You've put together the content, found a good mailing list host, and have listed your newsletter in all the ezine directories you could find. What else can ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_199_3.html 18th December 2004 Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization PART I: KEYWORD OPTIMIZATION The first step in a search engine optimization campaign is to choose your keywords or keyphrases for each of your web pages. Keywords are the terms that search engine users type in... http://www.articlealley.com/article_195_6.html 18th December 2004 Adding Search Funtionality To Your Site Having your very own search engine for your site will enable your visitors to quickly and easily find just what they are looking for, without having to navigate through numerous menus or wade through long lists o... http://www.articlealley.com/article_194_4.html 18th December 2004 How to Get High Quality Inbound Links The amount of quality inbound links to your site is one of the most important criteria used by search engines to rank your pages. Therefore, a well conducted link exchange campaign is one of the most effective Inte... http://www.articlealley.com/article_193_6.html 18th December 2004 Creating Printer-Friendly Web Pages Reading from a computer screen is uncomfortable, so users may often want to print the page they're viewing. The problem is that web pages don't usually lend themselves to print. Unless your web page width is 6... http://www.articlealley.com/article_192_4.html 18th December 2004 Web-Safe Fonts for Your Site Choosing the right typeface for your website copy is important, since it will affect the way your readers perceive your page (serious and formal, or friendly and casual). Aside from this, there are also important usability ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_191_4.html 18th December 2004 Site Maps: Let Search Engines Find Your Pages With 40 million websites in existence, and more than 3 billion web pages indexed by Google at the time of this writing (July 2003), it's no wonder that more and more people are relying on search engines to ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_190_4.html 18th December 2004 How To Use PDF Files On The Web Acrobat® PDF is perhaps the best format available to create printable documents, since it is optimized for letter sized sheets of paper. Since Acrobat® Reader can be opened within Internet Explorer, distributing PDF d... http://www.articlealley.com/article_189_4.html 18th December 2004 Send Eye-Catching HTML Web Pages by Email A few years ago, email programs didn't support HTML (the standard for formatting text on the Internet, and the most widely used medium to create web pages). If you wanted to send an email message, you were lim... http://www.articlealley.com/article_188_3.html 18th December 2004 Five Common Web Marketing Myths Exposed Myth #1: Build it and they will come Traffic is everything. As thousands of webmasters have already learned, you can have a catchy domain name and an impeccably designed website already on the web. You can ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_187_3.html 18th December 2004 Get High Quality Traffic by Writing Articles One of the best ways to promote your website is by writing articles that you can post in e-zines, and sites that provide free content to e-zine publishers. This will help you develop credibility and, with ti... http://www.articlealley.com/article_186_3.html 18th December 2004 Make Your Web Pages Easier to Read Computer screens are hard on the eyes, and their limited size forces users to scroll. This makes reading online harder, slower and more uncomfortable than reading on print. Following are a few simple tips that you c... http://www.articlealley.com/article_185_4.html 18th December 2004 Six Ways to Make More Money With Affiliate Programs Affiliate programs are one of the web's most effective marketing techniques. They create a win-win situation by which site A refers a visitor to site B, and site B pays site A a commission if that vi... http://www.articlealley.com/article_184_3.html 18th December 2004 Create User Friendly Confirmation Pages Including a form on your website is the best way to get feedback from your visitors. You can have a form to gather your visitors' email address so that they can subscribe to your ezine. Or you can have a form to ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_183_4.html 18th December 2004 Common Sense Advice for Search Engine Optimization Most web surfers start their sessions at a search engine or a web directory. There are a number of different methods you can use to capture their traffic and drive it to your site: 1. Stick to ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_182_6.html 18th December 2004 Promote Your Business for Free with a Signature File Email is a great way to promote your business. First, most people read their email every day. Second, it allows you to send focused messages to a specific target audience. Email messages travel f... http://www.articlealley.com/article_181_3.html 18th December 2004 Optimize Your Graphics for a Fast Loading Site Heavy images cost you money and traffic. They cost you money because they require both significant storage space and bandwidth. Since your web host will usually give you a limited amount of storage space... http://www.articlealley.com/article_180_4.html 18th December 2004 Make Your Small Business Look Big Our business friendly culture, the improvements in communications, and the abundance of Internet resources have all combined to make it possible even for a garage-based one-man-show to look as professional as the large... http://www.articlealley.com/article_179_3.html 18th December 2004 The Importance of a Good Web Page Title Many web designers focus just on the actual look and feel of a page and dismiss seemingly minor details like the page title. However, a good title can, in just a few words, tell your visitors what they can expec... http://www.articlealley.com/article_178_6.html 18th December 2004 URL Forwarding You're not ready yet to shell out $100 bucks a year for a web hosting service, so you want to stick with a free website. However, you dislike the long and messy URL addresses that usually are associated with them, and you'd rather use y... http://www.articlealley.com/article_177_1.html 18th December 2004 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website When designing your website, remember to avoid useless and confusing features, however "cool" they may seem to be. Usually, keeping things simple and consistent are the best way to go. Here are five easy ways to im... http://www.articlealley.com/article_176_4.html 18th December 2004 Domain Names Explained What is a Domain Name? A domain name is what you type in the browser's address bar to go to a specific website. For example, our domain name is: http://www.theinternetdigest.net (in today's browsers, it is not necessary ... http://www.articlealley.com/article_175_1.html 18th December 2004 Pay Per Click Search Engine Basics Pay per click search engines let you set up an account with an initial deposit, and then bid for the top positions in the search results pages for keywords or keyphrases that you are interested in. Your bid will typic... http://www.articlealley.com/article_173_7.html 18th December 2004